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TL;DR: Management capacity is likely to become a binding constraint in animal advocacy. We rely on people who step into leadership by necessity, often without the time or support to develop. One-off training won’t close the gap. If we want to scale impact, we need to treat management as core infrastructure: fund ongoing support, build leadership pipelines earlier, hire for potential, learn to use AI tools well, and prepare for a future where AI shrinks the entry-level roles that have historically fed our management pool.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Kevin Xia for your feedback on this post!
Animal advocacy has grown rapidly: more organisations, more staff, more specialisation, more complexity. With significant new funding likely to enter the movement over the next 12 to 18 months, growth will continue. That’s exciting. It also exposes a quieter constraint: we are scaling impact faster than we are scaling management capacity.
In most organisations, people become managers by necessity. Founders end up managing larger teams as projects grow. Senior advocates become default leaders. Strong individual contributors get promoted for reliability. We then expect them to manage well alongside shipping work, fundraising, and keeping the organisation afloat, usually without protected time or structured support.
Management quality shapes execution, culture, retention, and decision-making. When it’s under-resourced, even strong strategies fail to translate into results. The hardest management skills are built through sustained practice and reflection, not weekend workshops. When management time and development go unfunded, management becomes invisible labour, and its limits quietly cap the movement’s impact.
If an organisation wants high performance and high retention, management cannot be a side responsibility squeezed in around the “real” work. It has to be a core function with realistic scopes, clear expectations, and protected time. In my experience, managing each direct report well takes roughly 2 to 4 hours a week. If your managers don’t have that time, you don’t really have managers; you have overworked individual contributors with extra meetings.
Management is a skill built through practice, so support needs to show up consistently. 1:1 coaching, peer circles, mentorship, and manager office hours all work. I’m a fan of 1:1 coaching because the value per hour is high when sessions focus on the situations you’re facing this week, but other formats have helped me, too. You can view a list of mission-aligned coaches here.
Even two sessions a month compound over time, because you’re working on real situations rather than hypothetical case studies. This is also a clear opportunity for funders. Supporting management development is capacity-building infrastructure, and it’s cheap relative to its leverage.
Most organisations build pipelines reactively: someone leaves, then we scramble. But leadership transitions are usually predictable. If you have a few managers who have been in the role for years, the odds are high that at least one will move on in the next 12 to 18 months.
The best time to build management capacity is before it becomes urgent. That means identifying potential early, letting people practise in lower-stakes settings (interns, volunteers, project leads), and deliberately training the foundations. Small teams may not always have internal candidates, so a workaround is to keep a list of external people you’re tracking and to build relationships over time through volunteer roles, board seats, or advisor arrangements.
Not every great manager arrives with ten years of management experience. Some people become excellent managers quickly when you spot the raw ingredients early (good judgement, care for people, emotional steadiness, clarity, accountability) and invest in their development.
If management is a bottleneck in the movement, identifying and developing high-potential managers could be one of the most cost-effective interventions available to us.
Executive Directors usually get the lion’s share of leadership support, which makes sense given their multiplier effect. But line managers directly oversee most employees' work, so their quality has a disproportionate impact on retention, output, and culture. Volunteer coordinators count too: managing volunteers is a form of management, often a more demanding one.
Even without AI, leadership and management are some of the hardest roles to hire for in the movement. Senior roles need both strong management skills and movement-specific context, and animal advocacy is still young enough that few people have built both deeply. Compensation is also a real constraint: senior salaries in our movement are often well below what experienced managers can earn elsewhere. Until that gap closes, attracting and retaining senior people who can’t take a pay cut will stay difficult.
AI will reshape this picture in two directions at once.
The harder side: AI will compress the entry-level pipeline. I made the full case in AI, Talent, and the Future of Animal Advocacy, so I’ll keep the summary here brief. The implicit model of management development in our movement goes as follows: people start in entry-level roles, gain experience, take on more responsibility, and eventually manage. As AI absorbs parts of junior work, organisations will hire fewer junior staff or compress early-career roles. Fewer people get the gradual progression that has historically fed into management. We’ll have to hire more from outside the movement and help those hires quickly build context, which may be hard to do well.
The easier side: AI can accelerate context-building and free up management time. The same tools that threaten the pipeline can help us close the gap they create. If a new hire connects AI tools to the organisation’s documents, Slack, and past work, they can come up to speed on context far faster than through traditional onboarding. Managers can use AI to design structured learning opportunities, summarise institutional history, and create shadowing materials that previously required senior people’s scarce time. And the usual management tasks (drafting feedback, preparing agendas, summarising information, thinking through decisions) get faster with AI support, freeing up hours each week for the judgement-heavy work that actually matters.
The real constraint is that many managers in the movement are not currently trained on the best AI tools, and with packed schedules, it’s not always easy to find time to upskill (which we now need to do consistently to keep up with the tools' progress). That’s what turns AI from a management multiplier into a management threat. If we want AI to help rather than hurt our leadership capacity, we need to treat AI upskilling as a core management skill, not an optional extra. Funders, ED networks, and support organisations all have a role to play here.
Given all of the above, I think the movement needs four things in parallel:
For funders:
For Executive Directors:
For individual contributors thinking about leadership:
If management capacity is a binding constraint, treating it as core infrastructure is one of the highest-leverage things the movement can do in the next few years. The funding wave coming our way will do less good if we don't have the management muscle to absorb it, and AI will widen the gap between organisations that invest in leadership and AI training and those that don't. The opportunity cost of getting this wrong is high.
I’d be curious to hear from others working on this and from anyone who sees it differently.
Hi, I’m Sofia Balderson. I lead Hive, a global community for people working to end factory farming. This is a link post from my Substack, Notes from the Margin to share the messier, more personal reflections that don’t fit in formal updates. If you care about leading, belonging, or building something that matters (especially from the edges), feel free to subscribe here.
