Dr. Abby Hasberry has been a coach and advisor to Camelback Fellowship founders and fellows since 2019. She specializes in executive leadership development, executive coaching, and supporting BIPOC nonprofit and school leaders through opening and organizational transitions.
Every nonprofit founder I have coached has had a plan. They’ve mapped the org chart, hired the team, maybe even planned what the org will look like in five or ten years. What they haven’t planned for is the hardest part: becoming someone different.
The leap from founder to CEO isn’t a strategy problem. It’s an identity problem. And until you name it as that, no amount of strategic planning will get you across the bridge.
I’ve been coaching nonprofit education founders with the Camelback Fellowship since 2019. In that time, I’ve watched brilliant, mission-driven people stumble at this transition; not because they lacked vision or skill, but because they hadn’t examined who they needed to become in order to lead the organization they’d built.
The Founder Who Had a Plan but Not the Mindset
I worked with a founder I will refer to as Maya. Maya had done everything right on paper. She had a proven organization, a strong board, and a team she’d spent years building. Her goal during our time together was to step into the CEO role and eventually design a succession plan. She stated that she was ready to hand over the reins to someone else.
Except she wasn’t.
Every time a key decision came up, Maya stepped in. Every time an employee made a call she wouldn’t have made, she reversed it. She didn’t fully trust her team and her team knew it. The succession plan sat in a Google Drive folder, technically complete, but in no way was she ready to enact it.
What Maya eventually discovered, through therapy she sought out herself, was that her inability to trust her team wasn’t a management problem. It was fear based. She feared that the organization could not run without her. She feared that no one else understood her identity nor matched her intensity. Her identity was so fused with the work that letting go felt terrifying.
When she started doing the inner work, everything else shifted. The plan she’d already built finally had the mindset to match it, and she was ready to proceed in our work together.
The Founder Who Was the Heart of Everything
Then there’s Khalil. If you’d met Khalil at any point in his organization’s first few years, you’d have understood immediately why it worked. He was magnetic, mission-obsessed, and deeply loved by his community. The organization was Khalil, and Khalil was the organization.
The problem surfaced when Khalil realized he was ready to move on. Not because he was burned out, but because he felt called toward something new. When he began to look honestly at what he’d leave behind, he found an org with a tremendous heart and almost no infrastructure. No written policies. No employee handbook. No documented mission, vision, or values statements. No onboarding process. Everything lived in his head.
Khalil brought me in as a consultant to help him build what had always existed only in practice: the foundational documents, the systems, the articulated culture. It was humbling work. But it was also clarifying. For the first time, Khalil saw that his job as CEO wasn’t to be the mission; it was to ensure the mission could outlive him.
What the Transition Actually Requires
Both Maya and Khalil taught me the same thing from different directions: the founder-to-CEO transition demands that you stop seeing the organization as an extension of yourself and start stewarding it as an entity of its own; one that will last beyond you.
That shift is identity work. Here’s what it looks like in practice:
1. Make the mission your throughline and say it out loud, and on repeat.
Your mission isn’t a tagline. It should be the answer to every policy question, every hiring decision, every program offering. If you can’t articulate it quickly and clearly, your team can’t carry it out. Write it down. Say it in every room. Make it the lens through which everything is evaluated.
2. Build your team for succession, not just for now.
Your employees need clear job descriptions, evaluations tied to those descriptions, and honest conversations about their futures, even if their plan is eventually to leave; actually, especially then. Being invested in their growth, even beyond your organization, is what earns the kind of trust that makes succession possible, aids in retention, and solidifies loyalty.
3. Cultivate a full stakeholder ecosystem.
The CEO role is outward-facing in ways the founder role often isn’t. You need mentors above you, peers beside you at other organizations, and employees and mentees below you that you’re actively mentoring. This web keeps you learning, thinking, growing, connected, and teaching simultaneously. If you only look inward, you’ll shrink.
4. Know your strengths and build around the gaps.
Try the four boxes exercise: map what you love and do well (your zone of genius), what you love but are still learning (your growth goals), what you’re good at but don’t enjoy (what you teach and delegate), and what you neither enjoy nor do well (what your hire for or outsource). The fourth box is your delegation list. The third is your training curriculum. The second is your development focus. Build a 70-20-10 growth plan for yourself and revisit it often. Write a working styles document and share it with your team. Modeling self-awareness builds the trust you’re asking of others.
5. Design your CEO identity with intention.
Nobody hands you a CEO identity. You build it. Think about three things: how you see yourself, how others see you, and how you want to be seen. When those three align, and then when your professional identity and personal identity align, you show up with an authenticity that your team, your board, and your community can feel. That’s leadership.
The Org That Outlasts You
A leadership transition is not about you disappearing. It’s about you becoming someone who can imagine and build toward an organization that thrives without needing you to be its everything.
Maya’s team is now running point on programs she used to hold tightly. Khalil’s organization is in the process of searching for and hiring a new CEO who will be onboarded and trained by Khalil and his team.
Both founders are still connected to the missions they built. But they’re connected differently now: as stewards, not sole architects.
That’s the transition. It’s hard. It’s identity work. And it’s worth every bit of the effort.
Dr. Abby Hasberry has been a coach and advisor to Camelback Fellowship founders and fellows since 2019. She specializes in executive leadership development, executive coaching, and supporting BIPOC nonprofit and school leaders through opening and organizational transitions.
