Board Governance
By Beth Ellen Holimon · August 19, 2026
Your executive director hasn’t taken a real vacation in fourteen months. She answers board emails at 11 p.m. and shows up to every meeting with a full binder and three new ideas for how the organization could be doing more. From where you sit, that might read as commitment. It could also be the last stretch before something breaks.
Nonprofit boards find the most risk in their financial statements Far fewer are trained to watch their executive director and that gap is getting expensive. The share of nonprofit CEOs who say burnout is “very much” a concern jumped from 29% in 2025 to 46% in 2026, and board-relationship breakdown now ranks among the top drivers of executive departures, right alongside funding pressure. Treating an ED’s exhaustion as a governance issue is a choice a board makes.
Executive turnover is expensive and it doesn’t show up on a P&L until months later. A departing ED takes institutional memory, funder relationships, and staff trust with them. Fewer than a third of nonprofit boards have a written succession plan, which means most organizations are betting their continuity on an executive who isn’t going anywhere, right up until she does.
There’s a second cost that’s harder to put a number on: the culture an exhausted leader builds under her. Burnout at the top spreads. Staff notice when the ED can’t take a sick day. They absorb the message that overwork is the price of commitment, and the pattern repeats itself down the org chart.
Most boards miss burnout because they don’t have systems in place to identify it. A few patterns show up again and again:
The ED’s update is the only regular window the board has into her workload, and it’s designed to project competence.
Performance evaluation happens once a year and focuses on outcomes, not capacity.
No one on the board owns the relationship with the ED day to day, so early signs get spread across a group instead of assigning the responsibility to one person who’s paying attention.
Asking “how are you, really” can feel like it’s outside the board’s lane, even though the board is the only body with the authority to change her workload.
These are design failures, and design failures have design fixes.
FOUR PRACTICES THAT CATCH IT EARLY
Sabbatical and time-off policies. A policy that guarantees uninterrupted leave, with a plan for who covers what, does two things at once: it protects the ED and it forces the board to build the redundancy the organization needs anyway.
A workload conversation built into evaluation. Add a standing section to the annual review that asks directly about capacity, not just results: What did you have to let go of this year to get this done? What would you stop doing if we told you it was safe to?
A board point of contact. One board member, usually the chair, holds the relationship with the ED between meetings. That person’s job includes noticing when something’s off and asking about it directly, not waiting for a crisis to surface in a committee report.
A live succession plan. A plan that’s been discussed, updated in the last year, and known to at least two board members, so an ED taking leave (or leaving the organization) doesn’t put the mission at risk.
A board that only asks “did we hit the numbers” is running half a fiduciary check. The other half is: is the person responsible for hitting those numbers in a position to keep doing it next year, and the year after that?
These practices protect the organization’s continuity, its institutional knowledge, and the culture that staff inherit.
We’ll dig into how to build these practices into your board’s rhythm, plus a tool for spotting the early signs, at this month’s Board Buzz: The Costs of Executive Burnout and Board Response, on August 25.
Sources: State of Nonprofits 2026 (NonProfit PRO); Nonprofit Executive Director Statistics 2026 (Center for Non-Profit Coaching)