Came here to look at your work set-up... I got sucked all the way to the end of the article! Made a bookmark to learn about the founder-executive director difference that Joey Savoie wrote about too :)
Well written!
thanks a lot Shanil, appreciate you reading! Founder/Ed distinction is quite useful as not all founders should be EDs and not all EDs should be founders. They are definitely very different roles and have different personal fit and skills requirements, even though they often seem to appear together on someone's job title.
Thanks for the great post, Sofia! I think it is a good example of unpacking a job.
Thanks for reading Vasco and sharing the unpacking the job post, seems interesting! I think it's important to show/know what the job is really like, not what it looks like or seems like.
I’m the Executive Director of Hive, a global community for farmed animal advocates. People often imagine Executive Directors as primarily setting strategy and making high-level decisions. But in smaller nonprofits, the reality is much messier: it involves a lot of operations, fundraising, people management, decision-making under uncertainty—and some program management too. I've grown into the role over time, and it’s the most stretching and meaningful job I’ve had.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kevin Xia for reading this post and providing feedback as well as Toby Tremlett for general feedback and hosting the Career Week which motivated me to write this post.
Leadership roles have been among the hardest roles to hire for in the animal advocacy movement for quite some time.[1] I think it’s worth writing more about what this job actually involves, to help others make a more informed decision about whether it’s a good fit for them.
This post was originally inspired by Faunalytics’ “Why Did You Quit: Leadership Turnover in the Animal Advocacy Movement” report. I found it insightful—particularly how some Executive Directors step down because the role turns out to be very different from what they imagined.
My post is most useful for people considering:
Hive is a globally inclusive support hub for farmed animal advocates: a digital home where 4,000+ advocates across 100+ countries share knowledge, form collaborations, and find impactful opportunities. We run the most active Slack in the EA ecosystem, a widely read newsletter with movement updates, curated resources, and high-trust matchmaking across geographies and career stages. Our goal is to be both an on-ramp into the movement and a launchpad for high-impact work—connecting advocates, donors, and movement builders in a shared space designed to turn potential into progress.
We serve as movement infrastructure: rather than running interventions ourselves, we help others do so more effectively. Since launching in 2022, Hive has supported over 100 career and volunteer transitions, facilitated hundreds of strategic introductions, and helped catalyze ideas and projects like AI for Animals (Sentient Futures)—which likely would not have launched without Hive’s early support and network.
This role is sometimes called CEO (Chief Executive Officer) or simply Director (sometimes Managing Director if there is no other senior director in the org).
As Executive Director, I’m responsible for:
People are often surprised by how hands-on the job is in smaller non-profits (we currently have ~5 FTE). Strategy is maybe 20% of it. The rest is deeply operational and interpersonal: management, operations, stakeholder relations, fundraising, MEL, and comms take up most of my time—and it often involves a lot of emotional labor.
Back in 2023, I wrote about what my job as Hive's co-founder was like at an early stage. A lot has changed since then! That role was scrappier and more experimental: building programs from scratch, figuring out our identity, and testing what worked.
Being the Executive Director is a different job. I’m no longer just doing the work—I’m holding the whole, coordinating others, setting direction, and being accountable to the board, the team, and our funders. I make higher-stakes decisions, manage people with specialised expertise, and constantly re-prioritise based on the bigger picture.
The biggest internal shift has been learning to lead not by doing more, but by helping others do their best work—through clarity, structure, and trust.
Being an Executive Director means holding ultimate accountability for the org’s direction, financial health, and people. Other senior leadership roles—like a Managing Director, Head of Programs, or Chief of Staff—can offer similar influence with more focus and fewer competing priorities. If you prefer depth over breadth or want to avoid a fundraising-heavy role, those paths might be a better fit.
It’s worth noting that being an Executive Director of a smaller nonprofit such as Hive (~5 FTE) is different from running a larger charity (e.g. 50 people). While the high-level work will be similar, what you will do day to day will be different as you’re able to delegate more. It would be interesting to read a similar reflection from an Executive Director of a much larger organisation.
No two weeks are alike, but mine often include:
Looking ahead and flagging risks or prep needs for the team
Here is a picture of me at my home office desk! A wide screen makes it easier to have many tabs open at the same time :)
Here are some of the main challenges I’ve experienced in this role—though of course, there are many others depending on your context.
This role may look glamorous from the outside, but the reality is messy, multitask-heavy, and context-dense. I still struggle with perfectionism, procrastination on follow-ups, and the temptation to try to solve everything myself.
No leadership role will have the same requirements, but here are some traits and skills that I’ve found especially helpful in this role:
Letting go of perfectionism and embracing iteration
There is so much high-quality info and training out there for senior management roles. For the purposes of this post I will outline the basic categories only, and happy to consider writing a separate post with more resources if there is interest.
Executive Director roles usually require a lot of knowledge, experience and often an existing network. However, I do occasionally see Executive Director roles being advertised as not necessarily requiring experience.
Here are a few ways you can realistically get this kind of role:
It’s hard to test your fit in this role, but here are some ideas:
This isn’t an easy job to trial in a traditional way. You rarely see the full scope of what Executive Directors do unless you’ve been in the role—or very close to someone who is. Still, here are a few ways you might get a feel for it:
While this post reflects my experience, here are a few lessons I think can be broadly useful:
This is just one version of an Executive Director role and this role is too broad to cover everything in one post. Other orgs will have different team sizes, cultures, scopes, and challenges. I’d love to hear from others about how their experiences compare.
Thanks for your reflections and transparency Sofia! I find the "how to test your fit" ideas quite useful. Also I haven't really differentiated ED vs founder roles, because quite often I see them being the same person in orgs, so thank you for writing about their difference!
Thanks a lot for reading Angel and for your feedback! I also used to think ED and Founder are the same roles, and in some cases, they are (e.g. if you start a project and assume the ED title), but in my case, I definitely saw the difference between the scrappy founder and more structured ED role!