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Succession & Shared Leadership

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Succession & Shared Leadership
Sub-Topics
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Building Next-Generation Leaders
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Distributed Decision-Making
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Stepping Down Gracefully

Succession and shared leadership are two ways of making a community outlast any one leader: train replacements from the start, and spread authority so that different people lead in the areas they know best, with one coordinator to settle ties. A leader’s death, illness or departure is certain to come sooner or later, so the useful question is whether the group has prepared before it happens.

Part of Leadership Psychology in Crisis

Succession and shared leadership are the arrangements that keep a community’s leadership capacity alive beyond any single person.

Leaders Leave, Whatever Anyone Plans

Every leader will eventually be absent, through injury, illness, exhaustion, disagreement or death. In a community with no institutions behind it, that loss can leave a vacuum that whoever moves fastest will fill. The governance material on this is Leadership Succession, Emergency Succession and Succession Continuity, covering the procedures. This article covers the human side: how leaders prepare, share and hand over.

Three Ideas In The Parent Article

The parent article groups succession planning into three practices, each with its own article.

Why Shared Leadership Is Sturdier

A community with one leader has one point of failure and one set of blind spots. When authority is spread across domains, the loss of any one person damages the community without destroying its leadership, which is the parent’s phrase “resilience through redundancy”. Shared leadership also puts decisions with the people who have the knowledge, and it develops many leaders instead of one.

Research on teams has found that shared leadership is associated with better team performance in many studies, including a 2014 meta-analysis (Wang, Waldman and Zhang, cited from memory with no recalled figures). Nearly all of that research is on organisations with formal structures, however, and it is a correlation, so it supports the idea without proving it for small survival groups.

Costs To Weigh

Sharing leadership is not free.

  • Slower and less clear in a real emergency. If four people each hold authority in a crisis that crosses their areas, nobody may take charge. The coordinator or tiebreaker the parent mentions has to be named in advance, along with who decides when domains overlap.
  • More coordination. More people means more meetings and more chances for disagreement.
  • Diffusion of responsibility. When everyone is in charge, no one answers for a failure. Each domain needs a named owner.

Method: Starting Shared Leadership

Step 1: Map the domains. Medical, building, food production, security, social life, and any others the community runs. See Community Roles.

Step 2: Name an owner for each, and a deputy. One person accountable, one person who can step in.

Step 3: Define the coordinator’s role. Who convenes, who breaks ties, who speaks for the community outside. Keep it narrow.

Step 4: Write down who decides what. A short list that everyone can read. See Decision Archives.

Step 5: Set up a regular meeting of the owners. Short and with a fixed agenda, using Meeting Facilitation practices.

Step 6: Plan the rotation of the coordinator role. See Rotating Leadership on why long tenure builds informal power.

Common Mistakes

  • Waiting until a crisis to share authority. By then the people cannot yet do it.
  • Naming successors without telling the group. The arrangement then has no standing when it is needed.
  • Sharing in name only. If the leader overrules every domain owner, the structure is decoration.
  • Letting domain owners become permanent. Expertise is real, but a domain that one person holds forever becomes theirs, and fears of losing it begin to shape their behaviour.

What’s Next