Tenure and Circulation

I joined the organization mostly because of one person.

I had come from research and was not in a hurry to leave it. The interview process was straightforward, but I was unsure I would take the job. During contract negotiations I remember hesitating, partly because I was not fully ready to step away from what I was doing.

Then my future manager called.

We spoke for nearly two hours. I do not remember every detail, but I remember the tone clearly. He listened in a way that felt unusual. He did not treat my experience as a list of credentials, but as something he was trying to understand. He described how he thought about the work, where the organization was going, and how he saw my skills fitting into it. He made the role feel real in a way I had not managed to do for myself.

By the end of the call, something had shifted. I was still unsure about leaving my job, but I was no longer unsure about him. I joined in November 2010, mostly because I wanted to work with him.

A few weeks later, I learned he would be leaving the following summer. His time as a foreign service officer was ending, and with it his time in the role.

I remember an immediate loss of orientation. It was not only disappointment at losing a manager I respected, but confusion about how an institution could invest so much in selection and trust, only to rotate someone out just as working relationships were beginning to take shape.

At the time, it felt like a mistake.

Looking back, what I experienced as a personal disruption was part of a larger institutional logic. I did not yet have language for what bothered me beyond the personal. I experienced it as interruption: just as I was learning the work, the structure around it was about to change.

I also did not yet understand that this was not accidental. In that system, time-limited postings were not a flaw but a design feature. Foreign service officers built expertise quickly, contributed, and moved on.

Eventually, I came to see the logic more clearly. Some roles are intentionally structured to prevent permanence, even when individuals are effective. The aim is to preserve openness, prevent stagnation, and avoid concentrating authority in a single person or perspective.

I understood the logic. I still felt the loss.

Years later, after moving into philanthropy, I began to revisit that experience differently. The question of when grantmaking staff move on sits quietly beneath many funding systems, even if it is rarely made explicit.

From within philanthropy, these trade-offs often appear differently than they do to the organizations experiencing them.

Philanthropy complicates the picture. There is no clear training pipeline for program officers, and much of the work is learned through exposure to organizations, policy environments, and internal decision-making. Over time, people accumulate tacit knowledge that is difficult to formalize but central to judgment.

That accumulation matters. Experienced staff carry institutional memory, pattern recognition, and relationships built over years. In a field where context is everything and ideas recur in new forms, continuity is a real source of strength.

Continuity is often treated as expertise. The longer someone stays, the more they understand a field - its history, its patterns, its people. That knowledge is often indispensable.

Yet continuity also shapes judgment. Familiarity narrows what feels plausible. Networks crystallize. Certain organizations become reference points. Even when questioned, established theories of change quietly frame how new ideas are evaluated.

None of this happens suddenly. It accumulates slowly, which is why it is easy to miss.

This is where renewal enters the picture.

Continuity builds judgment, but it can also harden a point of view. Renewal - new people, new questions, new interpretations - is one of the few ways institutions reopen what has become too familiar to see.

That dynamic becomes most visible at the level of relationships.

Foundations need continuity to build judgment and trust. But they also need renewal to keep that judgment from narrowing. The difficulty is that renewal often travels through people and when people change, relationships can feel less secure from the outside.

Each time a program officer transitions, grantees genuinely worry about the continuity of their relationship with the funder. The standard reassurance is that their relationship is with the foundation, not the person. While that is true in principle, most organizations experience a foundation through their program officer. When that connective tissue breaks, there is justifiable reason to worry.

I experienced this firsthand. In my first weeks, I held introductory meetings with the grantees I had inherited from my predecessor. They needed reassurance that the change in personnel would not affect their relationship with the foundation. I could not, in good faith, guarantee that. I already knew my first major task would be to co-lead a strategy refresh.

Strategy refreshes are one way institutions renew. But when renewal arrives through leadership and staffing transitions, it can feel less like learning and more like instability to the organizations on the receiving end.

What I could stand behind was different: that if a relationship needed to end, it would be handled with care. And as in any serious strategy process, there are trade-offs. When we completed the refresh, we discontinued some lines of work. We ended some funding relationships - not because the organizations had failed, but because their work no longer aligned with the new direction. At the same time, new organizations came in, some of them relationships I had brought with me.

If program staff turn over too quickly, institutions lose memory. Relationships reset before they deepen. Lessons are only partially carried forward. In fields where change takes time, that loss is costly.

If they stay too long, what they see can narrow. Familiarity can replace fresh perception. Questions begin to reflect past experience more than present reality.

Continuity builds judgment. Renewal keeps judgment honest.

From inside, continuity feels like expertise; from outside, it can feel like inertia. Renewal can feel necessary internally, but externally it often feels like interruption - relationships reset just as trust is forming or the foundations for change are getting established.

There is no stable point where continuity delivers only its benefits. The same forces that create depth can also narrow what is visible. The same forces that enable renewal can also produce loss.

At a moment when philanthropic priorities are shifting more rapidly, and when organizations are being asked to navigate increasing uncertainty, this tension becomes more than an internal design question. It shapes whether the fields institutions support can plan, adapt, and sustain their work.

Seen this way, the question is not whether program staff should stay indefinitely or rotate more often. It is whether any single design choice can manage a tension built into the work itself.

What matters is not only whether people stay or leave, but whether the system regularly interrupts how judgment is formed. Without that interruption, even strong institutions risk confusing continuity of position with continuity of perspective. But renewal without memory produces its own kind of loss.

The question, then, is less about tenure than circulation: how ideas, people, and perspectives move through a system over time, and what prevents any single vantage point from becoming permanent by default.

The design challenge is how to create renewal without making partners pay the price of constant reset.

I sometimes return to my early experience in that organization, and to the manager who recruited me. At the time, his departure felt like a rupture. I had joined largely because of him, and his way of thinking gave shape to my early understanding of the work. His rotation felt less like policy than loss, just as continuity was beginning to form.

I now understand it differently. His departure was not personal but structural, part of a logic about how authority is held and moved. Without that logic, influence over resources and agendas can become too fixed, too dependent on individual relationships, too resistant to renewal.

And yet I still remember it not as a concept, but as a shift in orientation.

The system made sense. And still, something important was lost.