In early 2023, Brian O’Leary decided he was going to retire in 2026. He had been serving as executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, an association of publishing professionals, since 2016. Ten years is not an especially long tenure in the association world, but for BISG it was uniquely extended. Before his arrival, the association had six directors in a 15-year period, as the group struggled with both its revenue and mission.

“That’s disastrous for implementing or even conceiving strategy,” O’Leary says.

So while O’Leary had provided BISG with stability, he wanted to make sure that its board took full ownership of the succession progress, and gave the board enough of a runway to make a successful transition. 

That required a three-year process, where O’Leary’s departure in early 2026 was timed to coincide with the association’s discussion of its three-year strategic plan. He wanted to be sure that when the board began to pursue CEO candidates in earnest in 2024, it was doing so through the lens of that plan. “We wanted to use the strategy to ask ‘How are we doing?’ and ‘What does this tell us about the candidate we might need?’” O’Leary says.

Together with Mike Feinson, a consultant, as a facilitator, O’Leary recognized that there were two challenges within the board. One was its satisfaction with O’Leary as a leader. “The board had become very comfortable with me solving problems for them,” he says. “But the difficulty is that if you don’t have a problem-solving approach when it comes to hiring a director, I can’t be helpful.”

The second challenge was making sure the 14-member board’s executive committee and other members felt equally engaged in the process. “The board was a group of older and newer members, and part of the challenge was that some of the newer members wanted to have a voice,” Feinson says.

That concern had some precedent: In the past, executive directors had left abruptly, and the replacement process felt equally hasty. “In the past it had been a decision of the executive committee, and there was concern among some of the newer members that we were going to go down that road again,” O’Leary said. “I saw this as an opportunity for the board to collectively, all 14 members, weigh in on what they wanted and how they wanted to go about it.”

One of Feinson’s first steps in the process was to make sure the veteran and newer board members connected: Before the board convened to discuss succession, Feinson arranged to have individual members interview one another. That helped build consensus and level-set expectations for the actual succession discussion.

From there, Feinson asked the board members to develop specific expectations for the new executive director. Because BISG has often operated on a shoestring, board members were encouraged to look at what success would look like financially, but also organizationally. “The question was, ‘It’s December 2027, and the new ED has been in the role for a year and half—what would make you say this hire was a massive home run?’” Feinson says. All board members submitted criteria, a mix of qualitative and quantitative suggestions.

From there, the process of identifying candidates went relatively smoothly. Though the full board couldn’t manageably participate in interviewing all candidates, they did all watch recorded presentations. Ultimately, it hired a new executive director, Allison Belan, who took the reins in June. As for O’Leary, he’ll take an extreme approach to being out of the office: He plans to hike the Appalachian Trail next year.