JASS
Leadership Transition as Organisational Renewal
Reflections from a conversation between Lisa VeneKlasen (founder and former ED) and Shereen Essof (current ED) with the benefit of hindsight, five years after a leadership transition.
Artwork courtesy Devi Leiper O'Malley
“A leadership transition is a narrow moment, but the words can be misleading. What sounds like the mere passing of the torch is more about a process of organisational development and reinvention. It is much bigger than just a transition between two people. An entire organisational ecosystem is being asked to change, and changing management is not simple, especially in the time of a global pandemic. A leadership transition is about fundamental shifts in power that inevitably create conflict. It’s all part of the process.” —Shereen Essof
The JASS transition:
As a networked organisation built on relationships of trust, our process was unusually long and involved the entire JASS community. The formal transition was a full year long, directed and facilitated by both the board and senior staff, and coordinated by a staff team including Lisa. It involved many conversations with staff and JASS’ larger community, including early JASS builders, associates, partners, and donors across many countries. Like many leaders, Lisa began imagining what it would take to step down long before clear intentions and plans were crystallised. In that initial imagining, it was clear that JASS needed to be institutionally stronger to weather the change with agility. So, five years before Lisa announced her transition intentions to the board and senior staff, she led a concerted organisational development and fundraising effort in which Shereen played a critical leadership role. That pre-transition groundwork created a diversified multi-year funding base and co-leadership structures with a larger number of staff “holding the whole,” and introduced Shereen’s leadership to the whole organisation. By all accounts, and considering a thriving JASS today, the transition was successful; it facilitated a renewal of leadership and organisation-strengthening that took JASS from strong to thriving despite continuous disruptions around the world since 2020. Despite the best-laid plans and intentions, unpredictable changes in the context, such as the pandemic, exacerbated the usual complexities and twists arising from a transition. These are more easily understood with the benefit of time and are worth learning from, particularly in our chaotic world.
Unique transition features, additional complexity
Every leadership transition is unique and shaped by an organisation’s identity, positionality, structures, stage of development, the leaders involved and the broader context. Among the many distinct features of JASS’ leadership transition strategy, three stand out: 1) the wisdom, benefits, and challenges that come with the decision to recruit internally; 2) the variety of cultures and beliefs about leadership and organisations in different contexts (don’t assume a universal approach to NGOs and leadership change will work); and 3) transitioning from a founding executive director.
Choosing to recruit and hire internally: As a complex decentralised networked structure that had institutionalised and grown quickly in relationship to scope, depth, and scale, JASS needed some organisational consolidation. Its knowledge, successes, operations, and structures needed to be shored up and readied for another leap. For that reason, the staff and board chose to begin with internal recruitment, hoping to draw on existing leadership more familiar with and experienced in leading the institution, its operations, and its work. When Shereen put her name forward, everyone was excited considering her many years leading and reshaping JASS Southern Africa as its Regional Director and her proven global leadership contributions. After a rigorous interview process involving the board and staff, Shereen was chosen as the next ED. The decision to go with internal recruitment and the procedure we created turned out to be a wise choice, particularly when the COVID pandemic began. At the same time, while Shereen's intimate knowledge of JASS facilitated many aspects of the handover, her familiarity may have created unrealistic expectations of continuity rather than preparing the organisation and her community and staff for fresh approaches and a new way.
Different organisational cultures and expectations: Adding further complexity, JASS is deeply rooted in three regions—Mesoamerica, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia—that all have different movement, organisational, and leadership cultures and practices by design. In some contexts, the idea of a leader stepping down from a movement organisation is so rare that people assume something is wrong that is not being publicly shared. For Shereen, building her own relationships of trust demanded that she become more familiar with these different contexts and navigate many different expectations and concerns about the transition process.
The transition went into full effect, with Shereen stepping fully into the ED role on the eve of the pandemic, which was doubly destabilising for a staff whose demands and reliance on the organisation for security and connection increased.
Transitioning from a founding ED: A leadership transition from a founding ED brings additional complexities because the organisation, in some ways, can be an extension of the personal history and relationships of the founder, which was the case for JASS. When it was founded in 2003, JASS was originally a loose community of political friends—popular educators, researchers and organisers who shared political histories and philosophies in the thick of liberations and solidarity strategies of an earlier era. As JASS institutionalised over time, that network of ‘just associates’ became an extension, working in support of the staffing and structures needed to run the day-to-day but was still very much part of JASS. The organisation's leadership transition strategy deliberately emphasised conversations with all community members, aiming to build collective ownership and unite every part of the organisation as it moved toward the future. But the pandemic made sustaining engagement with the associate network nearly impossible because JASS, like many other organisations, needed to invest in supporting staff and building systems to navigate the crisis just to keep the organisation healthy. Some in the associate network felt left out and confused, creating additional expectations and dynamics to manage.
Our questions and learning:
What happens when the context you’ve planned for collapses and upends your leadership transition plans?
“Welcome to a turbulent world where unpredictability is the not-so-new norm, because many of the contexts JASS works in have faced crises for decades.” —Lisa
“COVID was the biggest surprise in the process. We established a path, but you can’t prepare for something like a global pandemic. When an organisation is evolving from a founding ED, the internal change process takes time. Having the process further destabilised by COVID meant a different set of things needed to be managed. We needed to be prepared for the unexpected.”—Shereen
What did we learn from the change process in the midst of an unanticipated global crisis?
With the benefit of hindsight, here are some of the elements of the transition process that really worked for us and ensured a successful transition:
Creating an internal staff support mechanism to direct the process made all the difference. We had a small team to oversee the timeline, address challenges, and communicate with the staff and the board. The team managed the levels of the process really well over many months before and after Lisa stepped aside. The combination of board and staff proved vital because, for most organisations, the board doesn’t have a sufficiently detailed sense of the day-to-day, where problems can arise in the midst of change.
Investing in an ongoing dialogue between us (Lisa and Shereen). The conversations and journeying together for three years prior to the handover were invaluable. This process wasn’t named as part of a transition per se, but it was an exploration of leadership change and organisational possibilities and challenges. It was more of an intimate process of sharing personal lives, larger questions about histories, and how change happens, which created an essential foundation for the eventual handover. Lisa was able to share with Shereen how impossible the juggling act of an ED can be, and to impart her own lessons on accepting imperfection and gaining comfort with navigating tensions, dilemmas and conflicts.
Preparing the ground for a leadership transition: We invested significant effort in preparing for change through loving, open, personal conversations with all staff, primary partners, and donors. These discussions helped everyone feel ready for new directions and some potential disruption.
Creating rituals, honouring both where we’ve come from and historical memory. We invested in a series of events to honour Lisa’s and JASS’ history, to say goodbye, and to welcome Shereen and make widely visible all of her past leadership roles and contributions to JASS. We invested in co-creating a JASS historical memory and brought its many past struggles and successes to light, emphasising the collective efforts of many leaders and acknowledging many “oh shit” moments that shaped what JASS is.
Recognising that a senior-level organisational transition is a change of power. It can be surprising how different players experience and perceive what’s changing and their role in it. Some staff are more adaptable while others remain more attached to the old ways and culture. When power shifts, conflict is inevitable, as people readjust to new dynamics and either newly assert their own power or struggle to re-establish some positional power. This reality demands careful organisational change management strategies to anticipate and deal with the conflict that arises and to recognise both the obvious shifts in power and the underlying dynamics that play out.
Envisioning leadership transitions, whether stepping in or out, as an invitation for reinvention. Meaningful reinvention involves discomfort and uncertainty and intentional efforts to do some things differently. Without this foundational work, organisations risk losing their way and falling into an existential crisis. In our rapidly changing world, leadership transitions and organisational transformation have become inseparable companions and should be seen as an opportunity to adapt to the changing context and ecosystem.
Highlights and other hot takes from our conversation:
“Having buy-in is critical. If you don’t have buy-in, you will be lost at sea. Building political, social and cultural capital is vital to the trust. We did that well.”
“Success in transition requires clarity about the purpose and vision. Attending to the horizontal dimension of leadership—managing relationships across the organisation—means setting a political rhythm, though it's often impossible to predict who will align with this rhythm and who won't.”
“You must be aware that there are things you don’t know. You have to give yourself grace and give grace to those around you. You need to be comfortable with conflict.”
“The dictum that 'form follows function' is more important than ever when stepping into new leadership or realising the need for such organisational change. The risk aversion and abundant caution embedded in current philanthropy have hindered the necessary organisational evolution at this moment.”
“Many staff and the broader community who have been involved with JASS for many years now remember the sensation and energy of building the organisation together as our offers and strategies gained traction and influence. They are less aware of, or less equipped to handle, the organisational evolution and demands of institutionalisation that both funding requirements and our political complexity necessitate. To hold on to political creativity, we may have protected folks from the reality of what it takes to manage external funding requirements and organisational complexity to a degree that made them less adaptable for the leadership transition.”
“We have to be careful not to put so much responsibility on our organisations to solve all the issues that arise. Organisations are what they are. You have to hold them lightly. Even as you care for the people inside, making sure they have decent working conditions and the chance to do good work, we can't make organisations carry the weight of all our issues.”
“When I think back, I often wonder how much COVID really fueled some of the tensions in our organisation. People felt displaced, and sometimes, when that happens, you look for someone to blame.”
“It is dangerous at this moment to think about an organisation as a family. Movement logic invites us to think of organisation as an extension of community, but that sits in conflict with the logic of organisations. The logic of organisations is completely different from how families or communities operate. Maybe this is asking us to deconstruct and rebuild how we structure the organisation or find a more clearly articulated logic that aligns with our vision.”
“But the question of how we create a shared sense of purpose and strategy remains, and with that, a sense of being part of something larger. Perhaps what people describe as 'family' is actually 'radical acceptance' and a sense of belonging. This is what we created in building JASS, and it's essential for sustaining movements and change efforts.”
“In a world in crisis, it’s also important that we rethink these conceptualisations by demarcating what the organisation is and what it’s not. Without boundaries, community becomes this fuzzy concept that means everything and nothing at the same time.”
Our conversations and insights affirm the basic premise that how we approach leadership transitions needs to be informed by what we have all learned about what it takes to navigate a world in constant crisis. How do we imagine our organisations and their leadership within an ecosystem? How do we better resource the flow of people and relationships in ways that enable us to bring our best effort to meet the moment while renewing our organisations?
