LeadingAge announced on Monday that Katie Smith Sloan will step down as president and chief executive effective 31 March 2027. The association represents more than 5,300 nonprofit and mission-driven aging services providers, with state partners across all fifty states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico.
She has been there twenty years, ten as chief operating officer and ten in the top job, the first woman to hold it. She was a prominent Washington voice on workforce, on affordable housing for low-income older adults and on long-term care financing reform, a leading voice for nursing homes during the pandemic and a consistent opponent of the federal staffing mandate finalised in 2024. She called the two decades the honour of her life, and said she steps down knowing the organisation stands on a solid foundation. A spokesperson confirmed she is not retiring and is focused on the work still to be done and on a smooth transition. The board, chaired by Christie Hinrichs of Frasier, has formed a search committee.
The interesting number is not the twenty years. It is the eighteen months.
Compare it with the other departure in this week’s alerts. Space NK’s Andy Lightfoot stepped down with the announcement and the effective date two days apart, and the successor named in the same breath. Both are legitimate. They say completely different things.
A same-day exit says the decision was made elsewhere, recently, and that continuity matters less than resolution. There is nothing sinister in that and it is often the kindest way to do it. But nobody is being handed anything. The successor inherits the position and rebuilds the relationships themselves.
An eighteen-month runway says something else entirely, which is that the organisation believes a large amount of what it runs on is sitting inside one person’s head and cannot be transferred quickly. That is what a twenty-year tenure in an advocacy body actually produces. Not a strategy document. A network. Which committee staffer returns a call, which state partner needs handling before a vote, what was promised to whom in 2019 and whether it still stands. None of that is in a file.
Every business with a long-serving person at the centre of it has this problem and most discover it in the worst possible way.
There is a shop somewhere with a manager who has been there fourteen years. She knows the landlord’s temperament, why the second grinder gets serviced in March rather than June, which supplier will do an emergency delivery on a Sunday, and which regular is quietly the reason four office accounts exist. None of it is written down because writing it down was never anybody’s job, and the day she gives four weeks’ notice, all of it leaves with her at a rate nobody can slow.
Four weeks is not a handover. Four weeks is a goodbye card.
Eighteen months is enough time to run a proper search rather than a panicked one, to let the successor be introduced by the incumbent rather than announced to the field, and to transfer the parts of the role that only exist as relationships. It costs something. A long lame-duck period is real, external parties start looking past the outgoing leader, and momentum on anything contested gets harder to hold.
That is the trade, and LeadingAge has made it deliberately, with the departure date public and the search running in the open.
Two decades in, they are giving themselves a year and a half to write down what she knows.
