Yes to making room for the next generation. Here’s how.

Early in my career, I was a staff recruiter at Teach For America at a moment when the organization was growing rapidly and building much of its staff infrastructure in real time. I was still relatively green when I was given the opportunity to lead a large, high-stakes set of relationships and outcomes — and, before long, to begin managing a team. I learned by doing: taking risks, making mistakes, and eventually pairing that experience with more formal training.

That early opportunity shaped my career. Someone trusted me with real responsibility before I had all the tools to do it perfectly and gave me the space to grow into it. It unlocked in me a lifelong love of developing people and leading teams, and I have never forgotten what it meant to be offered an early opportunity to lead rather than being expected to arrive in a leadership role fully formed.

In a recent eJewish Philanthropy piece, Betsy Berns Korn (Board Chair, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations) and William C. Daroff (the organization’s CEO) reflected on the path toward the next generation of leadership. “What gives us confidence about this generation,” they wrote, “is that it has already demonstrated courage. Our responsibility now is to help that courage mature into judgment, patience, discipline and the ability to bring others along.”

Korn and Daroff note that the post-Oct. 7 moment has galvanized young people across the Jewish community into action, and into a desire to lead. “If we believe these young men and women belong in Jewish leadership now,” they write, “our community has to find more ways to trust them with real responsibility… We need to create more opportunities for them to participate in consequential conversations, learn how decisions actually get made, build relationships with senior leaders and assume responsibility before every credential has been accumulated and every rough edge polished.”

I couldn’t agree more. So the next crucial question becomes: How?

We can’t just suddenly hire a promising young person with no relevant experience to be the next CEO of a major organization. But we can see potential and talent and help develop it. So what does it take, on the ground, to build a viable pathway from entry into a Jewish nonprofit career into a Jewish nonprofit leadership career?

My work supporting talent and people practitioners and CEOs, as well as young professionals directly in multiple sectors has helped me see four vital parts of the picture:

1. Onboarding.

Someone’s first year after joining our field is a moment we can’t afford to miss, because it will shape how they understand this work and their place in it. It’s a time to help them feel welcomed, valued, informed, challenged, and on a clear path to growth. They should understand not just their duties, but how their day-to-day work drives the mission forward. Beyond the organization, they should get a sense of the unique history and landscape of the Jewish nonprofit world and their organization’s place in that bigger picture. They should feel connected to teammates they learn from and with and supervisors who can help them envision potential futures. Ultimately, good onboarding is about belonging to a team of trusted people achieving something valuable. That matters much more than any information the onboarding can convey.

No single organization can build all of that alone. That's what Leading Edge's Onboarding Intensive is designed to do: give early-career professionals field-wide understanding, a peer network, and the skills and guidance to thrive. If you manage someone new to the field, consider it for them. Applications are open until Nov. 20.

2. Skills development.

When people talk about professional development, managers often think first about training and programs. But it’s a mistake to reduce professional development to training alone. Some of the most effective professional development is about creating learning opportunities within the job itself. Nothing teaches a skill more effectively than a chance to apply it when the needs are real, with supportive coaching and guidance along the way. At Leading Edge, we use a matrix organizational structure, in which everyone has a dedicated functional manager, but individual projects may have different project delivery leads. The chance to be a project delivery lead is an opportunity to practice skills people will use in the future even for those who aren’t (yet) functional managers. Providing big responsibility early on, with the right supports is key to developing the next generation of leaders and helping foster retention in both the organization and across the field.

3. Visible paths to advancement.

Korn and Daroff are right: we shouldn’t make early-career professionals wait until every credential is accumulated and every rough edge is polished before giving them more responsibility. But growth also shouldn’t feel mysterious. People should know what’s expected at the next level and have opportunities to practice those skills before a promotion is on the table.

Many organizations use a competency model to begin defining what strong performance looks like at each job level. That gives managers and employees a shared language to ask: What are you already demonstrating? What will be expected of you at the next level? And where can we give you opportunities now to stretch, practice, and get routine, clear feedback? Clear pathways don’t guarantee a promotion, but they give early-career professionals something equally important: the ability to see where they’re headed and actively build toward it.

4. A field-wide approach.

Route 128 outside Boston was once the country's leading tech hub, well before California's Bay Area became synonymous with the industry. So why did Silicon Valley pull ahead? Weather may have helped, but some scholars point to something else: how easily people moved between companies. Building on AnnaLee Saxenian's work, Ronald Gilson argued that the key difference is that California banned enforcing non-compete clauses in employment contracts, while Massachusetts enforced them. The result was a region with high employee mobility. Narrowly, one might think it’s bad for any given tech company to constantly “lose” talent to competitors. In fact, all companies in the region gain from a robust regional talent economy. Similarly, for Jewish nonprofits, if we want the best talent pool, then we can’t keep thinking of these talent development needs — from onboarding to professional development to management training and beyond — as something we do just within each organization or each organization type. Jewish nonprofits, overall, need to become a vibrant “region” of the economy where we all raise the bar with effective early-career support.

This list isn’t rocket science, but foundational practices done well can set a promising leader on a long trajectory in our field. Bring people in thoughtfully. Build their skills. Shepherd them toward what comes next. Do all this, and more, across organizational boundaries, for the good of all Jewish nonprofits.

Korn and Daroff suggest that our responsibility is to help a generation that has already demonstrated courage to develop the further skills that will allow them to lead. Of course, the most important actions for that growth can only be taken by the developing leaders themselves. But there are also concrete steps every organization can take to build a supportive context where that growth is more likely. The next generation is already leading and learning. Will our organizations actively heed Korn and Daroff’s call and make developing that new generation of leadership a top priority?