Last Tuesday, Democrats won races across the country that many of us - everyday observers as well as some of the smartest election analysts - had written off. Texas elected its first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. Georgia elected the first Black woman governor in American history. Mississippi may send its first Black senator to Washington since Reconstruction.
I've spent two decades helping mission-driven organizations find the leaders who carry their work forward. Watching the results come in, I kept seeing the same lessons we learn in that work, playing out on a much bigger stage.
Stacey Abrams spent years in Georgia doing the unglamorous work: registering voters, building local organizations, growing a bench of candidates. She ran for governor twice and lost twice. She didn't run a third time.
This year, Keisha Lance Bottoms won that office by more than eight points and became the first Black woman elected Governor in US history. Abrams' fingerprints are on it, just as they were on Jon Ossoff's and Raphael Warnock's Senate wins in 2021 (also firsts in their own right). Like Moses, she led her people to the edge of the promised land even though she didn't get to walk in herself.
I think about this with every founder transition we run. The best founders are building for a leader they may never work alongside. The voter rolls Abrams built are the board, the systems and the leadership bench a founder leaves behind. The successor gets the victory lap but the founder made it possible in the first place.
If things had gone the way they were supposed to, Scott Colom wouldn't have been on a ballot this year. President Biden nominated him to the federal bench in 2022. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked the nomination by refusing to return her blue slip, a Senate courtesy that allows a Senator to block a nominee from their own state.
Three and a half years later, Colom ran against her for her US Senate seat in Mississippi. As I write this, he leads by roughly 2,500 votes with the count nearly done.
We meet people in Colom's position all the time: the highly qualified finalist who came in second, the internal candidate the board passed over, the leader whose program got cut. The ones who go on to do remarkable things don't pretend the door didn't close. They leverage that disappointment as motivation, they find the window - and they push their way through it to the other side.
When Gina Hinojosa was weighing a run for Texas governor, she sat down with Beto O'Rourke, who had lost statewide races there twice. His advice, as reported: "Not one person can win Texas. It has to be two."
She and Senate candidate James Talarico ran side by side, each reaching voters the other couldn't. She beat a three-term incumbent while Talarico defeated Ken Paxton for Texas' Senate seat.
Boards still search for the lone hero who can do everything but that's rarely the right call. The leaders who succeed tend to arrive with, or quickly build, a partner whose strengths fill their gaps: the visionary ED and the operator COO, the founder and the co-director. Hiring for the pair, not just the person, is one of the most underused moves in our sector.
None of these wins happened in one election cycle. They took years of groundwork, a setback that became fuel, and a willingness to share the stage.
That's true of the organizations we serve, too. The leader you hire this year stands on what the last one built. The win may not come on your timeline, or even under your name but the future you help build will be a lasting reality.
Christina Greenberg is CEO of Edgility Search where she supports executives and boards with leader transitions, governance and evaluation. Read more on her Forbes Business Council Executive Profile.