Managing Leadership Transitions
By Justin Warbeck
Contributors: Jake Norwood, Andrew Mendez, Will Breshers, Haesung Kim
This article has two parts. Part one focuses on advice for those of you whose existing club’s leadership is leaving soon or, more challengingly, has already suddenly left. It talks about what you need to do to maintain the club and the opportunities are available in this time of transition. The second part is for people who are currently in a leadership position preparing to hand off control in advance of leaving yourself. The focus is on how to successfully pass on as healthy and self sustaining of a club as possible.
Your Leadership is Leaving
It may be sudden or you may be informed months in advance: the primary organizer of the club is leaving. Hopefully there is already a planned transfer of power in place but it is entirely likely the old leadership would prefer you and your fellow students to work it out yourselves. There are several details to be aware of and keep in mind when the future of the club is suddenly in your hands. Important topics we’ll go over include
Creating a Checklist of Necessities
Communicating with Your Fellow Students
Understanding Your Role in the Club
General Advice
Creating a Checklist of Necessities
One of the first things you should do is make sure that your club has access to everything it needs to function. Seems pretty obvious but sometimes things may slip through the cracks and get lost in the confusion of the transfer. You should try to get your hands on these even if you plan to change them or throw them out when the club changes leadership. While you may be planning to rewrite the club’s constitution or code of conduct, having a copy of the prior version you can reference in that process or afterwards is a good idea to maintain transparency and consistency in the transition. Before leadership departs make sure you have access to:
Bylaws and rules of the club
Bank accounts and other relevant financial information
Passwords to club websites and social media
Understanding of the club’s legal status (private, 501c3, etc)
Access and keys to relevant locations such as training venue or club gear storage locations
Communicating with Your Fellow Students
Whether you are assuming leadership by yourself or as a group it is very important that you communicate with your fellow students. There are two important topics that the club should go over and discuss in order to help ensure that the club maintains its structure and integrity.
Ask the student body what it is they feel is most important to them in the club. While they’re all here to learn HEMA, there’s many ways to go about it. Some may be more interested in the competitive side of HEMA while others are more interested in the history and studying the manuscripts (and many, both!). Others may have interest in specific weapons or systems, while some are just happy to show up as long as someone is teaching. Finding what makes your fellow students show up every day and fostering it within the club will help ensure that you maintain and even grow the club’s numbers. It will also reassure the membership in general that you are focused on helping maintain or create an organization that has a place for them in it, that cares about their interests and desires.
Next, you should discuss a leadership model. Sometimes the leadership model is already predetermined by the departing leadership. They may assign a new club leader or leadership group before leaving, but sometimes they don’t. Whether you're stepping forward to assume the leadership role individually or as a group, make sure to discuss it with your fellow students or at least keep them aware of what is happening. You want to maintain a sense of trust between you and your other students and having transparency and openness will help to facilitate this.
Understanding Your New Role in the Club
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed about how many hats club leadership has to wear and how many different skills you’re expected to have. Don’t be afraid if you don’t know anything about taxes or fee structuring or conflict resolution. These are things that can be learned (that’s the point of this website!), by you and by other people. You’re not alone. The most essential part of leadership is that if no one steps into the role, the club will fall apart. At its core, the leaders are the people who care enough to keep the ball rolling, the door open, the lights on. Being passionate about HEMA and the club is enough to get you started.
Next, understand your own strengths and weaknesses. You may be an awesome instructor but struggle a bit with the administrative work of running the club. Or you may excel in managing and communicating with people but may not be as knowledgeable about the treaties and swords themselves. Don’t be afraid to delegate responsibility and even authority to people within the club who can help you with areas you’re not as good at. At a certain point you may even want to consider changing the leadership model to best suit the strengths of you and your membership. Again, if there are not people immediately available with the necessary skills to help you, look for passion and commitment to the organization. These are the people who will put in the work to learn these skills you need help with.
A common piece of advice from club leaders who have inherited clubs was to understand what your purpose as leadership in the club is. It is service role. The job of leadership is to guide and foster an organization that serves everyone in it (which does include you). Don’t make the mistake of seeing the leadership position as a means of elevating your status or changing what you do and don’t like about the club on a whim. Not only is this selfish and juvenile, it can risk driving away current members.
General Advice
We have provided for you advice from various HEMA Instructors who have given input on important things they have learned from inheriting a club.
The transition can be difficult, but use this as an opportunity to promote growth and evolution of the club. Think of it as a challenge the club must overcome together and can unite and strengthen the bonds of the club.
Maintaining openness and transparency is important to maintaining trust. Keep your students aware of what changes may be occurring and get their thoughts on it before making implementations.
Despite having a new leadership position, you must keep yourself accountable to following the rules and bylaws that your club has already established. This is critical to maintaining trust in the club. Be aware that you can still change and remove rules and bylaws that don’t serve the club anymore, but this should be done in an orderly and transparent manner.
Stick with what your club knows as far as curriculum unless there is unanimous support for a switch. Suddenly switching from an Italian longsword system to an early German system as the focus of the club can create discomfort among your students and may drive them away.
Re-examine your venue. Keeping a familiar location can be beneficial, but if the venue presents too many challenges it may be time to consider switching locations. Weigh out the positives and negatives of going down this path.
Handing Off Leadership
This section will most benefit club leaders who are able to see their departure coming. The longer you have to prepare, the more you can do. To this extent, many of these steps are groundwork that will benefit the club regardless of whether you stay or go and so have value to those who don’t necessarily have a departure planned but like to be prepared for the vagaries of the future. But even if you have to hand off your organization at the last minute, there are things you can do to help it continue to thrive in your absence. We’ll discuss:
Taking Time to Prepare
Cultivating Club Culture
Letting Go
Taking Time to Prepare
Hopefully you have a bit of time before you know you are leaving. If this is the case then it is time to prepare. To start out, make sure that your club has access to website and social media passwords, club bank account information, keys to training area and storage spaces, and anything else that the club will need to continue functioning on a day to day basis. Hopefully you can do this on pretty short notice and doing so is really the bare minimum that should be done.
If you want to ensure the club thrives after your departure though, you’ll benefit from at least a few months to get everything in order. During this time you will want to take a step back and see how the club runs with a minimal amount of influence from yourself. One important decision to be made is who is going to be in charge of the club when you are gone.
You may have an idea of who should run things in your absence. Perhaps you have a student who is an amazing instructor and is great at administration work as well. They may be highly qualified for the position, but it is important to see how they do before you leave. Someone may be highly qualified for the position, but they must also want to do it. If someone is in the position only because you asked them to do so, their motivation and dedication to the position may disappear as time goes on. Make sure the person you put in the position wants to be there.
Cultivating Club Culture
The things which help a club handle leadership transition well are often the same things which help a club run well under existing leadership. You want to establish a healthy club culture. Make sure your students have a chance to teach, develop ideas, and have study groups as this will increase their confidence as instructors. Having club officers and individual responsibilities for students will create structure and order, and the more organized the club is the less traumatic the transfer will be.
Propping others up where they can thrive such as teaching, doing demo work without you, competing, etc. can increase their confidence in the club and make it so they are prepared to share their knowledge with others. This independence will make it so they are more attached to the club and not necessarily so dependent on the leadership of the club.
Ultimately you want to prepare the club to be self sufficient, and the sooner you start preparing them to do so the easier and more successful the transfer will be.
Letting Go
Once you have moved away from the club and the new leadership has taken over, you have to take your hands off and let the club run itself. For some it may be easy, but for others it will be difficult. You may have done everything you can to see the club develop in a specific direction, only to have it completely change in an unexpected manner under the new leadership. You will be tempted to immediately contact them and ask why things have deviated so much from your original instructions. You may feel you need to advise them from a distance and get them back on track to running the club how you think it should be run. When things don’t go according plan, remind yourself that the club is merely adapting to fill your absence. You may have been integral to the club as an instructor, administration, or even the face of the club and there may not be anyone who can do it the way you did. You may have brought something unique to the club that cannot be easily replicated, so the club may have to change to deal with your absence.
Or perhaps, you find that after you left the club and are being contacted by the old leadership asking for you to take a leadership position even remotely. Try not to let yourself get attached and get drawn into commitments that you cannot sustain from afar. Advise and help the club through their struggles and answer questions when they come up, but you want the club to be able to stand on its own with as little involvement from you as possible.
You Are Assuming or Leaving a Leadership Position during a Rotation.
Perhaps neither of the previous situations apply to you and instead you are inheriting a leadership position as part of a normal rotation such as a yearly leadership election. If you are coming into the position (or even leaving the position) much of the advice we have given in the previous section will be helpful to you, but even so there are a couple things to keep in mind.
When Leaving the position, expect that the next person in line knows nothing about your position. They may have run for and been elected for your position, but for the success of the club don’t assume they know much about your position. In addition to necessary information (passwords, keys, bylaws, etc) keep a document on the very basics of the position, how to run your position, and useful contacts.
If you are coming into the position, remember that these documents are mere skeletons that will not run the club for you, but offer a basis for you to act as the muscle and move the club in the direction it needs to go. The actuality of running your position in the club is on you, but you should not be alone. See if you can maintain some contact with the previous holder of the position. If the previous holder is not available, another member of leadership may have insight to help you get established and get started. The position may seem daunting, but remember that the club wants to see you succeed and thrive.
Be Ready for Leadership Transition
It can be difficult, and it can be scary, but you can do it. Many before you have been in the same situation you are going through now (much of the advice for this article has come from club leadership in your same position!). The hardest in the transition process can be trying to figure out the best approach to handling the transfer of power. We hope that with the advice provided by this article you’ll be ready for any challenges that may come your way.