I am a product of an unsuccessful leadership transition.

In August 2024, I was asked to resign as CEO after 19 months.

Not for poor performance — I was let go without cause and given a severance package. Not for lack of effort — I had worked without stop since day one. Not for lack of capability — I had spent 25 years as a senior executive and gone through an extensive search process to win this role.

I was let go because the leadership transition was set up to fail from the start..

Here is what was missing:

No transition plan. I was accountable to the board, but they never defined expectations beyond the hiring process. I navigated using my own judgment and relied on a team I had just inherited to show me the way. The organization gave me no roadmap for success — and the only formal feedback I received was being let go.

No clarity on purpose. The board was fractured on the organization’s mission. They couldn’t tell me what problem we existed to solve — because they didn’t agree themselves.

No transparency about organizational friction. The board knew about long-standing issues — structural problems, internal politics, cultural tensions — but never disclosed them. I was left to discover friction points on my own, months into the role, when I should have been addressing them from day one.

No feedback infrastructure. I received zero performance evaluations in 19 months. When concerns existed, they festered in silence until it was too late.

By the time the board asked me to resign, the damage was done — to them, to me, to the organization we were supposed to be leading together.

The cost was signicant:

The organization lost more than 30 months of progress — my hiring process, my short tenure, then rehiring again. They paid for a failed search, my severance, and interim leadership. The staff endured months of uncertainty and a leadership vacuum during a time of both opportunity and challenge.

And I lost my confidence and hard-fought career reputation.

What I learned in 12 months of recovery:

This wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about the board. It was a systems failure.

Key leader transitions fail when organizations assume clarity instead of creating it.

That’s the work I do now.

I help mission-driven, board-governed organizations navigate the most vulnerable moment in an organization’s life—the CEO transition— so it becomes a catalyst for transformation rather than a wound that takes years to heal.

I know this work because I lived it from the CEO’s chair.

Now I help organizations get it right.