What Succession Planning Looks Like When Nobody's Getting Paid

Ask any sport club board what keeps them up at night. They will say funding, or facilities, or membership numbers. They rarely say succession. But succession is the thing that, left unaddressed, makes every other problem harder.

Here is the number: 50% of clubs change key committee members annually. Average volunteer tenure is 2.1 years.

That is not a staffing problem. That is a governance crisis hiding in plain sight.

The guilt method

In corporate governance, succession planning is a formal, documented process. The board identifies future leaders, develops their capability, creates transition timelines. There are frameworks. McKinsey has written about it. Harvard Business Review publishes a new article on CEO succession roughly once a quarter.

In volunteer sport, succession planning is "who can we guilt into taking over?"

The outgoing president asks around at the last few training sessions before the AGM. They approach the person who turns up most reliably, or the person who complained the loudest at the last general meeting, on the theory that critics should be given the chance to do better. Sometimes they approach nobody at all, and the AGM features a ten-minute silence after the chair asks for nominations, followed by someone reluctantly putting their hand up because the alternative is the club folding.

I have watched this happen. More than once. The awkward quiet. The person who finally says "alright, I'll do it" with the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to a root canal.

This is not succession planning. This is crisis management performed annually, on schedule, as though it were a surprise every time.

What the guidelines say

The ISCA and Transparency International Good Governance in Grassroots Sport guidelines are clear that governance depends on committed leadership. Structure, principles, policies - none of it works without people who understand it and are willing to implement it.

But the guidelines also recognise something uncomfortable: volunteer sport does not control who its leaders are. In a corporate board, you can recruit for specific skills. You can offer compensation that attracts experienced candidates. You can headhunt. In a volunteer committee, you get whoever puts their hand up. And whoever puts their hand up is making an unpaid commitment on top of their actual job, their family, and the rest of their life.

Sport England and UK Sport both emphasise succession planning in their governance frameworks. ECB governance reviews routinely flag it as a top concern. The question "what happens if X leaves tomorrow?" appears in board risk assessments at state bodies and national governing bodies across every sport.

Everyone knows it matters. Almost nobody does it well.

The real cost of turnover

When a committee member leaves, the visible cost is the vacancy. Someone needs to do the role. But the invisible costs are larger, and they compound.

Institutional knowledge loss. The outgoing secretary knew which council officer to call about ground bookings. They knew the history of the constitution amendments from 2019. They knew that the insurance broker prefers email over phone, that the grant acquittal needs the ABN not the ACN, and that the bank requires two forms of ID for signatory changes, not one. None of this is written down. All of it walks out the door.

Relationship loss. Sport administration runs on relationships. The treasurer who had a direct line to the state body's finance officer. The president who knew the local MP's chief of staff. The registrar who had built trust with the parents of every junior member. These relationships take years to build and cannot be transferred in a handover meeting.

Process loss. Nobody knows the password to the website. Nobody knows how to lodge the BAS. Nobody knows that the uniform supplier requires orders six weeks in advance, not two. The new person spends months rediscovering processes the old person could do with their eyes closed.

Momentum loss. The previous committee had started a facilities upgrade application. They were halfway through the strategic plan. They were negotiating a new sponsorship deal. All of this stalls. The new person needs to understand the context before they can advance the work, and understanding the context takes the time they should be spending on advancing the work.

Henrik Brandt of the Institute for Sport Studies in Denmark, working with the ISCA project, observed that most governance failures in grassroots sport are not malicious. They are structural. Turnover is the structure that creates more governance risk than any other.

The AGM problem

Here is where the structure of volunteer sport makes succession planning especially difficult.

In most clubs, the handover happens at the AGM. The old committee is formally dissolved. The new committee is elected. On Tuesday night, the old treasurer is responsible for the finances. On Wednesday morning, it is someone else.

There is no overlap period. No shadowing. No transition plan. The outgoing person might spend twenty minutes with their replacement in the car park after the meeting. They might email a folder of documents. They might do nothing at all, because they were tired of the role and just wanted it to be over.

Compare this to a corporate board, where incoming directors typically have months of onboarding, briefings from every department, access to years of board papers, and an executive assistant to help them navigate the systems. A volunteer committee member gets a handshake and a login to a Gmail account with 14,000 unread emails.

The ISCA guidelines emphasise the need for clear organisational structures - defined roles, documented processes, accessible records. But clarity at a point in time is not the same as continuity across time. A role description is useful. A role description plus a year of meeting minutes, decision records, contact lists, process documentation, and institutional context is what actually allows the next person to succeed.

What succession planning actually looks like

Not in theory. In practice, for volunteers, with limited time and no budget.

Documented roles. Not just titles - what the person actually does each week. The treasurer doesn't just "manage finances." They reconcile the account on the 15th, pay the ground hire invoice by the 20th, prepare the committee report by the 25th, and lodge the BAS quarterly. Write it down. All of it. The person who inherits the role should be able to open a document and know what Tuesday looks like.

Shared access. Every account, every system, every login should be accessible to at least two people. Not because you don't trust the person in the role - because people get sick, go on holiday, and resign unexpectedly. If the only person who can access the bank account is the treasurer, and the treasurer is in hospital, the club cannot pay its bills. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It happened to a club I work with last year.

Overlap periods. This is the hardest one to implement in volunteer sport, because the AGM model does not accommodate it. But even a two-week overlap - where the outgoing person is available to the incoming person for questions - makes an enormous difference. Some clubs have started electing committee members a month before the formal handover. Others pair incoming members with outgoing ones for a shadow period. It takes effort to arrange. It is worth it.

A knowledge base that exists outside anyone's head. Meeting minutes that are stored in a shared system, not in someone's personal Dropbox. Contact lists that belong to the role, not the individual. Process guides that describe the recurring tasks of each position. Financial records that are accessible from day one, not after three weeks of chasing bank authorisations.

The UK playbook for federated sport put it simply: "You're not buying software. You're buying continuity when key people leave."

What governing bodies can do

Individual clubs will always struggle with succession. They are small, under-resourced, and dependent on whoever volunteers. But governing bodies - state bodies, regional associations, national federations - can change the structural conditions that make succession catastrophic.

Standardised role descriptions across affiliated clubs mean the incoming treasurer at any club in the network knows roughly what is expected of them. Shared templates for handover documentation mean the outgoing person has a structure to follow, not a blank page.

And critically, a platform that persists beyond any individual means that turnover does not mean starting from zero.

TidyConnect was designed around this reality. When everything lives in a system that belongs to the organisation - not to the person currently in the role - the incoming committee member inherits a working environment, not an empty desk. Role-based access means the new treasurer sees the treasurer's view: the financial records, the contacts, the documents, the history. The new secretary sees the secretary's view: the meeting minutes, the correspondence, the compliance deadlines.

TidyConnect reduces onboarding effort for new volunteers by 60%. That number matters because the alternative - six months of a new committee member operating at half capacity while they figure out where everything is - is six months of governance operating below the standard the organisation set for itself.

The question boards fear

"What happens if X leaves tomorrow?"

Every governing body board has asked this question, usually about a specific person - the operations manager who has been there nine years, the regional officer who holds the relationships with 80 clubs, the compliance officer who built the reporting framework from scratch.

If the answer to that question is "we would be in serious trouble," the organisation does not have a succession problem. It has a single point of failure. And in volunteer sport, where departure is not a matter of if but when, single points of failure are not risks. They are certainties waiting to arrive.

The ISCA guidelines argue that governance depends on structures, not individuals. That principle is easy to agree with. Building the structures that make it true - documented roles, shared systems, accessible records, overlap periods, a knowledge base that belongs to the organisation rather than the person - is the actual work.

Nobody gives awards for succession planning at the annual dinner. Nobody notices when a handover goes well. But every club administrator knows what it feels like when a handover goes badly, because the next twelve months are spent rebuilding from fragments, rediscovering what the previous person knew, and wondering why nobody wrote any of it down.

The answer, usually, is that nobody asked them to. And nobody gave them a system that made it easy.

References

• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF).
• Sport England & UK Sport. A Code for Sports Governance. Succession planning.
• Volunteering Australia. Volunteering Australia. Volunteer tenure and workforce research.
• BoardSource. BoardSource. Non-profit succession planning.
• Sport & Recreation Alliance. Sport and Recreation Alliance.
• NCVO. Governance Guidance. Trustee succession.