On Friday I was in St. Louis doing a pre-conference session for an association client that covered a wide range of topics for their chapter leaders, including succession planning. My pet peeve with succession planning is that too many associations define it as a problem of filling the slots. We have to find people willing to serve on subcommittees and task forces, because we'll need a subset of those people to actually fill the committee slots, and it's from that pool that we will draw our Board members and then eventually our leadership. It's association leadership, final-four style. 

That's weak. There's nothing wrong with finding people in your committee structure to serve on the Board, but that's not your only choice, and if your focus is constantly on filling slots, you'll miss something kind of important: leadership development.

Leadership (I know I'm a bit of a broken record on this) is not only about your positions of authority (like the Board). Leadership is your entire system's capacity to shape its future. So instead of only filling the slots, what if you looked at building the capacity for leadership at different parts of the system. That would include filling slots, of course, but it would also include qualitatively changing the experience of the people who do the work of those "slots." 

It starts with knowing where your members actually engage. This goes beyond being on a committee. They engage when they read your web site. They engage when they come to your conference. They engage when they buy stuff from you. They might even engage when they socialize with friends that they've made by going to your events. It depends on the nature of your association, of course, but I would argue there is typically a rich tapestry of engagement available to your members. 

So as you look at this tapestry of engagement, consider two important questions:

1. Can we tweak those opportunities to help members be more active, rather than passive?
2. Can we tweak those opportunities to help members be more strategic, rather than tactical? 

Move in that direction, and I think you'll build your system's leadership capacity. Not only that, you'll start to see the individual people who are drawn to more active and strategic engagement, and THOSE are the folks you probably want at the Board level (even if they're young, and even if they haven't been on a committee yet).