The Art of Letting Go – Part 9: Watching the Transition Window

It was November 2024 and I was in Victoria Falls for the Africa Philanthropy Network Assembly. ZimRights was one of the host organisations and I had been invited to join the opening panel on investing in infrastructure and movements for African philanthropy. On the panel were some very special people, including Mamo Mohapi of the Mott Foundation, Bongiwe Ndondo of the Hlanganisa Community Fund for Social & Gender Justice and Isabella Luz of Brazil’s Instituto Procomum. My brother Evans Okinyi of the East Africa Philanthropy Network was moderating the conversation.

Before we got into the business of the day, Evans asked each of us to introduce ourselves and share one fun fact that people in the audience probably did not know about us.

I told the audience that while I was serving as a magistrate in Bulawayo in 2007, I was arrested by the police. They told me that my crime was loitering for the purposes of prostitution.

Of course, the audience laughed.

We then got into the serious conversation of the day, which was about sustainability, movements, resources and power.

What I did not tell the audience was that behind the funny story of my arrest was a much more serious story about one of the first major transitions in my professional life.

Towards the end of my time in the judiciary, I had become increasingly frustrated with the distance between the courtroom and what I considered to be the real action. In Bulawayo, one of my recurring confrontations with law enforcement involved informal traders. Police officers would raid market women in the early hours of the morning as they bought vegetables and other produce for resale. Their goods would be confiscated and, later, applications would come to the magistrates’ court seeking forfeiture of the produce to the State. On some occasions, by the time those applications reached me, some of the confiscated produce had already been distributed.

I found this deeply troubling. I did not believe then, and I still do not believe today, that vending should be treated as a crime. Zimbabwe needs to decriminalise livelihoods. I struggled to understand why the machinery of the State should be deployed against women waking up at three in the morning to buy tomatoes and vegetables so that they could earn an honest living and feed their families. For that reason, I would not sign the forfeiture orders placed before me in those circumstances.

This became one of my running battles with the police.

On the evening when I was arrested, I deliberately chose not to identify myself as a magistrate. I wanted to see how the police treated an ordinary suspect who could not produce a title that might change the way the system responded to them. But the more these confrontations happened, the more I became aware that something was changing inside me. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with where I was located in the justice system.

I had entered a transition zone.

There was nothing dramatically wrong with my career. I had not been dismissed. I had not failed as a magistrate. I simply began to understand that the bench was no longer where I wanted to serve. I wanted to be closer to communities and to the struggles that were producing the cases that eventually arrived in court.

In 2008, I resigned from the judiciary and joined civil society.

I lost the prestige of the bench, but I gained the satisfaction of serving closer to the communities I cared about.

For the years that followed, I lived the demanding life of civic activism. I learnt to challenge systems of repression and, as the late Alex Magaisa would say, to swim with crocodiles. The more I understood those systems, however, the more I became interested in something beyond resistance. Those who challenge powerful systems also need systems of their own. Movements need governance. Activists need strong institutions. Organisations need ways of distributing authority, developing leaders, preserving institutional memory and bringing people together around a mission that can survive individual personalities.

My time at ZimRights became a masterclass in this work. So did the opportunities I had to serve other civic institutions, including the Zimbabwe Peace Project and the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum. I became increasingly fascinated by the architecture that allows movements to hold together under pressure and to remain effective long after the excitement of a campaign has passed.

Eventually, another transition window began to open.

This time, it was much harder to recognise because I absolutely enjoyed what I was doing.

When Things Are Going Well

My first transition had been relatively easy to read. Frustration was telling me that something had shifted. The second transition arrived while I was doing some of the most fulfilling work of my life.

One day, sometime around the period when we were preparing to launch the People’s Human Rights Manifesto, I had a mentoring call with one of the seasoned leaders who had accompanied me for many years. The Manifesto was eventually launched on 12 April 2023 following extensive consultations and became one of the flagship initiatives under the ZimRights Shifting Power to the People Strategy.

At the end of our call, my mentor sent me a voice note.

“Bamdiki, I don’t know what this is, but after talking to you, I have a strong sense that your heart is now somewhere else. I don’t have clarity on this, but I think God has bigger things for you. You may need to pray about it.”

Wow.

I remember telling myself that he was wrong.

We were preparing for the People’s Human Rights Manifesto. The momentum was rising. I was enjoying the work and, after several difficult years, I felt I was getting the hang of this thing. There was so much we were still trying to build.

How could my heart be somewhere else?

I dismissed the thought and carried on.

But he was right.

I was already in transition. I was simply not paying attention.

In Part 3 of this series, I wrote about understanding the assignment: the importance of knowing what you have been called into a particular space to do. The harder part may be recognising when that assignment has substantially been accomplished, especially when you still enjoy the work and people continue affirming your leadership.

That was the problem I was beginning to confront.

The work was going well.

By 2024, I could see many of the things we had worked towards at ZimRights taking shape. The organisation had a clear strategy, stronger governance systems, an increasingly confident team and a growing community movement. I was also finding myself drawn more strongly towards questions of civic leadership, institutional architecture and how we could support leaders and organisations across the sector.

Then, on 25 October 2024, NANGO named me the 2024 NGO Director of the Year at its NGO Directors Annual Summer Retreat in Nyanga.

It was a very special recognition because it came from the community I served. But the award also created an unexpected moment of reflection. In the article I wrote afterwards, I found myself asking how I could use that recognition to inspire and empower the next generation of emerging leaders to lead the sector better. Looking back, that question tells me something about where my mind was already going.

The next Director of ZimRights was in that room.

I had the privilege of taking a photograph with her and whispering in her ear that she was next.

At the time, I probably did not fully appreciate the significance of that moment. I was receiving an award for my own leadership while finding great satisfaction in imagining another leader standing in that place.

A few days later, I was in Victoria Falls at the APN Assembly.

I had another conversation with the same elder who had warned me that my heart seemed to be moving elsewhere. This time I admitted that he had been right. I had thought about his words and had begun to accept that I was indeed in a transition. What remained unclear was the shape of the next assignment.

Like many good mentors, he refused to answer that question for me.

Instead, he recommended a book that he thought might help me think. It was Bob Buford’s Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance. Buford’s work is built around the idea of an intentional pause in which a person begins to examine the next phase of life and the contribution they want to make through it.

My mentor pulled a copy from his library and told me he would send it if he found someone travelling in my direction.

“Never mind,” I said. “I have already bought it on Amazon.”

Out of the reflections that followed came a simple formulation of the work I felt increasingly drawn towards: serving those who serve others. That idea eventually evolved into the philosophy of the Civic Leadership Institute: Serving those who serve our communities.

I wrote about that part of the journey in Part 4 of this series when I reflected on accompaniment.

That is how my second major professional transition unfolded. It took time. The signs appeared at different moments. A mentor heard something in my voice. New questions began to hold my attention. Success created space for reflection. I became increasingly interested in strengthening leaders and institutions beyond the organisation I was leading. Eventually, these signals became difficult to ignore.

As I approach the end of this series, there is an important question that I want to confront.

How do you know when it is time to step forward into another assignment?

I use the language of stepping forward deliberately. Organisationally, the conventional language is that a leader “steps down”. That may accurately describe movement in an organisational hierarchy, but it can easily create the impression that leaving office means diminishing in relevance. Leadership transitions become harder when we imagine every departure as a movement away from significance.

A leader can leave one position and continue serving the same mission from a different place.

The real question, then, is how we recognise that moment.

I do not have a definitive answer. My experience suggests that there are several things worth paying attention to.

Understand the Nature of the Space You Are Leading

Many people have asked me how many years are enough for a chief executive.

I do not think there is a universal number.

The question makes sense only when placed within the character of the institution itself. A family-owned business operates differently from a membership movement. An organisation deliberately built around the personal brand of an author, artist or speaker has a different leadership logic from a public-interest institution. Founder-led businesses can sustain very long tenures. Jim Collins, writing about a group of enduring companies studied with Jerry Porras, noted that founders of companies including Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, Motorola, Sony, Walmart and Disney remained chief executive for an average of 37 years. By contrast, Russell Reynolds reports that CEOs leaving major publicly listed companies in 2025 had served an average of 7.1 years.

These numbers are useful precisely because they refuse to give us an easy formula.

The important starting point is to understand what you are leading.

My reflections here are mainly about broad-based non-profit organisations and people’s movements. These institutions are created to serve a public mission. They do not belong to the chief executive. They do not belong to the board chairperson. They do not belong to the founder. Leadership in such spaces is stewardship for a period of time.

Once you understand that, you begin to relate differently to tenure.

There were no executive tenure limits at ZimRights that forced me to leave after a prescribed number of years. I found it useful, however, to study the six leaders who had occupied that office before me. I wanted to understand how long they had served, what each of them had achieved and the circumstances in which their tenure ended. It was a helpful reminder that the office had a history before my arrival and would have another history after me.

When I started, I thought I would probably serve for about five years.

Then five years approached and I got carried away.

There was always another important piece of work. Another institutional reform. Another campaign. Another funding challenge. Another leadership question that I wanted to resolve.

This is one of the ways in which a leader can miss the transition window. There may never be a day when the inbox becomes empty and all the work is finished. In a movement, there is always another battle. If completion means the absence of unfinished work, very few leaders will ever leave.

A personal leadership horizon can therefore be useful even where the institution has no formal tenure limit. I do not mean a rigid date after which a leader must leave regardless of circumstances. I mean a discipline of periodically asking whether your continued presence remains the best use of your leadership and the best thing for the institution.

Success can make that question especially difficult.

When things are going badly, leadership change may force itself onto the agenda. When things are going well, there is powerful encouragement to continue. The organisation wants stability. Partners know you. Donors trust you. Staff understand your leadership style. Your own confidence is growing. Success can quietly persuade a leader that continuity requires their continued presence.

That is when awareness becomes especially important.

The 2024 NGO Director of the Year Award did something useful for me. I enjoyed it and received it with gratitude, but it also strengthened my desire to see more leaders rise in that room. I could increasingly see my own success as an opportunity to prepare the ground for somebody else.

When I walked onto that stage, the next Director of ZimRights was already in the room.

That, for me, is one of the signs worth watching.

There comes a point when your excitement begins to move from what you can achieve personally towards what the people around you can become. When that happens, pay attention.

Understand the Transition Culture of the Organisation

The second issue is the organisation’s transition culture.

Every institution has one, even where nobody has ever deliberately discussed it.

In some organisations, leadership transition is understood as part of institutional renewal. In others, the possibility that a successful chief executive might leave creates immediate anxiety. The board wonders what has gone wrong. Staff begin speculating. Partners panic. Donors want reassurance. The chief executive themselves may interpret every succession conversation as evidence that somebody wants them out.

Such a culture makes healthy transition difficult.

A useful test is whether the organisation can discuss succession while the incumbent is still performing well.

Can a board ask about the next generation of leadership without creating a crisis? Can promising leaders be given real authority and public visibility? Can donors and partners develop trusted relationships with people beyond the chief executive? Can the organisation imagine itself under different leadership without interpreting that imagination as disloyalty?

These are cultural questions before they become succession questions.

Governance literature increasingly treats succession in this way. BoardSource describes executive succession as an ongoing responsibility concerned with leadership continuity, organisational effectiveness and the development of leadership strength across the institution. It recommends preparing for transition before a vacancy appears.

I have seen organisations where the chief executive cannot raise the subject of departure because everyone immediately assumes something is wrong. This places leaders in a difficult position. They remain silent about an approaching transition until the decision has already been made. The organisation then experiences the departure as sudden, even where the leader has been thinking about it for years.

An organisation that has normalised leadership renewal creates more room for honesty.

ZimRights had already lived through several leadership transitions before I arrived. That history was useful. When my own departure eventually became public, the Chairperson reflected that transitions were part of organisational life and could be understood as opportunities for renewal. That language is important. It releases both the institution and the outgoing leader from the idea that a change in leadership must be evidence of failure.

A healthy transition culture also allows the next leader to emerge before the outgoing leader disappears. People get used to hearing other voices. Authority becomes more distributed. The organisation gradually discovers that it contains more leadership than the person currently occupying the top office.

This connects directly with the architecture of transition that I explored in Part 7 of this series. Succession is easier to manage when the organisation has been preparing for leadership continuity long before names and departure dates enter the conversation.

Find People Who Can Help You Read the Signs

The third issue is accompaniment.

My mentor’s words stayed with me because he noticed the transition before I was willing to acknowledge it.

“I think your heart is now somewhere else.”

He could say this because he knew me. He understood the work I was doing, but he also understood my leadership journey beyond the job I occupied at that particular moment. He had listened to my ideas over the years. He knew what excited me, what frustrated me and what I believed my leadership should ultimately serve.

These companions do not appear at the moment of transition. They are built over the course of the leadership journey.

At different stages in my own journey, I have deliberately told trusted people what I believe in. I have shared the kind of leader I want to be, the things that frighten me about power and some of the values that I hope will remain visible in my leadership. That creates a reference point. When I become distracted by success, ambition, fear or institutional pressures, there are people who can remind me of things I once said when I was seeing more clearly.

This is why I speak of disciplined accompaniment.

A good companion is not simply someone who encourages you. They must have enough proximity to understand your journey and enough independence to tell you something you may not want to hear.

Leadership can easily become an echo chamber. The more successful you become, the more likely you are to be surrounded by people whose immediate interests are connected to your continued leadership. Staff may want stability. Partners may prefer the relationships they already know. People who have grown under your leadership may genuinely love working with you. Their encouragement is valuable, but it may not always help you answer the question of whether your own season is changing.

Every leader therefore needs some relationships that sit outside the institutional incentives of the office.

People who can ask whether you are still growing.

People who can hear when your energy has shifted.

People who can remind you of an assignment that may be larger than the position you currently occupy.

In my case, the warning came almost two years before I eventually announced that I was leaving ZimRights. There was no urgency in it. My mentor did not tell me to resign. He simply invited me to notice what might already be happening.

That is often what good accompaniment does.

It helps us see.

Build an Organisation That Can Receive Another Leader

The fourth issue is the sustainability of the organisation.

Recognising a transition window does not necessarily mean that you should leave immediately. Awareness should begin a period of preparation.

Once I became clearer that my own transition was approaching, I became increasingly conscious of the environment that the next leader would inherit. I wanted the organisation to be governed well, to have credible systems, to have leadership capacity beyond the Director’s office and to have relationships that belonged to ZimRights rather than to Dzikamai.

This work is central to a responsible transition.

If most important decisions still require your intervention, there is work to do. If all significant donor relationships live in your phone, there is work to do. If institutional memory disappears when you leave the room, there is work to do. If the board is strong only because you organise it, there is work to do. If talented colleagues have spent years waiting for permission to lead, there is work to do.

The purpose of that work is to create a fair environment for the next leader.

A successor should inherit an institution, not a vacancy.

This means investing in governance, distributing authority, strengthening management, documenting systems, introducing colleagues into important relationships and allowing other leaders to carry visible responsibilities while you are still there. BoardSource’s work on succession makes the same connection between leadership continuity, bench strength and the long-term sustainability of the organisation.

There is also a more difficult part of this preparation.

The organisation must develop enough confidence to be led differently.

Every leader develops preferences. We have our own ways of running meetings, making decisions, communicating, managing conflict and setting priorities. After several years, those habits can begin to look like institutional rules. A successor can easily inherit an organisation that expects them to reproduce the personality of the person who left.

That is an unfair inheritance.

Good succession creates room for continuity in mission and change in leadership.

The incoming leader should understand the history and respect the institution, but they must also be free to read their own moment. The environment that produced the outgoing leader’s methods may no longer exist. New circumstances may demand another style, another emphasis and perhaps even another set of capabilities.

This is why I have increasingly come to think that one of the final responsibilities of an outgoing leader is to reduce the institution’s dependence on their own way of doing things.

Part 8 of this series examined this challenge through the movement from founder to foundation: converting personal centrality into systems, culture, governance, memory and leadership depth. The same principle applies beyond founders. Any long-serving chief executive can become so central that institutional continuity becomes tied to their personality.

The transition window becomes easier to obey when you know that the organisation is capable of receiving another leader.

Invest in Your Own Sustainability

Finally, there is the sustainability of the leader.

I have learnt to take this part of the transition conversation very seriously.

Many leaders remain in positions long after they have begun to sense that their season is changing because they cannot see a viable life outside the organisation. This is easy to judge from a distance and much harder to understand from inside the leader’s life.

For a long-serving chief executive, the organisation may provide much more than employment. It may carry income, professional identity, networks, friendships, social standing, routine and a strong sense of purpose. After ten or fifteen years, the question of leaving can become inseparable from the question of who you will be when the title disappears.

There are also very practical considerations.

Non-profit leaders do not usually leave with the financial rewards that accompany the sale of a business. Many carry mortgages, school fees, medical obligations and extended family responsibilities. A decision that may be healthy for the institution can create considerable financial uncertainty for the leader and their family.

We should be able to acknowledge this without allowing it to become an argument for permanent tenure.

Personal sustainability therefore deserves attention throughout the leadership journey.

The question of what happens after this assignment should never first occur to you in the month when you are preparing your resignation letter. I do not mean that every leader should have the next job waiting. In Part 8, I reflected on how burdensome the question “What’s next?” can become when it is imposed on somebody who needs time to rest and recover. I still believe that if I were to redo my own transition, I might create more distance between assignments.

The preparation I am speaking about is broader.

Are you building some financial independence from the position you occupy? Are there parts of your identity that exist outside the institution? Are you still learning? Are you maintaining relationships that are not defined by your title? Are there interests you have allowed yourself to pursue without immediately converting them into organisational projects? Can you imagine a meaningful life in which you are no longer introduced by your current position?

These questions are part of transition preparedness.

They reduce the fear attached to leaving.

In my own case, the ideas that eventually became the Civic Leadership Institute had been developing before I left ZimRights. The work I had done with boards, leaders and civic organisations had awakened a particular interest in institutional architecture and leadership accompaniment. I did not have every detail worked out when I began the transition, but I could see enough of another direction to know that leaving one office would not end my contribution to civic leadership.

This is where my two transitions eventually began to look similar.

Leaving the judiciary did not end my work for justice. It changed where I stood in relation to that work.

Leaving ZimRights did not end my relationship with civic movements. It changed the form of my service.

That understanding can be liberating for a leader who is watching the transition window.

Watching the Window

So how do you know?

I still cannot give a neat formula.

I suspect that the transition window rarely announces itself through one decisive event. In my experience, it emerges through a pattern that becomes clearer with time. You begin to notice changes in what holds your attention. You become increasingly interested in developing the people who will lead after you. Questions outside your current role begin to occupy more of your imagination. Trusted companions notice that something in you is shifting. The organisation itself may have reached a level of maturity where another leader can take what has been built and do something with it that you may no longer be best placed to do.

Success can be one of the signals.

That is perhaps the most important lesson from my own experience.

I had imagined that one day I would know it was time to leave because I would become tired of the work. Instead, some of the clearest signs came at a time when I was enjoying it most. The movement was growing. I was receiving recognition. I had become more confident in the role. I could see the results of years of difficult institution building.

And somewhere within that success, I began to see another possibility.

The transition window had opened.

The discipline was to notice it before comfort convinced me to ignore it.

There is a point in leadership when staying can be an expression of commitment. There can also come a point when the same commitment asks you to prepare another person to lead. Wisdom lies in reading that moment well.

That is why I have chosen to speak of stepping forward.

When I resigned from the judiciary, I technically stepped down from the bench. When I left ZimRights, I stepped down as National Director after six years of leading the movement. My public farewell described the transition as the conclusion of an assignment whose time had come, while the movement prepared for another leader and another season.

Neither transition reduced my relevance to the work I cared about.

They changed my location within it.

Perhaps that is the most useful way I now understand the transition window. It is the moment when you begin to recognise that continued faithfulness to the work may require you to serve it from somewhere else.

The window does not tell you that what you have been doing was unimportant. Quite the opposite. It asks whether you have done enough with the opportunity you were given to leave the institution stronger, create room for another leader and carry what you have learnt into the next season of your life.

When that moment comes, the work of letting go begins long before the final day in office.

The first step is simply to see it.