What university groups may be doing wrong in leadership succession

TL; DR

A bad leadership transition can undermine the impact of university groups to quite a significant extent. Through user interviews, anecdata from conversations with organizers, and personal experience, we have identified useful interventions for groups working on leadership transition:

• Start a succession plan quite early (a rule of thumb is to start ~1-1.5 years before fully leaving the leadership position);
• Have an onboarding phase with gradual assignment of responsibilities to the successor;
• While executing the above, keep an eye out for over-optimization.

We think that following the above advice – for example, by using tools such as our succession planning template and our (beta) onboarding template, or revisiting the guidance on the Groups Resource Centre – would increase the group leaders’ probability of finding a successor and onboarding them successfully. You can also skip straight to the resources section below for a better explanation of these forms of support.

Epistemic Status

Moderate confidence. These claims are a relatively averaged collection of (best guesses at) best practices based on anecdata: feedback from various OSP group mentors, the CEA Uni Groups Team, and several user interviews. However, the nature of this problem is quite uncertain and context-dependent, and it is hard to provide generalizable advice. This research was done by me (Antonio) with a lot of feedback and advice from Joris Pijpers, to which I am very grateful. While I have done this research as a contractor at the CEA University Groups Team, the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of CEA as an institution.

Purpose

This post’s aim is to share key findings from leadership transition research done over the past 2 months with university group organizers. It is meant to be a relatively averaged collection of (best guesses at) best practices based on anecdata: feedback from various Organizer Support Program (OSP) group mentors, the CEA Uni Groups Team, and several user interviews.

This post works as a research report that expands and provides context to the existing guidance at the Groups Resource Centre by trying to point out bottlenecks for which guidance has historically been less clear in the EA CB landscape. I still recommend using the GRC as the go-to reference; this post is meant to raise awareness and dive deeper into the topic.

Introducing the problem

Historically, we have noticed that many university groups tend to vary a lot in terms of their size and influence over time, often becoming more successful and then losing traction (or even becoming inactive). Leadership transitions, on top of other circumstances, seem to be a particularly influential event in accentuating this phenomenon. Based on this and anecdata from conversations with university group organizers, we have thus decided to look into what the needs of university groups are for improving leadership transitions, and what can be done in order to reduce value loss in this process.

Throughout this post, we refer to succession as the process a senior organizer (or multiple leaders, if applicable) goes through as they try to find a successor (or multiple, if applicable). This is broadly separated from handover or onboarding (here used interchangeably), the other key phase of leadership transition in which a successor has already been picked and they are now taking over responsibilities in leading the group. We have also tried to add guidance for the handover process in this post, but are less confident in our endorsement of particular best practices as we are still collecting feedback.

Why is succession difficult?

Here are some of the reasons why we believe leadership transition can be particularly difficult (in random order):

• University students take some time to get well-acquainted enough with EA to be good university group leaders, so by the time they reach that stage, they will not be able to be leaders for a long time – turnover rate ends up being unusually high when compared to regular organizations.
• Sometimes, there really isn’t anyone who would be a natural successor.
• Talented people who would be good successors want to start/join AIS group or go into direct work (although, in terms of final results/good done, it’s possible that this isn’t really a problem as the direct work would outweigh the absence of further community-building).
• When someone else takes over a group, there seems to be a trend of immediate–perhaps temporary–quality drop compared to previous leadership, due to missing experience and/or hiccups ranging from logistical adaptations to new team strategies and visions.

Key Findings

What are the biggest failure modes in leadership transition?

Here are some of our best guesses at why leadership transitions often don’t go as well as expected, and what potential intervention directions (in the community-building sphere) these point towards. In the next section, we propose specific calls to action for organizers that work along the identified intervention directions.

1. Failure to anticipate succession needs

The very first failure mode is simply to not be aware that succession can be a lengthy issue. Common reasons identified in user interviews and input from OSP mentors include:

• Assuming some seemingly highly-engaged people will naturally take over the group;
• Organizers not having enough interaction/1-1s with group members to understand the landscape of the group and identify promising successors;
• Current leader’s perception of timelines is incompatible with actual planning needs;
• Simply not having thought of succession as a significant issue.

This points towards raising awareness of succession planning as an intervention area.

2. Planning fallacy or overestimation of the successor’s motivation / CB quality

Some organizers face akrasia resulting from knowing that succession can be lengthy for some groups, but not thinking that their group falls into that category. This often translates into groups not starting to look for leadership successors early enough. 

Common reasons for this phenomenon (identified in organizer and mentor interviews) include:

• Being convinced that possible successor X is well-set for taking over the group when they may not be, or may be considering different options’
• Not spending enough time understanding the successor’s ToC for the group, or what drove the successor to accept taking over the group;
• Not spending enough time transmitting motivation; 
• Not providing a good pitch at the value of EA CB.

This points towards interventions in the direction of guiding organizers towards more careful successor selection + planning around pitching CB, motivating the successor, and encouraging the successor’s upskilling. 

3. Picking a good successor, but not onboarding them well

There are many ways this failure mode could take form. Some key ones are:

• Successor is not clearly convinced of the group’s ToC, and/or does not have a vision formed during the onboarding phase (leading to suboptimal work when they take over, e.g. at the Freshers Fair)
• Onboarding is too quick, leading to various hiccups – and ultimately value loss – when they take over:
  • Not having access to the group’s documents
  • Using funds or running events suboptimally due to inexperience
  • Not coordinating well with other stakeholders (like faculty, uni depts, student life admin, etc.)
• Not leaving room for innovation or listening to the successor’s ideas, which leads the successor to be more frustrated/less motivated.

This points towards interventions in the direction of a well-planned onboarding, preferably with written guidance + lots of time working together for mission- and vision-alignment.

4. Not addressing bottlenecks specific to the particular group

The purpose of this post is to raise awareness about common best practices, but the overall importance of each bottleneck will vary per group, and others may rise. For example, it may be very common for students at university X to go on exchange during junior spring, making it hard to run a group at what can often be a key semester (in terms of the leader’s EA and CB maturity) – in such a case, scoping out a promising successor may need to be done even earlier, or altogether differently.

Another example that is less context-specific is an organizer optimizing for lots of 1-1s when a different kind of interaction could be more productive in their group’s setting.

This points towards mentorship-type interventions in the direction of actively seeking out the group’s particular bottlenecks and adapting advice to those.

In summary, the four failure modes point towards intervening for…

• raising awareness of succession planning;
• guiding organizers towards more careful successor selection + planning around pitching CB, motivating the successor, and encouraging the successor’s upskilling;
• a well-planned onboarding, preferably with written guidance + lots of time working together for mission- and vision-alignment;
• actively seeking out the group’s particular bottlenecks and adapting advice to those.

What should organizers do to avoid these failure modes? (our best guesses)

The following items are numbered in regard to which failure mode they work to address.

1-2) Start a succession plan quite early (a rule of thumb is to start ~1-1.5 years before fully leaving the leadership position)

From OSP mentor input and some user interviews, we have identified that an important part of avoiding this failure mode seems to be just starting much earlier than what might have been intuitive to some, by: 

• spending time doing 1-1s (or on other forms of interaction);
• getting to know “intrigued-but-not-yet-highly-involved members”^[1] and boosting their interactions with EA; and
• talking about the value of community building.

These all seem like interventions worth undertaking quite early. Here is some guidance for making a succession plan (or at least, that can inform the succession plan). It seems key to try to make a best-guess timeline around finding answers to the uncertainties below – when they apply to the organizer’s case –, and build specific action steps around solving them.

3) Have an onboarding phase with gradual assignment of responsibilities to the successor

Some of our key recommendations here, based on similar forms of input, are:

• Start the onboarding process early: we think the senior organizer should aim to be in an advisory role, without being too involved in running the group, by their last semester/term.
  • How early to start the onboarding may depend on your group’s specific needs and timelines. For example, if you have a summer term before your last year of studies, you might want to use the summer to run this onboarding process and transition off the role once the academic year starts. 
• Have a reference document that provides an overview of what it takes to run your group (often denoted by an onboarding template).
• Spend lots of time working together with the successor during this handover period.
  • This point is often neglected, with organizers instead choosing to focus on logistical aspects. Time working together allows for small fixes, logistical questions, and building overall motivation to community-build. That’s why this can be very correlated with overall transition success.
  • This may be the key driver in ensuring motivation is preserved between the senior organizer and the successor.
• Gradually phase out of your leadership role while maintaining an advisory role (a rule of thumb is to have this happen over your last year of studies).
  • You may start with handing over subsets of leadership work: fellowship processes, leading weekly meetings, etc. Try to set up a tentative timeline that is gradual and for which you have some capacity to advise, spend time working with the successor, and intervene when needed.
• Don’t over-optimize for committee structure.
  • While it is important to have a relatively clear division of roles and responsibilities, organizers often tend to spend a lot of time creating systems here, thereby leaving less time for these other kinds of work.

An example of how this onboarding phase can be structured (from the senior organizer’s perspective): "I think it'd be good if you started being the primary organizer for these events.  Meet me weekly at this time/place, and I'll help you do it/ work together on making it happen well so you can absorb my experience & have more support in the transition."^[2]

4) While executing the above, keep an eye out for over-optimization

Having some form of mentorship or external guidance can be helpful here: trying to make sure the organizer is not optimizing for rules of thumb, and pivoting when needed, can be much more easily seen with an experienced outsider perspective. CEA’s Organizer Support Program (OSP) – for which applications are currently open! – is one way to fill this need, but often asking other community builders in the space, having calls, or meeting people at conferences can also be ways to help keep things in check.

Resources to help support transition

We understand that the process above is complex and group organizers may feel lost or overwhelmed by this comprehensive list of failure modes and problem areas, so we have developed the resources below to help the transition process with more succinct calls to action.

Succession planning mentorship

We have developed a meeting template to help mentors and mentees discuss key succession planning issues, including reminders of early timelines and overcoming group-specific struggles when executing on this plan.

Our best guess is that most groups that go through OSP should have this discussion with their mentors – generally by revisiting progress on this area throughout meetings and having one more dedicated meeting to succession if needed. 

However, the template isn’t OSP-exclusive and can be used by anyone either through self-study or some form of mentorship/advice call with a more experienced organizer. For example, you could use this template as a talking-points list in an EA Global 1-1.

Onboarding Template

For the onboarding phase (tackling failure mode 3), having a reference document (onboarding guide) can be very important for making sure the successor knows how to handle the ropes when the senior organizer leaves.

We are currently working on an onboarding template that would make creating this document easier and less time consuming. This is still being piloted before we fully endorse its format, but we still think it is helpful for groups that are currently onboarding successor leadership to work through. You are also welcome to leave feedback in the form of comments on the template, or by messaging me (Antonio Azevedo) on the EA Groups Slack. You can find other key references in the GRC’s section on handover templates.

Groups Resource Center 

When overwhelmed with different resources and recommendations, this is meant to be the go-to resource for direct action points. Guidance about failure modes and how to avoid them is available to groups in general through the Groups Resource Center – you can find more succinct reminders of these action points as well as guidance on plenty of other aspects related to running a group.

Thanks to Joris Pijpers, Jessica McCurdy, Sam Robinson, Jake McKinnon, Jemima Jones, and OSP mentors and mentees that volunteered to provide input on user interviews and other research – all of which made this post possible.

1. ^{^}

   Borrowed term from Kuhan Jeyapragasan.

2. ^{^}

   A big thank you to Jake McKinnon for this phrasing of the point.