The Complete Toolkit - Gardiner Foundation

PREPARING FOR TOMORROW
The importance of succession planning
The Takeaway: No one is around forever, and
no one is irreplaceable. Don’t wait for events to
overtake you; build succession-planning into
everything you do.
Community groups rely on unusual reserves of passion and commitment,
and this makes them particularly vulnerable to the sudden departure of key
people.
Your group needs to have plans, procedures and understandings in place to
manage this.
The Management Committee
Committee members should turn over; if your Committee has been much the
same for several years, there are questions to be asked. Are the members
staying because you can’t get new members, or because you can’t muster the
courage to ask the others to leave?
Long-standing Committees tend to stagnate. Times and contexts and
environments change, and personnel need to change with them. You can
still contribute to a group if you are not on the Committee – through serving
on a sub-committee, volunteering, mentoring new or potential committee
members, or providing specialist support.
The Staff/Volunteers
If your group employs staff, you need to keep an eye out for stagnation. CEOs
can go stale, as well as Committees.
Even if everyone is still fired up and effective, you need to plan for their
eventual departure. People move on, retire, die, change focus – sometimes
quite abruptly.
CEOs themselves have to make the same decisions about the staff and
volunteers they manage. How likely are they to stay on? How likely is it that
they would leave without warning? How long in that job is too long? How easy
is it going to be to fill that slot? Who’s waiting in the wings?
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SECTION 5 CONSOLIDATING THE WINS: Tracking stock and moving on
STRENGTHENING SMALL DAIRY COMMUNITIES TOOLKIT