Doing good while reading good — join the Nonprofit Good News-Letter.
Challenge 22 in the series 50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit
A program coordinator at a youth-serving nonprofit has been in her role for four years. She's excellent. Her evaluations are strong. Her clients trust her. Her colleagues look to her for guidance.
She wants to grow. But the org chart has three levels: her, the program director, and the executive director. The program director isn't going anywhere. The ED has been in the role for 12 years.
There is nowhere for her to go — except out.
This is one of the most predictable losses in the nonprofit sector, and most organizations see it coming and do nothing.
Most nonprofits are small. According to Nonprofit Impact Matters, 92% of nonprofits operate with annual budgets under $1 million. Organizations that size typically have flat hierarchies — an executive director, a handful of program and operations staff, and maybe a part-time bookkeeper.
In that structure, the only real "promotion" is to executive director. And the average nonprofit ED tenure runs five to seven years, according to CompassPoint's Daring to Lead national studies — meaning the seat opens roughly once a decade, sometimes longer.
The result: a sector where talented mid-career professionals hit a ceiling within three to five years and face a choice between staying in a role they've outgrown or leaving. Most leave. And when they leave, they don't just change organizations — many leave the sector entirely.
The Bridgespan Group has documented this as a "leadership pipeline" crisis. Their research projected that the sector would need roughly 80,000 new senior managers per year to keep pace with growth and retirements — a number that has only grown since. The pipeline isn't producing them because the organizations that should be developing future leaders can't retain them long enough to do so.
Losing a four-year employee doesn't just create a vacancy. It creates a knowledge gap that may take two years to fill. Relationships with clients, funders, and partners walk out the door. Institutional memory disappears. And the remaining staff — who just watched their most talented colleague leave because there was nowhere to go — draw their own conclusions.
I spent a chapter in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience on how staffing challenges make nonprofits fragile, and limited career advancement is one of the most insidious. The risk isn't just turnover — it's the gradual erosion of organizational capability as the people who know the most consistently leave.
This also creates a diversity problem. If the only path to leadership runs through a narrow, rarely-opening bottleneck, the people who reach the top tend to look like the people who were already at the top. The sector talks about diversifying leadership. The structural ceiling is one of the reasons it hasn't happened faster.
You probably can't add three new management layers to your org chart. You don't have the budget, and artificial hierarchy wouldn't help anyway. But "advancement" doesn't have to mean "promotion."
Expand roles horizontally. Give your best people new challenges that stretch their skills without requiring a title change. Managing a new program area, leading a cross-organizational initiative, representing the organization in a coalition — these create growth without requiring new positions.
Create senior individual contributor roles. Not everyone needs to manage people to advance. A "Senior Program Coordinator" or "Lead Specialist" role with expanded scope, more autonomy, and higher compensation signals investment in the person without requiring a management vacancy.
Build pathways to external leadership. If your organization genuinely can't offer advancement, help your best people advance elsewhere — and make that an explicit part of your organizational culture. Talk about career growth as spanning numerous organizations, and genuinely support that notion. Serve as a reference. Help them apply for board positions. Connect them to ED search firms. An organization known for developing future leaders attracts future leaders, even if they don't stay forever. And every person who leaves is going to talk about the place they worked before. You want them to say they were supported, not stunted.
Use the board strategically. Some organizations create advisory roles, program committees, or leadership development experiences that give rising staff exposure to governance, strategy, and decision-making — the skills they'll need when they do step into senior roles, whether at your organization or another.
Name the ceiling honestly. Don't pretend the ceiling doesn't exist. Staff know. The most respected thing a leader can say is: "I know there's limited upward mobility here. Let's talk about what growth looks like for you — whether that's here or somewhere else." That conversation builds loyalty precisely because it's honest.
Retaining talented people when you can't promote them is one of the hardest leadership problems in the sector. I've been writing about it — and testing solutions with real organizations — in Nonprofit Good News Premium.
Have a career conversation with your longest-tenured staff member who isn't in a leadership role. Ask: where do you want to be in three years? Listen to the answer. If they say "I don't know," that's a signal. If they say "not here," that's a signal too. Either way, you now have information you can act on.
This is part of an ongoing series based on the 50 challenges outlined in Appendix 1 of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Each post names one challenge clearly and offers a practical reframe with steps you can take this week. For deeper coverage of nonprofit strategy, risk, and resilience — including tools you can put to work immediately — check out Nonprofit Good News Premium.