Emerging Leaders Retreat 2024

22 early-career association staff, identified by their own executive directors as future leaders, spent the last two days of 2024 at the Rocky Mountain Chapter Lodge. NANA's staff matched each participant with a sitting executive director in advance, and the pairing structures the entire retreat rather than sitting alongside a conventional agenda.

Each pair spent unstructured time together across both days — conversations that ranged from career-pathway questions to the mechanics of a first executive-director search. Gordon Ashcombe, CEO of the Society of Rural Hospital Administrators and NANA's board chair through 2025, closed the retreat with a panel on lessons from his own path into association leadership, fielding questions on when to make the jump from a program role to the top job.

Between paired conversations, participants worked through a career-pathway workshop and, on the second day, built a one-year development plan to bring back to their own executive director. Kestrel Travel & Housing managed lodging and the shuttle from Denver International Airport, included in registration.

The retreat closed on New Year's Eve with a toast beside the lodge fireplace — informal, and by design the only unstructured close to NANA's official calendar year.

The lodge sits on Alpine Trail with a complimentary shuttle from DEN. One night's lodging is included in the $195 member registration fee; non-members pay $295.

The retreat is aimed at staff in their first five to eight years of association management who their own executive director has flagged as future leaders — nominations come from the ED, not self-nomination. The 22-participant cap exists to keep every pairing genuinely one-on-one rather than splitting an ED's attention across several early-career staff at once.

Most nominees hold a program, membership, or communications role rather than an executive-track title; the Rocky Mountain chapter opens nominations to the wider membership each October, ahead of the December retreat.