Succession Planning for Your Club/Society
What is Succession Planning?
Succession planning is about making sure your club/society is in a great position to continue and you have steps in place to ensure this. By looking at where your club is now, where you’d like it to be, and what you can put in place to help achieve your club’s main aims and objectives. It is used to help find your club’s new executive committee members and ensure they have the knowledge and skills to step into positions when your committee members move on, so your club is not left struggling.
Simple steps to succession planning
- Look at your club’s current position (what it needs (skills or knowledge gaps), main committee roles and any anticipated unfilled committee positions).
- What skills do your committee members need to fill those main roles on your committee?
- Consider those skills and look for potential members to fill any vacant positions.
- Work with those identified members to prepare them for roles within the club.
How does this help your club/society?
- By enabling your club to share duties so it doesn’t fall back on one or two people.
- Committee members get a smooth handover.
- Committee positions look more appealing.
- Helps your club/society achieve its aims and objectives.
A lot of clubs/societies’ executives stay in their roles a lot longer than they originally intended to. It’s difficult to attract new committee members as no one wants to step into their roles, as it can seem daunting. Sometimes, when they leave, the club/society falls apart .
You may have someone keen to step in, but they may find it overwhelming as they don’t have the knowledge or skills to perform the required duties and that’s where succession planning comes in.
Succession planning is great because if your club/society is run well and achieving its aims and objectives it will attract members. Some will want to be more involved in the running of the club/society, bringing some great new ideas with them.
It’s exciting to have big dreams for your club/society. It helps to work through those ideas and realise what is actually possible and what’s definitely not possible, then concentrate on the achievable possibilities and plan the steps you need to take to reach them.
It’s also a good idea to assign a certain task to a designated person to ensure the task gets done, so you don’t go assuming that ‘someone else will do that’, and then find out everyone thought someone else was doing it!
The TUSA holds a Student Leadership Conference in November each year to help clubs & societies learn leadership skills and to equip them with the knowledge to run a great club/ society!