95: Who's Really on the Hook? Mapping Organizational Accountability
Map every major organizational function across strategic, operational, and governance domains. Identify dangerous gaps, problematic overlaps, and the accountability vacuum threatening your next leadership transition.
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The Off the Hook Framework: A Leadership Series on Accountability, Delegation, and Leaving Well
You're exhausted. You're the only one who knows how the donor database works. Board members text you on weekends. Your team escalates every decision to you. You haven't taken a real vacation in three years.
And everyone tells you how dedicated you are. How committed. How essential.
Here's what they're not saying: your indispensability is an organizational liability.
This is the accountability paradox at the heart of nonprofit leadership. The leader who won't get off the hook—who holds every responsibility, hoards every relationship, controls every decision—isn't demonstrating commitment. They're creating a single point of failure with a nonprofit tax status.
Real accountability isn't about how much you personally deliver. It's about ensuring delivery continues without you.
Because here's the truth no one wants to say out loud: You're temporary. Your tenure will end—through retirement, new opportunity, burnout, termination, or death. The only question is whether your organization will be ready.
I bring a specific lens to this work: I'm an interim leader. I provide temporary executive leadership for nonprofits in transition. Every engagement I take begins with an exit date. I'm hired knowing I'm leaving. I've learned to lead with non-attachment—caring deeply about the work and the people while holding my departure lightly. I document everything. I build systems that run without me. I transfer relationships that belong to the organization, not to me personally. This isn't because I care less. It's because I care about sustainability more than being indispensable. What I’ve learned from being professionally temporary is that every leader should operate with an interim mindset. Because functionally, you are interim. Your tenure is temporary even if you don't know the end date yet.
This series is for nonprofit CEOs and Executive Directors who know intellectually they should delegate but can't seem to actually do it. It's for board members who don't know what hooks they're on—or who are on hooks that belong to staff. It's for funders and foundation program officers who see organizations struggling with leadership transitions and want to support better succession planning. It's for anyone who's ever said "if I don't do it, it won't get done right" and meant it.
Everything in this series is succession planning work—just not the way most people think about it. Succession planning isn't just creating a document for when you leave. It's how you lead every day while you're staying.
It's documenting your decision-making frameworks so they're transferable. It's building redundancy in critical relationships. It's developing your team's strategic capacity instead of protecting them from complexity. It's getting yourself off hooks you've held so long you've forgotten they don't belong to you.
Most nonprofits don't have written succession plans. Most leadership transitions are managed as crises instead of planned transitions. Most organizational knowledge walks out the door when leaders leave because it was never captured.
This series is about changing that—one hook at a time. The greatest act of nonprofit leadership isn't being indispensable. It's building something that doesn't need you to be great. Welcome to The Off the Hook series. Let's get to work.
Quotes:
“When leadership transitions happen, unclear accountability turns into organizational crisis.”
“If you are the founder, you should not be the only person who can do something. And if you are, you actually haven't built an organization, you've just built a dependency structure with a nonprofit tax status.”
“The worst organizational accountability scenario isn't too few people on hooks. It's diffused responsibility where everyone feels vaguely accountable, so no one is specifically accountable.”
To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/
To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
“The worst organizational accountability scenario isn’t too few people on hooks. It’s diffused responsibility where everyone feels vaguely accountable, so no one is specifically accountable.”
Transcript:
Welcome back to part two in this on the Hook, off the Hook series. Today we're going to be talking about mapping your organizational accountability and understanding who's really on the hook. If you haven't listened to part one in the series, I would encourage you to pause and go find part one. Uh, part two will have value in it if you haven't listened to part one.
Why not do it all in order? So you've done your hook audit. If you have followed along with part one, which means that you've identified the list of things that would collapse if you disappeared tomorrow, and you may have had the uncomfortable realization that your being indispensable is actually an organizational design flaw.
So as we discussed in the last episode, the harder question is who else in your organization is on which hooks and for what? And do they actually know it? Most leaders at nonprofits can't answer this question clearly, and it's not because they're bad leaders, but because organizational accountability is rarely mapped so explicitly.
We operate so much on assumptions and inherited norms and quote, that's how we've always done it. Quote, instead of clear, documented agreements about who holds which. So what I see is that this creates two really catastrophic scenarios that play out constantly with my clients and in organizations that I view from afar.
So number one, the first catastrophic scenario is the accountability vacuum. So this is when everyone assumes that someone else is handling it. Critical functions fall through the cracks. Board members think that staff is responsible. Staff thinks the board should be governing. Funders expect oversight that isn't happening and nothing is anyone's fault because nothing was actually anyone's job.
Does that sound familiar? The second catastrophic scenario is the accountability pile on this is when everyone thinks that they're all responsible for the same things as other people. This looks like founder syndrome, board micromanagement, and staff paralysis, and it all stems from this concept too many people on all of the hooks that should only belong to one role or one governance.
Both of these scenarios are succession planning, disasters, and when leadership transitions happen, unclear accountability turns into organizational crisis. So let's start out by mapping first, who's actually on the hook in your organization, where the gaps are, and then how to fix them before the next person leaves.
So across three domains of your organization, we're gonna map hooks in these areas, strategy, operations, and governance. So most organizational dysfunction comes from putting the wrong people in the wrong domains, or not defining those domains clearly at all. So we're gonna start with stra with strategy.
So in the strategic hook section, this is, we're gonna talk about direction and priority setting. These are the hooks about what the organization does and why. So this could look like mission, definition, evolution of the organization, strap plans, strategic priorities, goals, the program design, the theory of change, budget, and staffing priorities, which is resource allocation.
Organizational positioning, partnerships, and long-term sustainable planning. So that all falls in the big hook bucket of strategy in my book. Who Should be on these hooks are the executive leadership and the board. In a collaborative way, the board sets direction, the ED or CEO leads execution, and both are accountable to together to ensure strategic coherence.
Where this often breaks though, is when eds or CEOs make strategic decisions without. Board input. This is so super common in founder-led orgs or boards abdicate strategy entirely to stamp, uh, staff, which is so common when boards, uh, just rubber stamp their governance. Now let's move on to the operational hook.
So this is execution and management. This is about how the works get, gets done day to day. And as a reminder, if you're listening to this and you're like, I cannot possibly take notes on all of this, you can find, um, this, uh, series of articles on my website, naomi hadaway.com/articles. Uh, and you can find all the information there, including these exercises and these questions.
Okay. The how the work gets done is operational. This is program delivery and quality. This is staff management and development. This is financial ops and compliance, donor relationship management, comms, marketing systems, tech and infrastructure. This, again, should be executive leadership, but then we're now adding staff to the hook and we're removing board from the hook.
The board's job is to simply ensure that operational capacity exists. But not to do operations. Where this breaks this hook of operations is that board members insert themselves into staff decisions, or eds or CEOs make operational decisions that they could delegate to other staff. This is also a break point when staff are unclear about their authority to act.
Okay, the last hook is the governance hook. This is oversight and accountability. This ensures that the organization functions with integrity and effectiveness, and this looks like fiduciary oversight, so financial health, legal, compliance, and risk management. It looks like executive performance evaluation.
It also, and if you're a board member, listen. This is your hook board, recruitment, development, and succession. This also includes policy setting and enforcement, ethical oversight, values alignment and emergency preparedness, and that succession planning. The people that should be on these hooks is exclusively the board.
Staff can support board governance, but the board should not ever delegate these hooks. This breaks when boards ask staff to evaluate the ed, and this is a nuanced topic. I know a lot of people listening have been asked to evaluate your ED or CEO. Um, I think that there are some use cases for it, and I think there's a lot of use cases against it.
We can talk more about that. Um, if you email me, this also breaks when boards delegate fiduciary oversight to, for example, finance committees without full board engagement. This also looked like board chairs acting as though they are full decision makers or executive directors or CEOs governing themselves.
So let's get into a practical exercise. We're going to develop an organizational hook map. So if you're willing, this is a big exercise, get your full leadership team. Into a room. It can be virtual or physical. You're going to map every major organizational function and who's actually responsible. Now, if it's too much to think about getting your full team into a room, if you don't have a staff retreat coming up, or you're already booked and busy, you can do this by yourself.
The problem is, if you only do this in a vacuum, you are likely to miss something. So if you start it by yourself, just make sure that you've got an opportunity to have someone check you and participate in this, uh, exercise as well. So step one is to list. Everything. Get a large whiteboard or a shared document list every significant org function across those three domains.
Don't filter it yet. Just get it all on the paper and get it visible. So strategy domain examples would be your annual goal setting, budget approval program, launch decisions, partnership agreements, and funding strategy. The operational domain might look like staff hiring and firing, donor comms, grant reporting, event planning, database management, and day-to-day finances.
The governance examples might look like. Board meeting agendas, facilitation of those board meetings, ED or CEO, performance review, audit of finances, policy reviews, board member recruitment and emergency succession planning. Once you have everything written out in those three domains, it's time to look at and assess your current reality for each of those functions.
Write who currently handles it, not who should, but who. Who actually does use names or roles. It's, it's totally okay to do either executive director, board chair, finance committee, development director, program staff, whatever. It's, you can also put no one or everyone. Put who currently handles it. Where this gets uncomfortable is when you start to discover either functions, where multiple people think they're responsible, and this is one of the key reasons why you can't do this In isolation, you need to have other people's input.
It also will get uncomfortable when there's functions that no one is actually handling functions being handled by the by the wrong domain. So that looks like board in having their fingers inside of operations, or EDS trying to solely run governance. It also gets uncomfortable when you see functions that exist in only one person's head.
Here's the thing though, don't try and fix anything yet. Just let the reality sit for a minute so that you can start to feel it and see it clearly. Step three. And there's only two step, two more steps here. Step three is to identify the gaps and the overlaps. So you're gonna mark everything in these categories and you can use whatever color you want.
But go with me on these color choices. So marked in red is going to be single person dependencies. This is any function that only one person can do, especially when there's no backup or documentation. This could po possibly be some of your highest succession risks. Mark in yellow where there's no clear owner.
This could be functions that multiple people are partially handling or that everyone assumes someone else is doing. These might be okay right now, but they will become crisis during transition, Denmark in orange when there's a wrong domain ownership. So that's when your board members are in the mess of ops or staff is helping with governance or, uh, strategic designs are being made tactically instead of strategically.
These are also not terrible, but they do create ongoing dysfunction. Then mark in blue when there is executive director or CEO overreach, this is when there's functions that the long tenure ED is handling that should have been delegated or when you've got founder syndrome going on. The last color category is purple, and this is board under performance.
This is, uh, governance functions that the board isn't doing, and so staff has to take over. This is the place where the board is off the hook that they really should be on. Okay, how you doing? This is a lot. Step four is to redesign who should be on what hooks. So for each function, you're going to look at your board or your paper and you're gonna answer five questions.
What domain does this actually belong to? So that's strategy, ops, or governance. Who should be on the hook? And you wanna be specific here, role or governance body. Is it a committee? Is it the board? Is it a role like program officer, director of development, whatever? What authority do they have? Can they decide this alone?
Do they need to consult others? Do they need approval? Who needs to be informed about this function. They don't need to be responsible, but they just need to be aware. And finally, what documentation or training would make this function transferable? So you're gonna create a simple authority matrix. And I'm not gonna go into detail here.
This is all listed in the article on my website. But you're basically identifying the domain, the primary hook, ownership, uh, the authority, the informed who needs to be informed and transferability needs. Again, I'm not gonna go, I could go into. 10 more minutes of this, but I don't wanna bore you and have your eyes glaze over.
Uh, go to naomi hadaway.com/articles to find this part two, who is really on the hook article. Okay. There's a couple of things that I wanna talk about as we wrap this episode. Uh, I wanna talk about the founder syndrome audit and also talking about board member crisis. So if your organization was founded by someone who is still in leadership, so whether that's executive director, CEO, board chair, or major donor, I want you to also add this layer to your mapping list.
Every function that that founder currently handles is the function being held because of organizational need or because the founder is super attached. Could this function be transferred elsewhere? What is the risk if the function remains founder dependent? What's required to transfer this function and what's preventing that from happening right now?
That transfer Founder syndrome isn't really just about founders being controlling or egotistical. It's actually about organizations failing to transition those hooks from founding leadership to sustainable institutional structures. The founder is often holding hooks that they don't want and that the organization has never built capacity to take on or spread out.
It might be just overwhelming now, but it becomes truly a mess. During succession, the founder leaves and suddenly 20 majorly critical functions have no owner because they were never formally part of anyone's role. Here's an accountability checkpoint. If you are the founder, you should not be the only person who can do anything, and if you are, you actually haven't built an organization, you've just built a dependency structure with a nonprofit tax status.
I know that might sting a little bit, but I think it's the truth. So let's address the board side of this equation, because board accountability, confusion causes just as many transition disasters as ED or CEO or founder overreach. Most board members have no idea what hooks they're actually on. This is easier when you hold a seat like a chair, vice chair, secretary, or treasurer, but otherwise, board members sh just show up to meetings.
They vote on things, and maybe they serve on a committee. They think that quote unquote governance is something that happens in board meetings and is not a set of explicit responsibilities that they are personally accountable for. So let's talk a little bit about the three hooks that every board member is on, whether they know it or not.
The first one is fiduciary duty. You, as a board member, are legally and ethically responsible for the org's financial health, legal compliance, and mission integrity. This isn't just what the treasurer does or just what the chair does. Every board member is on this hook. This means practically that you must read financial statements before board meetings and ask questions if something seems wrong.
This also means that you need to understand the org's, major revenue sources and expense drivers. You need to know what the reserves are and whether they're adequate. And PS if your organization does not yet have a reserve, uh, account or reserve policy, make that something you prioritize in 2026. Even if you're starting with a low balance, it does not have to be ginormous at the beginning.
This also practically means in this fiduciary duty hook that you review the annual audit and understand any findings, and you also ensure that the org is legally compliant with payroll taxes, required filings, and insurance. Hook number two for the board is organizational strategy and direction. You are responsible as a board to ensure that the org has clear strategic direction and stays aligned with mission.
The board doesn't do the work, but you are accountable for ensuring that the work is the right work. So this looks like engaging meaningfully in strategic planning and not just showing up and nodding. This means asking hard questions about program effectiveness and impact. This one's a hard one because it often can look like defensiveness from the program staff when you ask questions, but there are ways that you can, uh, ask this gently and with thoughtfulness.
This also means that you practically make sure that resources align with the priorities of the org, making decisions about major strategic shifts or new initiatives. Here's the big one that I see no one doing. Board members need to understand the competitive landscape and sustainability threats.
Executive leadership and succession is the last hook. As a board member, you're responsible for hiring, supporting, evaluation, and if necessary, transitioning the ED or CEO. This is the most neglected board hook until there's a crisis, and then when it happens, it is too late, and that's when I get called.
What this means practically is that you need to conduct regular meaningful executive director or CEO performance evaluations. I cannot tell you, my dear listener, how many organizations I work with where the e executive director has not had a performance review in one year, two year, three years. It's not okay, and it's also not hard.
As a board member, you need to insist that the board has an at least an annual evaluation. You also need to ensure that the ED or CEO has the support and resources that they need to succeed. You also must have an emergency succession plan for when the ED leaves or the CEO leaves. It's not if it's when.
If you want help creating the succession plan, reach out to me. You can go to the contact page on my website, naomi hadaway.com. If you are a funder or a, a foundation program officer and you would like to, uh, inject succession planning into your grantee portfolio, uh, we have a beautiful program where we offer a one day retreat followed by a three month online cohort that you can offer to all of your grantees.
It's beautiful. You can learn more about that at naomi hadaway.com/plan-well. The other things, uh, on this hook, uh, around executive leadership and succession for board members is you must develop a leadership pipeline strategy for long-term succession. This could look like either in develop, making sure that internal candidates are developed, making sure that you have it written into your succession plan, that the board will hire a professional interim or make a decision that you will only look externally if you're going to do any of these things.
Honestly, you also need to develop your core competencies around how you hire and what the organization needs. That's a whole nother separate episode. This final practical place of the Hook three, uh, executive leadership and succession is knowing when it's time for leadership transition and then acting on it.
It's not comfortable, but it must be done. So there's a couple of, uh, common accountability failures. I see when board members are off the hook that they should be on this is the disengaged board member who doesn't read materials beforehand. They vote, however the board chair does. They show up to meetings, but barely.
They just think that fiduciary duty means not being sued. They have no idea what the org budget is or whether it's in financial trouble. There's also the rubber stamp board who approves whatever the staff recommends without. Uh, meaningful oversight or discussion. They think that being supportive means never questioning anything, and they always ab abdicate governance entirely to the CEO.
There's also the volunteer board member ideology where they treat board service like volunteering. They like run events, they stuff envelopes. They serve on program committees. They feel productive because they're doing something, but that's not governance. There's also the board that won't deal with executive director or CEO performance.
This is when you avoid the hard conversation and you let mediocre or failing performance continue because transition seems too hard or too scary. The final one here is, uh, when board members are off, the hook that they should be on is not having an accountability check point for your own board members.
If you can't clearly articulate what you are accountable beyond showing up to meetings, and if you are not holding each other accountable, you're just attending as a board member, and that's not the same thing. So this is a long episode, but there's just a couple more things before we get into a practical exercise.
There's a dangerous space, which is when everyone is on the hook or no one is. The worst organizational accountability scenario isn't too few people on hooks. It's diffused responsibility where everyone feels vaguely accountable, so no one is specifically accountable. This is when no one has fundraising goals because we're all responsible for fundraising.
This is when the board and staff collaborate on strategy, but strategic decisions never get made. This is also when we say everyone owns our culture, but talk toxic behavior isn't addressed. Diffused. Accountability is actually no accountability. Someone must be on the hook for every critical organizational function.
That person might consult widely or collaborate meaningfully or build consensus consensus, but at the end of the day, one person or one governance body must own the outcome. If you can't answer who's responsible for this with a specific name or role, you have found an organizational liability. So once you've mapped who's on what hooks and who should be, you've also found the gaps between what the current and the should.
Uh, and so now you need to move functions from one person to another, and you need to create a hook transfer plan. So again, I'm not gonna go into this in, in detail on this episode. You can find that on, in the article on my website. But for every function you're going to identify the current hook holder, what the future hook, hook holder's name is, or the role.
What the transfer timeline is and what needs to happen. Also, document your transfer blockers and accountability. Who's making sure that this transfer actually happens? And I know that this sounds like busy work, but I promise you it's not. This is actually real time succession planning in its most practical form.
It's systematic and it's transferring hooks before crisis, forces it to be done in an emergency way. So again, through this process, I've been asking you to pick one critical organizational function that either has you as a responsibility holder or it has unclear accountability. And I really want you to, by the end of the month or whatever timeline you name, identify the specific person that's gonna be on that hook document what that means.
Communicate it to everyone who needs to know. Remove the function from people who shouldn't be on the hook and set that check-in. Date accountability. One function, one timeline, clear accountability, and then move on to the next one. The next episode, we're gonna talk about getting off the hook without abandoning the ship.
So the emotional and practical challenge is getting yourself off the hooks. You've held too long. So we need to address the guilt and the shame and the fear that keeps you holding onto the hook that you need to release. So we'll talk about healthy disengagement versus abandonment, and we'll also explore what you actually owe your organization versus what you don't.
Organizational health and professional transitions require some accountability, but if you've been holding hook so long that you can't imagine not holding them, stay tuned for the next episode. That's where we're going next. As always, thanks for listening. You can find more information about me and the work that I offer@naomihadaway.com.
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the leaving while assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype. It's quick and easy, and you can find it@naomihadaway.com. Slash assessment, that's Naomi N-A-O-M-I, hattaway, H-A-T-T-A-W-A y.com/assessment.
To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace. You can also see that information on my website. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation.
Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a Navigation Guide for Workplace Transitions.