July 2024:
Lodge Succession: Getting Ready for the Next Guy

Summer is here! Kids are on vacation, the days are longer, and everyone is planning their trips to the beach or mountains to escape the heat. Even though December seems like a distant future, you’d be surprised how quickly summer fades into fall and fall disappears into winter. It can be easy to put off today what can be done tomorrow. But lodges should fight that impulse, according to Carlos Diez, past master of Solomon’s Staircase No. 357 and inspector for District 905. Even though it’s only July, it’s not too early to start thinking about next year’s slate of officers. That’s right, it’s succession planning season.  

We’ve all seen it before, Diez says: The end of the year comes around and lodges scramble to find replacements for their officer chairs. The result, too often, is a shuffling of existing officers with the master staying on yet another year or a past master stepping back in to fill the void. “It has a ripple effect,” Diez says. “Guys get burned out, from the top where guys are in the same position, all the way down to the new members, who begin to feel a sense of stagnation in the lodge.” It’s enough of a problem that the Grand Lodge has a committee that’s responsible for training officers in succession planning: the Leadership Development Committee. As the current chair of the committee, Diez sees firsthand how lodges struggle to plan for the future—which at its core is all about renewing officers’ roles with fresh faces—by implementing a few easy-to-do strategies.

According to Diez, one of the challenges of succession planning is knowledge. “We’ve found that there’s a lack of understanding among the membership in what each officer’s position is responsible for,” he says. People often fear what they don’t know or, at the very least, become less likely to volunteer to do something if they don’t fully understand the implications of getting involved. The good news is that this is easy to fix. Have officers be more transparent about what they do, not just as it relates to ritual work, but also in the functioning of the lodge. “Lodges could also think about creating a lodge manual in which all the typical duties of each officer position are clearly laid out,” he suggests. “That way, new members or interested members can review the manual at their own pace and get comfortable with the idea of jumping into the line.”

Perhaps a bigger challenge to establishing a well-planned line of succession is one that’s trickier to address, since it boils down to an all-too-familiar problem: lack of engagement among members. “Finding someone interested in following the path to the East is easier when you have an engaged membership,” Diez says. The more members who are actively participating in lodge activities, the more potential officers to choose from. But it’s more than just about butts in seats. It’s about finding people who are passionate about the fraternity. “That’s why I often counsel lodge officers to ask members who appear to be disengaged to think about what drove them to the fraternity in the first place,” Diez says. Rediscovering that core passion is the first step toward re-engaging members.

On the other side of that coin, it’s also about learning to identify officer potential in new members. For instance, Diez tells a story about a time when he was master of Solomon’s Staircase and found that two new initiates were really strong at memory work. “I took advantage of their interest and their abilities by introducing them to some of the work of a steward,” Diez says. “That piqued their interest and primed the pump, so to speak.” By introducing capable members to the officer line in a slow and gradual way, lodges can build interest among members in joining later on.

At the end of the day, though, succession planning is as much art as science. “Each lodge has its own unique circumstances,” Diez says, “so there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.” But exposing new members to the duties of officer positions and keeping them engaged is a good place to start.