The day I handed over the office keys to my successor at ZimRights was a very calm day. A lazy day, indeed, but full of meaning.

We had been talking about this for a while, so it was not supposed to surprise anyone. But in that calmness, I carried my own internal struggle.

 

I would love to say that I served to the very last day. In many ways, I did. Many who met me in action did not believe that I was leaving. We spoke abou

t the future with so much passion that I often needed to remind myself that I was checking out. What pushed me in that direction was an internal struggle that I had battled with from day one.

“If only I could leave things a little better.”

That was my single focus: to lighten the burden for those coming after me. The unspoken struggles of leadership had affected me so deeply that when the time came for me to step away, I desired, from the very depth of my heart, to take away with me the struggles, at least those I could carry. I wanted to set her up for success. So I did everything I could, up to the very last day of my tenure.

As I walked away on the last day, one of the things I left on the table was two annual reports: the one I had inherited, and the one I was leaving behind. The message I did not put into words was that the minimum demand of leadership is simply that you leave things better than the way you found them. If you do that, as a leader, no matter where you lead, your tenure would have been a success.

The journey between the two annual reports on the desk is the story of my leadership in that space. It is a record, open for everyone to see and for the next generation to draw inspiration from.

But then, there are stories that never make it into the annual report you leave on the desk. They are not captured in organisational timelines. They do not sit neatly under achievements, milestones, awards, transitions, or legacy. Yet in many ways, they are the parts that explain everything else.

Every leader has two histories.

There is the visible history. The positions held. The battles fought. The institutions served. The public statements made. The crises navigated. The meetings attended. The victories celebrated. The names people remember.

Then there is the hidden history. The nights of uncertainty. The private fears. The tears in the garden of olives. The moments when courage was not a feeling but a decision. The betrayals absorbed quietly. The disappointments carried without explanation. The sacrifices made without witnesses. The emotional cost of standing in the arena when stepping away would have been easier.

This sixth reflection is about that hidden history.

It is about the untold struggles. Stories I never told. Stories that I may never tell. These are stories that I know every leader carries. Those who do not tell them may emerge as victors, yet the walls know how many times we had to defeat fear before the final day came.

This is why, when the time came for me to pen my final goodbye, I became deliberate. I was penning a song of victory against my other self. The one that resigned on day one of appointment. The one who many times was tempted to throw the key out through the window and tell everyone to go to hell.

This is the untold story of many, if not all, leaders. Behind the final day of “farewell,” “well done,” and “thank you,” there are many hidden nights of “I have had enough,” and “you can go hang yourself.”

So, every time I see a leader making a graceful exit, I salute them. Not only because they have done the right thing, but because behind that graceful exit, there were other possible, and possibly more likely, outcomes. One could have been the decision to hold on until kingdom come. Another could have been to throw the keys through the window from the highway of leadership flight.

Yes. This is the story of how leaders navigate the choices between leadership flight and leadership transition.

Leadership flight is not always visible from the outside.

Sometimes it looks like a resignation. Sometimes it looks like a leader suddenly becoming unavailable. Sometimes it looks like silence, withdrawal, absence, exhaustion, or a new opportunity accepted too quickly because the old assignment had become too heavy to carry. Sometimes it is dramatic. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes the leader leaves the office. Sometimes the leader remains in the office but has already left inside.

This is why I do not speak about leadership flight with judgment.

I know the road that leads there.

I know the internal argument. I know the exhaustion that begins to sound like wisdom. I know the temptation to call disappearance “discernment.” I know the seduction of a clean exit when the work of responsible transition feels too heavy. I know the anger that says, “Let them see for themselves.” I know the wounded pride that says, “I have done enough.” I know the honest fatigue that says, “I cannot carry this anymore.”

And sometimes, all of those voices are telling part of the truth.

That is what makes leadership flight so difficult. It is rarely born from one thing. It grows slowly through accumulated pressure. Internal frustrations. External seductions. Institutional fatigue. Resource scarcity. Loneliness. Ethical strain. Disappointment. The quiet feeling that one is holding together too many things that should never have depended on one person in the first place.

So when I speak about leadership flight, I do not speak as someone who defeated it once and for all. I speak as someone who had to preside over that conflict.

Because you do not always settle it.

You preside over it.

In my final year at ZimRights, I had the opportunity to speak with many leaders who were navigating this same space. Some had already left leadership. Some were preparing to leave. Others were still inside the work, carrying the pressure quietly while trying to remain steady in public.

Those conversations helped me understand that leadership flight is not an individual weakness to be judged from a distance. It is a real organisational and sectoral problem. It emerges where exhaustion accumulates, where responsibility becomes isolated, where institutions depend too heavily on one person, where succession is delayed, where internal frustrations are not processed, and where external opportunities begin to look like rescue.

This instalment would therefore be incomplete if I only told my own story. The struggle I carried was not mine alone. It was part of a wider pattern. If we are serious about building healthier institutions, we must understand that pattern more clearly.

Perhaps the first and most important issue is this: when we check in, we are rarely taught how to check out.

Most leadership training, mentorship, and coaching teaches leaders how to enter, grow, perform, influence, and climb. Very few spaces teach leaders how to leave with dignity, how to prepare successors, how to release authority, and how to make room for the next generation without either disappearing or holding on too long.

When I wrote in the first instalment of this series that the day you walk in is the day you must begin thinking about how you will leave, someone wrote back to me and said, “That does not sound right.”

I understood the discomfort.

It does sound strange to ask a leader to think about exit on the day they are entering. But that is the paradox of leadership. As deeply as you think about impact, you must also think about continuity. As seriously as you think about what you will build, you must also think about what will remain when you are no longer the one building it.

My own dramatic entry into leadership taught me to carry this paradox from the beginning. Far from creating a bus stop mentality in me, it gave me urgency. It forced me to ask what needed to be done, what needed to be strengthened, and what should not be transferred unresolved to the next leader.

Most importantly, it gave me a deep desire to set my successor up for success.

I wanted the next leader to walk into a better space than the one I had walked into. I think that is what leadership across generations must be about. It is not only about what you achieve during your own tenure. It is also about the condition in which you leave the assignment for those coming after you.

This is where the first level of transition architecture begins. It begins with mindset and heartset.

Mindset is what you tell yourself from day one: this office does not begin and end with me. I am a steward for a season.

Heartset is the deeper commitment that drives you to serve well, not only for your own record, but for the next generation of leaders. It is the desire to excel, not merely in years of service, but in the quality of service and in the quality of what you hand over.

This architecture helps a leader navigate both the push and the pull of leadership flight. The push may come from exhaustion, frustration, conflict, or disappointment. The pull may come from external opportunities, recognition elsewhere, safer spaces, or a desire to start again. When mindset and heartset are properly formed, a leader does not become immune to these pressures, but they become less likely to let those pressures determine the manner of their exit.

The second level of architecture is institutional.

Many organisations do not deliberately think about succession planning and transition. Studies of nonprofit governance repeatedly show that succession planning remains weak across the sector. BoardSource’s Leading with Intent data found that only 27 percent of nonprofits had a written succession plan for the chief executive position, while 26 percent of nonprofit CEOs expected to leave within three years. Later reporting by the National Council of Nonprofits, citing BoardSource’s 2021 Leading With Intent report, placed the figure at 29 percent with a written succession plan in place. The pattern is clear: most organisations are still underprepared for executive transition.

So when many leaders walk into nonprofit institutions, the architecture does not encourage them to think of the organisation beyond themselves. In some cases, the institution quietly creates a crucifix for the leader. The leader is expected to be the centre of memory, strategy, fundraising, crisis response, public confidence, staff morale, board reassurance, and donor continuity. Over time, the system begins to treat the leader as both the alpha and the omega.

That is dangerous for the leader, and it is dangerous for the institution.

Where succession is not planned, empowerment and renewal are delayed. Where knowledge is not distributed, the organisation becomes fragile. Where authority is not shared, every transition becomes a threat. And where the leader cannot safely discuss leaving, disappearing can begin to look like the only available option.

But even where this is the architecture a leader finds, the leader still has a responsibility to begin changing it.

That was my situation in June 2022. In one of my own struggles with leadership flight, I picked up the phone and called the Chairperson.

“We need to talk about succession,” I said.

Because he was a seasoned leader, and because we had spoken about these issues before, he did not panic. We set up a meeting and spoke plainly about the timeframe.

“How much time do you want to give us, and how much must we achieve?”

That question helped to move the conversation from anxiety to planning.

We mapped the timeframe. We identified the targets. We discussed what needed to be done before the transition could happen responsibly. The meeting ended with us on the same page. Later, we returned to that conversation, made adjustments, brainstormed further, and by the end of the year, both of us had become naturalised into transition talk.

That phrase matters to me: naturalised into transition talk.

Transition must become speakable before it becomes manageable. If it remains taboo, it will return as crisis.

The third level of architecture is organisational.

As leadership becomes used to speaking about succession, the rest of the organisation must also be prepared. Teams must be helped to understand that transition is not betrayal. Departments must think about continuity. Systems must be strengthened. Records must be organised. Responsibilities must be clarified. The institution must slowly become comfortable with the idea that the work can continue beyond the current leader.

Then, when the formal letter finally lands, people may still feel the shock of reckoning, but they should not be completely surprised. They should be able to say, “You had given us a hint. We knew this day would come.”

That is not manipulation. It is responsible preparation.

This three-level architecture is not foolproof against leadership flight, but it provides guardrails for mindful transition. Every leader may want to leave well, but where there is no architecture to support responsible exit, other pressures can take over.

A leader who wants to leave well may keep postponing departure, not because they want to hold on forever, but because the structure creates too much uncertainty for everyone. Even after I had given an exit date, I still received requests to stay a little longer. At that point, discipline becomes necessary. You must draw a line in the sand and allow a new future to emerge.

At the same time, without architecture, leaders may not feel safe to discuss transition at all. One leader said to me, “I can’t tell these people my plans. They will fire me immediately.”

When that is the environment, leadership flight becomes easier to understand.

If a leader cannot safely discuss transition, they may choose silence. If they cannot trust the institution with their exit, they may begin to plan privately. If transition is treated as betrayal, the leader may wait until the last possible moment. By then, the organisation experiences the departure as abandonment, and the leader experiences it as survival.

That is why succession planning is not only a governance tool. It is also a protection against leadership flight.

It protects the institution from sudden rupture. It protects the incoming leader from avoidable chaos. It protects the outgoing leader from carrying the burden alone. And perhaps most importantly, it protects the future of the work from becoming hostage to the exhaustion, fear, or private calculations of one person.

This is why, for me, the day I handed over the office keys was not just a ceremonial day.

It was the end of a long untold struggle of weighing, in the heart, the weight of what I received and the weight of what I was giving. Because we must always give more than what we receive.

That is why those two annual reports mattered to me.

One represented what I had inherited. The other represented what I was handing over. Between them was not only a record of programmes, activities, achievements, and institutional growth. Between them was also the untold struggle to stay long enough, serve well enough, prepare carefully enough, and leave responsibly enough.

The untold struggle of leadership is not only the struggle to lead. It is also the struggle to leave well. It is the struggle to resist the temptation to hold on forever because the institution feels unsafe without you. It is the struggle to resist the temptation to disappear because the burden has become too heavy. It is the struggle to build enough architecture around the transition so that departure does not become rupture.

That process design, the courage to initiate it, the grace to embrace it, and the faith to hand over the baton, is not heroism. That is an art, the architectural work of many craftsmen and women who care deeply and will go out of their way to help you win the untold struggle of how to leave with dignity.

That, my friends, is the struggle we must learn to win, and help many others to win too.