7 lessons from leading our ending, that might be useful for yours
Written by Zoë Stanton
In November 2022, after 10 years, Year Here stopped delivering social innovation Fellowships and all operations ceased.
The case study (viewed here). is designed to be the ‘how’ of ending Year Here’s Fellowship and operations. Why? Because leading the ending of something is one of the most mysterious undertakings everyone involved had ever embarked on. They want to shed light on their experience so that if you find yourself considering closure, you can gain a sense of what it will involve, how it might feel and how you can do it as well as possible.
Written in 2023 by Zoë Stanton with Shady Bajelvand and with guidance and support from Iona Lawrence and Emily Horton.
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I finished my role as Year Here CEO at the end of last year. As a leadership team, we intentionally choose to stop delivering a well loved, long standing programme and end organisational operations. As a team, we successfully managed a steadily paced, positive close. More here on why and how we ended. It was not the role or ending I expected, but one that I am very proud to have been part of because we were leading with intention, courage, integrity and care.
I’m now six months into a new life, in a new country (which I’m loving) and things feel clearer. Time and distance have created space for further reflection and new perspectives to emerge. It now feels important to share learnings and experiences for a number of reasons:
To crystallise the learning and insight we have taken into new jobs, organisations and lives.
To share back to those who may be tussling with similar questions and challenges; considering intentional endings to programmes or organisations they lead.
For myself, to bring closure to an important experience in my life and to make space for the new and different.
For Year Here, to honour and capture its past as it moves into an new phase as a community movement.
We’ve captured a very detailed account of the experience in a case study hosted on the Stewarding Loss toolkit for those who would like to explore in depth. And below we have drawn out 7 key learnings.
7 lessons from leading our ending, that might be useful for yours:
Share leadership: Finding ways to share and grow leadership capacity made all the difference to the quality of decisions we took and the emotional experience of everyone involved. For us, this was building in-depth Board understanding and engagement in the business and harnessing co-leadership models at board and exec level.
Prepare for the emotions and to hold your space: The emotional work involved in closure was huge. We experienced fear, guilt, anxiety and deep concern for others. While there was plenty of support and words of encouragement, there were people who were, understandably, not comfortable or accepting of the decision. To help, we were clear on our boundaries (such as who you engage with and when) and worked together with trusted colleagues to support each other to retain our boundaries.
Doing two (or more!) jobs at once: For large swathes of the closure we were doing two fundamentally different jobs at the same time: keeping an organisation alive to deliver its remaining commitments while also preparing for its operational ending. This was exhausting work and added to the emotional burden. We took care to look after ourselves and others as it was a marathon not a sprint.
It’s a wiggly process, not a linear one: We felt like if we made the right plan, the ending would be a manageable and linear process. This is an appealing fantasy. Curve balls, dead ends and blind spots were all part of the daily and weekly journey of closing an organisation. We weren’t prepared for these at the start but became used to dealing with them along the way.
Agreeing 2–3 goals, or principles for our ending brought ambition and clarity: Writing down principles helped us communicate a vision for ending. They ensured we were all aligned. They informed the countless decisions needed, often at pace, that upheld our ending.
Communication planning is critical: We knew to end well we needed to maintain the trust and admiration of our community, audiences and allies. Exacting communications planning around core messaging, audiences and channels communicating in the right way at the right time was essential to ensure people felt respected along the way.
Choosing to proactively and intentionally close allowed us to set a pace and it was a journey of learning and growth: People assume closures are frantic, chaotic, crisis-laden processes which need to be rushed. This says as much about our discomfort around endings and the stigma of failure all too often attached to them, as it does about the endings themselves. Choosing to end enabled us to set our pace and create room for reflection. We found ourselves engaged in a process full of learning, intent and care.
You can read the full case study here. These learnings and detailed case study were written in collaboration with Shady Bajelvand. We are very grateful for the support and contributions of Iona Lawrence, Emily Horton, Zoe Whyatt, Sneh Jani Patel and Cat Drew.