In this post I use “EA groups” to mean “EA university groups”. I also am primarily speaking from a US context, and this may not generalize well beyond the US.
EA university groups are unique compared to other student organizations for the following reasons:
- They are niche. Very few people are truly interested in EA, even at great universities. Most student organizations are based around activities that are much more popular or have a much lower barrier to entry.
- They are small. Related to the point above, even the most successful EA groups can only boast one or two dozen seriously engaged members. The median EA group is much smaller than this and might only have a few serious members.
- They are ambitious. EA groups hope that their members will go on to donate lots of money or have very impactful careers. Organizers are encouraged to think of organizing as an impactful activity that merits serious effort.
- They are only weakly paradigmatic. There is an existing set of activities that groups almost always run, including 1-1s and fellowships, and a set of common activities, including general meetings/socials, EAG trips, group retreats, and regional retreats. But there is substantial variation in which of these are done and how, and because groups are ambitious, there’s still a lot of experimentation and invention here.
A conventional large student organization might be organized around a series of well-defined activities directed by a board of organizers, each of whom generally has a title with clearly defined responsibilities. The factors listed above mean that this conventional organizing model is unsuited to EA groups.
EA groups do not have a well-defined set of activities that stays constant in time. Their ambition means that they are open to dramatic changes in programming and focus. Their size means that they often do not have a large group of organizers to utilize, and their lack of broad appeal means that they will generally struggle to find new members and organizers and will have to adapt their activities to the limited organizing talent available.
As a result of this, EA groups have a wide variety of leadership structures, and a single group might use different structures over time. While the management of traditional student organizations or companies is not a good reference class for EA groups, startups may provide better examples. I think the best writing on startup management may be much better than anything I can produce, but my hope is to provide a reference specific to the challenges of EA university groups.
I’ve created an overview of the most common management structures for EA groups that I’ve seen or heard about. These categories are imperfect, but hopefully you can find your group in one or two of them. In all of these categories, unless otherwise specified, I’m using “organizer” to mean someone who does meaningful work for the group and accepts responsibility for the overall state of the group. I expect that they participate in discussions about the high-level strategy of the group and are not limited to just a narrow area of responsibility.
Solo organizer
Often the case when a group is starting up, the solo organizer is the only person with any sort of management responsibility over the group.
I think it’s well understood that this arrangement is suboptimal, and an organizer can almost always benefit from having someone else to lean on and provide support. A solo organizer is a single point of failure, and it’s hard for a group to operate on a high level if it’s completely reliant on the availability, skills, and enthusiasm of one person.
Duo organizers
Two organizers working closely together with little additional support. The organizers might not have clearly defined areas of responsibility, but they probably have developed an understanding of how to coordinate together and ensure things get done.
This is a pretty natural setup, both in groups and in the world at large. Many startups have two cofounders, and two people working together in close coordination can often be more effective than a much larger but less coordinated group.
More than two main organizers
Whether for succession or other reasons, adding additional main organizers to a two-organizer team is a common occurrence, and some groups even start out this way. This category only includes cases where all the organizers are understood to be on roughly the same level, and all are involved in the high-level strategic thinking of the group.
While it’s always nice to have more manpower, additional people take you further away from the single bond a good pair of organizers can have. Put mathematically, there’s one possible connection between 2 organizers, three possible connections between three organizers, and six possible connections between four organizers. Keeping everyone on the same page without a single source of direction or guidance can prove difficult.
In practice, I think 2+ organizer setups generally stabilize by adopting the following model:
Many organizers with president
Here, decisions and responsibilities flow through a clear head organizer/president, at least theoretically simplifying communication. How the work of the group is actually accomplished can still vary a lot within this structure. Some groups can be very “flat”, where the president provides some high-level direction but leaves group members to coordinate and collaborate in order to complete many tasks. Other groups might have more of a waterfall, with the president providing direction on the assignment and specifics of most delegated tasks.
I think this structure has a lot to recommend it, since it can handle a much larger group of organizers. A lot is riding on the ability of the president to exercise the right amount of discretion over each task. Two failure states are where the president just does everything themselves, or delegates extensively without giving the other organizers the support they need. Note that because there is only a single person with an elevated sense of responsibility, there may be a lack of redundancy similar to having just one organizer.
Co-presidents leading many organizers
A good pair of organizers can collaborate closely without issue, making it possible for both to occupy the role of president, with the exact distribution of responsibility shifting as needed. As with a single president, the other organizers rely on the co-presidents for direction and delegation, although the degree of organizer independence can vary substantially within this framework.
I think this structure is pretty great, as it still can have the simpler communication and decision-making of a presidential system along with additional redundancy at the top. I’m reluctant to call it (or any other structure) the “best”, as many groups will not have the personnel to create a structure like this and would be better served by something else.
So far, we’ve progressed from structures with less people to structures with more people, and I’ve been more supportive of larger structures. As Kennan McClung likes to say, the primary determinant of group success is organizer time, and increasing this by adding more capable people is good.
However, it’s worth paying attention to the cases where more does not mean better. Most simply, meetings with more than 3 people often tend to feel worse, and participants may not have the same agency they would in a smaller meeting. Beyond meeting mechanics, there are a broader set of concerns I have about creating a sense of responsibility in larger groups of organizers, such that you can delegate significant tasks and have succession go well.
Adding lesser organizers
There are many situations where a group might end up with organizers who contribute to the success of the group without being involved in deliberation or decision-making to the same degree as the organizers described above. You might have someone you rely on for a well-defined task, such as graphic design or administrative work, who you do not expect to ever take over the running of the club. This seems fine.
I have a great deal of concern, however, for structures where lesser organizers are understood to have a reduced role and responsibility to the club, but there is a hope they will eventually take on an increased role. In the cases I’m worried about, you might have:
- An “organizing board” composed of recent intro fellowship graduates who are given tasks.
- Junior organizers brought abroad on the premise they will have a reduced role.
- Intro fellowship facilitators who it is hoped will take on an organizing role in the future.
In general, human social arrangements resist easy categorization, and I expect this post’s system categorization will only be somewhat successful in mapping to the real world. Providing actual advice is even harder than categorization, and nothing I say will generalize to every situation. With these caveats in mind, I still feel confident in claiming that if you really do want someone to run your group someday, you should tell them as much. And whatever neatly imagined succession pipeline you have, you should still be ready to execute on the penultimate and most important step:
In running a group, or in being an EA, you can do many things in a free and casual manner. This is a good thing. This post has a fairly discrete taxonomy of group leadership structures, but in practice, a group might end up somewhere between two of these, or shift through several structures in the course of an academic year. This is also good, but in the case of succession, I think groups can benefit from more formality than they normally exercise.
If someone is your successor, they should know. Moreover, this truth should be self-evident and reflected in their role and responsibilities. There can be an enormous mental gulf between not running a group and running a group, and people do not typically hop over on accident. The more deeply a successor can be made to understand that they will one day run the group, the more they can adopt the mindset of a committed and successful organizer. Put the opposite way, if the organizer does not truly understand that they will eventually run the group, they will not adopt the mindset necessary to successfully do so.
Much hay has been made out of the idea of legibility. I’ll admit that this post is trying to increase legibility in an environment that tends to lean illegible, but I am not about to die on the hill of making all things perfectly neat and understandable. Some things should be made more disorganized. Successful management is about finding the right amount of legibility and balancing the costs and benefits of having more or less. We might imagine a version of the Serenity Prayer for organizers that goes something like this:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept illegibility
the courage to impose legibility
and the wisdom to know which is best.
