The One Thing New Leaders Forget: Contracts
Starting a new role as an executive director (ED) is a lot. There’s an organization to understand, a team to meet, a board to build trust with, and usually a backlog of decisions that have been waiting for new leadership to arrive. The first few weeks are a blur, and everyone wants a piece of your time.
Most new EDs handle this in one particular way. They schedule one-on-ones with everyone they need to know: employees, clients, board members, contractors, donors. That’s the right instinct. People are the most important thing to understand quickly, and those early conversations set the tone for everything that follows.
But there’s a second thing that often doesn’t happen, or happens too late.
The thing most new leaders don’t do: review your existing contracts
Every organization is bound by a set of commitments it has made in writing. Vendor agreements, lease terms, software subscriptions, grant agreements, employment contracts, loan documents, insurance policies. These contracts define what the organization is obligated to do, what it’s paying, and what it’s entitled to. They are, in a real sense, the legal and financial skeleton of the organization.
The reason new leaders often skip this step isn’t negligence. It’s that contracts are harder to get to than people are. A direct report will come to your office. A contract is buried in a shared drive folder, or in a filing cabinet, or split across three different email accounts from staff who are no longer there. The friction is real.
When I stepped into my own ED role, I spent my first month almost entirely in one-on-ones. It wasn’t until a board member asked me about a lease renewal that I realized I didn’t actually know what we were obligated to, or when. I had a good sense of the people. I had almost no picture of the paper.
What a contract review should cover
For a new ED, a focused contract review doesn’t need to be exhaustive on day one. But it should cover at minimum:
- Any agreement with a financial obligation attached to it, including leases, loans, and recurring vendor contracts
- Grant agreements, particularly those with restricted funds, reporting requirements, or performance conditions
- Employment agreements for senior staff, if they exist
- Any contracts coming up for renewal or expiration in the next twelve months
The goal isn’t to become a contracts expert. It’s to know what the organization is signed up for so that nothing comes as a surprise six months in.
A practical suggestion
If you are a new ED, or if your organization is preparing for a leadership transition, build a contract inventory into the onboarding process. Assign someone to pull together the key documents before the new leader starts, and plan a structured review in the first thirty to sixty days.
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