Leadership Jobs Are Opening. How Do We Create Career Pathways?
By Chanse Sonsalla
Leadership roles are opening across the field. Early in my career in community development, the wave of leadership transitions felt promising. Advancement can be difficult in this field, and openings at the top suggested possibility. But my optimism faded as I tried to position myself for a future leadership role. According to our Annual Snapshot research, career progression is rarely an explicit conversation. When senior positions do open, the focus often turns outward — prioritizing external candidates rather than cultivating leaders from within their own staff. As our members navigate staffing challenges, their focus is often on operational continuity. Current leaders reported that the most challenging aspects of leadership transition center on maintaining funder relationships, preserving professional contacts, identifying suitable successors, and ensuring readiness of the next leader. In 2025, only five member associations reported having a written succession plan for their executive director or senior staff. When polled on their general hiring practices, none reported an explicit preference for promoting from within. As a result, many associations appear to rely on informal or emergency planning when vacancies arise. Taken together, these patterns suggest that talent development often begins when a vacancy occurs rather than years earlier through deliberate preparation. The path to leadership is unclear. Today’s leadership is approaching hiring for senior positions through the lens of organizational need. Emerging professionals see those positions as future destinations. From an entry-level position, the end goal is visible: executive leadership, senior expertise, or department leadership. The path to get there is not always clear. Career development requires foresight, feedback, stretch opportunities, and explicit preparation. Some associations are modeling how those mechanisms can take root in everyday practice. At Homebase Cincinnati, the executive director makes it a point to include emerging professionals of color in high-level conversations so they can observe how leaders navigate relationships, strategy, and decision-making. Even when practices like this are informal, they remain a powerful form of career development and an important first step toward embedding leadership development into organizational culture and operations. Of course, professional development support is a common presence in any compensation package. In practice, however, the onus for career development is usually placed on the individual. As a result, associations’ career development investments often do not align with their long-term leadership or workforce needs. Training alone does not build leaders. The majority of professional development provided by associations is external. Online training, conferences, and peer networks expand industry knowledge for staff, but are often elective and rarely connected to organizational needs and knowledge. What our members really need, if they want to retain their emerging professionals, are internal or embedded development opportunities that tie career advancement directly to organizational needs. But fewer than a third of participating associations reported offering shadowing, mentoring, or job-rotation programs. Other significant barriers to preparing existing staff for advancement are structural — lack of time for additional training, insufficient budget for professional growth, and limited mid-level leadership roles available in the coming years. When advancement depends on individual persistence layered onto full workloads, factors like caregiving responsibilities, financial stability, and burnout tolerance shape who is able to persist. For professional development to be an equitable part of the organizational culture, it needs to be embedded in organizational systems. Succession planning cannot only answer, “Who replaces a senior staff member?” It must also answer, “How do today’s staff become tomorrow’s leaders?” Prepare today's staff to lead tomorrow. Addressing this gap requires aligning succession planning with real career pathways. Drawing on lessons from sectors with more established leadership pipelines, several strategies stand out:
These shifts also require tangible investment. As an emerging professional in this field, I regularly speak with peers navigating similar career paths. When we talk about what would make it possible to stay, grow, and step into leadership roles, the same needs consistently surface:
The 2025 Annual Snapshot sends a clear signal: leadership transition is underway. The question is not whether change is coming, but whether systems are in place to ensure continuity of people — not just positions. This year, the Alliance will continue exploring these questions through research and peer learning across our network. If we expect the next generation to carry this field forward, we must build systems that make staying possible and leadership attainable. |
Applied Research Manager