Succession Beats Recruitment in Small Local Groups

What follows is the working version of succession planning in volunteer groups: the decisions in the order you actually meet them, with the reasoning attached.

Why recruiting into a gap fails

A vacancy is advertised at the moment the previous holder has left, which means nobody is available to explain what the job involves. The role has usually grown informally over years, so what is advertised bears little resemblance to what is actually required. New people are asked to take full responsibility immediately, which is exactly the condition under which most decline.

Meanwhile the work falls to whoever is nearest, usually the chair, which accelerates the exhaustion that caused the vacancy. The whole sequence is predictable and is set in motion by not having planned for it.

Deputies as the mechanism

Appointing a second person to every significant role, with a defined share of the work, converts a cliff into a slope. The deputy learns by doing part of the job with somebody available to ask, which is how these roles are actually learnable.

It also provides cover for illness and holidays, which is the immediate benefit that makes the arrangement worth doing anyway. Groups resist this because it looks like duplication when everything is working, which is precisely when it must be set up. One additional person per role is the single highest-value structural change most small groups can make.

Term limits

Fixed terms with a limit on consecutive renewals produce a predictable handover instead of an indefinite tenure ending in a crisis. They also make standing down socially straightforward, since nobody has to decide that they personally want to stop. The objection is always that nobody else will do it, which is often true and is a description of the problem rather than a reason.

Where a role genuinely cannot be filled, that is information about the role's design rather than about the pool of people. Splitting an unfillable role into two smaller ones frequently solves it, and is rarely attempted.

Making roles transferable

A role that exists only in one person's head cannot be handed on, whatever anybody's intentions are. A single page per role listing the recurring tasks, the dates they fall due and who to contact covers most of it.

Over a funding cycle, passwords and access must sit in more than one place, held in a way that survives a person becoming unavailable. Writing down why things are done a particular way matters more than the instructions, since successors need permission to change what no longer fits.

The documentation takes an hour per role and is the difference between a group that continues and one that restarts.

Recruiting for continuity

Recruit for the deputy role rather than the lead role, since the ask is smaller and the training is built in. Approach people individually rather than announcing a vacancy, because a general appeal reaches everybody and persuades nobody.

Be specific about the time commitment and the end date, since open-ended requests are what people decline. Ask people who have used the service, who are frequently overlooked and frequently the most committed. Bringing someone into a defined small task first is a better route than asking them to join a committee.

Volunteers cost an organisation time to train, so short-term help is not always help.

The handover itself

Overlap is the most valuable element, and even a month of running things jointly transfers more than any document. The outgoing person should stop making decisions during the overlap, or the handover does not actually occur.

Agreeing what the outgoing person will still do, if anything, prevents both abandonment and the slow return to control. A short written note of the current state, including outstanding issues, saves the successor months of discovery. Thanking people properly matters, because the way a group treats departures is watched closely by everybody still there.

The takeaway

Appoint a deputy to every role while everything is fine, because that is the only time it is possible.

Passed on beats recycled, and both beat replaced.