Is your culture built for outside talent?

Is your culture built to bring in talent from outside your industry?

I ask because most nonprofit leadership teams I sit with cannot answer that question, and the ones who can usually cannot answer it well. Their governance documents do not ask it of them. Their hiring committees do not ask it of themselves. And it is the question, in my experience, that most reliably predicts whether a senior outside hire will thrive in the seat or leave inside eighteen months, carrying institutional knowledge no one else has the standing to replace.

The question matters more now than it did five years ago. The nonprofit sector — particularly the health and human-services subsector where I have spent much of my post-military career — is in a documented leadership crisis. Turnover runs at nineteen percent against roughly twelve percent in other sectors, two-thirds of chief executives have no written succession plan, and a 2025 Center for Effective Philanthropy survey found ninety-five percent of nonprofit leaders concerned about staff burnout, with nearly half struggling to fill open positions. That is not a hiring problem. It is a receiving-culture problem. Sectors under pressure eventually have to bring in talent formed elsewhere. Most believe they are prepared to do that. Fewer are.

A distinction is worth drawing before going further, because most treatments of this topic collapse it. There is a difference between a veteran and a military retiree. A veteran served — four years, six, eight — and separated. A retiree served twelve years or more, often much more, and drew a pension on the way out. The former is a talent pool. The latter is a leadership pool, and the difference matters more than either the sector or its critics generally acknowledge.

The retiree specifically — the senior noncommissioned officer, the field-grade officer, the colonel who ran a battalion or a brigade or a program office — arrives in a civilian role carrying twelve to thirty years of formal leadership development. That development is not incidental. It is structural. No one spends that long in the profession of arms without being trained, evaluated, mentored, and rotated through a series of increasingly complex commands designed specifically to produce judgment under pressure and the habit of building the person behind you. What a nonprofit executive team spends a quarter escalating is often what a lieutenant colonel decided before lunch on a Tuesday in a place with no reliable electricity. That is not because the nonprofit team is unserious. It is because what is considerable to one culture is routine in another, and neither side usually sees the calibration it is working from.

So one might expect the sector, having identified a leadership pipeline problem, to have organized itself to absorb this population. It has not. Indeed's 2025 workforce survey found sixty-four percent of veterans with more than eleven years of service report feeling underemployed or underutilized in their civilian roles. Two out of every three of the people I am describing are being wasted.

That the sector could absorb them is not in doubt. Another industry demonstrates as much every day. Roughly a quarter of Lockheed Martin's workforce is veterans, according to the company's own reporting. Booz Allen, Leidos, and their peers run higher. Federal contractor hiring disclosures indicate more than forty-seven thousand veterans were hired across the industry in 2025 alone. This is not charity. Federal law requires them to meet hiring benchmarks, and their customer is the military, so absorbing military talent is business necessity rather than choice. The receiving structure exists because the industry decided it needed to exist.

In the sectors that have not built the receiving structure, what shows up instead is a set of practices I have come to call whiteboard deep. Leadership development named on the strategic plan and absent from the calendar. Succession expectations declared in the annual report and unassigned in the operating rhythm. Onboarding for outside senior hires that ends the second week and never really begins. I have watched succession plans die on whiteboards inside this sector, and I have watched senior military talent walk past those same whiteboards without either side recognizing what was there.

The question is not really about veterans. Veterans are the sharpest case because the mismatch is the most visible there, and because when it goes wrong, it goes wrong in ways that reflect on both parties and surprise them both. The question is about whether the culture you have built — the hiring instincts, the promotion patterns, the quiet assumptions about who succeeds in your organization and who does not — was built to absorb someone whose formation happened somewhere else.

Most organizations answer this question by default rather than by design. They hire from inside their industry because they trust the credentials they know how to read. They promote from within because it feels safer. They interpret difference as risk rather than as capability. And when the sector shifts under them, as this one is shifting now, they find themselves trying to solve problems with the same instincts that produced the problems in the first place.

The organizations that will come through the next decade well are the ones willing to ask the question honestly and to adjust what they find. So I will end where I began. Is your culture built to bring in talent from outside your industry?

If you are not sure, that is the answer.