In praise of stepping down

The other week I was having a call with my friend Lidya, and we were talking about open source sustainability. We were discussing volunteer organizations and how it’s difficult for people to step back from roles. And when someone realizes they do need to step back, it’s difficult to communicate that to others.

Our discussion turned to reputation; how it’s earned, what it unlocks, and why the people who’ve earned the most of it are often the ones who find it hardest to leave. I think there’s something unwritten and unsaid among open source communities about how we operate, which inherently makes it challenging to step back from a role. Which inevitably leads to sustainability problems, either through burnout or lack of attention.

What follows is my attempt to work through why that is and what might make it easier.

For definition’s sake, reputation here means how others perceive you in a community. It can be either positive or negative, and even then that’s in the eye of the beholder. A conservative person can have a negative reputation for being too rigid, but they can have a positive reputation for helping maintain consistency. And yes, I know. We’re not even out of the definitions, and things are already murky. Please bear with me.

A person gains reputation by performing actions in a community. Let’s start with the happy path and say a person starts contributing positively to the community, such as making changes that are accepted and sharing opinions that are respectful. If continued for a period of time, that person will have a good reputation.

That good reputation earns them the opportunity to make higher leverage changes in the community. Maybe they are added to a team that allows them to merge into the main or oversee the finances. Not everyone can do these roles, and nor does a community want everyone to do these roles. They are reserved for people who have a good reputation because they are positions where that person could do something extremely negative.

While the higher leverage positions in a community allow for bigger positive impacts, it also enables a much worse negative impact. A treasurer can’t realistically add a million dollars to the community’s bank account¹. A treasurer absolutely can drain the funds from a bank account. A person given release permissions for a project can ship changes for the community, but they can also remove it entirely². It’s impossible to give a high impact ability to someone without also giving them a way to hurt the community in a more significant way.

The higher leverage position a person attains, the ceiling of their ability to negatively impact the community significantly outpaces the ceiling to positively impact the community.

Therefore, we have these positions that we covet as a community. We know these positions can hurt the community, but we also need someone to do them. The longer the community has been around, the more likely the community places even more value on these positions. It’s less painful to lose a community that’s been around for two years compared to losing a community that’s been around for twenty. It’s hard for me to believe that this isn’t a sunk cost to some degree, but that’s a different topic.

Unfortunately, the people who are qualified to serve in these positions aren’t always available to do so. People who have the reputation necessary to make higher leverage changes, at times, aren’t able or willing to make those changes. That’s not an indictment on the individual; these roles are voluntary, and the rest of life requires time and money.

When there is a desire for higher leverage changes but a lack of people capable of implementing it, the fault is with the community as a whole. Individually, people will have missed opportunities to improve things, but it’s not any one individual’s fault.

The community needs to continue to advance people up the reputation ladder to ensure there’s a healthy pool of people available to make the high leverage changes a community needs to continuously grow and thrive. The community needs to nurture and cultivate new members while simultaneously creating spaces for them to grow.

A healthy community isn’t one that has several members in each team. A healthy community is one that has diverse membership in each team, especially on the facet of experience. Each team, tier, and area of a community must be concerned with who is coming after them. They should be recruiting and mentoring new members, then advocating and sponsoring them when other opportunities open up. Having constant flux in membership keeps ideas fresh and helps prevent stagnation both in the community and in the individual.

The challenge here is that these higher leverage positions allow people to gain more reputation than what they could have otherwise. A person in a treasurer role has fewer people auditing their work. The rest of the community will assume, as long as the community is surviving, that this person is doing great work. This grants them special reputation for doing the work nobody else is doing. Consider a person who can release a project. That work may be entirely hidden from the rest of the community. As long as releases are occurring, people again will assume they’re doing great work. That lack of transparency prevents the broader community from being able to audit the situation.

Whereas a person who is doing work in public, such as triaging, can’t attain that same level of reputation, despite everyone clearly knowing if they are doing great or poor work. The concern here is that the person in a position to do high leverage work is coasting, continuing to reap positive reputation while not actually earning it. This is especially harmful to the community if there are others who would be interested in advancing things.

As I mentioned, these positions tend to be more private and have fewer eyes that can audit them. This means it’s harder for the community as a whole to know if a change is needed. This doesn’t need to be something nefarious either. It’s way more plausible that a person is simply overwhelmed TODOs or is unaware of a better way to perform their role. Whereas with triaging there’s a clear signal that more triagers are needed when issues are not being responded to. Is the community able to make the same determination about needing an additional treasurer or a releaser? Take a moment and think of a person who is in a high leverage role in your community, what percentage of tasks do you think you’re aware of?

What makes things more complicated is that the person may personally benefit from this reputation beyond the scope of the community. Serving in one of these coveted positions grants a title that provides a certain amount of clout. Stepping down from a role removes that benefit for an individual. In some cases, it means a better portfolio for a promotion, a more appealing resume or a bigger reach for their business. Stepping down becomes a harder decision for an individual to make when it impacts their livelihood.

It’s absolutely reasonable that a person would choose to stick out a volunteer position a bit longer, just until they’re in a more stable personal situation. I’m not sure if this is even a bad thing. In fact, I suspect most human-first communities would be happy to have the person make the decision that puts themselves first. After all, the community can only succeed when the individuals are succeeding.

I do want to be clear though. Stepping down from a position, isolated from whatever prompted it, should always be seen as a positive for that person as an individual³. If a person serves for two months or twenty years, it’s still a positive that the person decided to step down. They’re making a decision that makes their life more sustainable and we should always be happy for that.

So let’s look closer at the challenges of stepping down, because it’s clearly not perceived as all roses. At a minimum, it means a lower ceiling on the reputation that can be earned. That can’t be avoided, but I don’t think that’s the real hurdle. I think there’s a stigma where the person will earn a bad reputation for stepping down. Perhaps people will think that the person couldn’t cut it, that they’re leaving the community in the lurch, or that they’re flaky. I think all three of these are wrong, or at least aimed at the wrong target.

First, “couldn’t cut it” confuses capacity with circumstance. They made the call that they didn’t have the time, energy, interest, or situation to perform that role anymore. We can’t force a person into a volunteer role, so we can’t be upset when life happens and the person needs to step back.

Second, “leaving in the lurch” is usually a community problem wearing an individual’s name. A volunteer community runs on labor it can’t compel and can’t schedule. Regardless, there’s an open position that will allow people higher leverage impact. That’s a good thing. Generally, people want to help; they just may need some guidance getting there.

Third, “flaky” mistakes are one decision for a pattern. A single decision does not imply a pattern. Nor does it eliminate all the positive reputation that person has earned.

Fourth, it provides clarity to the organization. Maybe the written definition of the role doesn’t match the actual expectations. That’s a good thing to know about. Or perhaps the clarity is on the basis that the community lacks anyone with a particular skill set. Now the community knows it needs to recruit and cultivate this skill among the membership. It’s unlikely the community will stop at a single person; instead, it’ll grow several to avoid a single point of failure in the future. Again, that’s a good thing for the community.

Where turnover could be seen as a negative is in the frustration of the typical but unplanned challenges the community will have to deal with. The community at any given moment has its few things it’s concerned with. When there’s turnover in an important position, those priorities shift. There’s understandable frustration in that. However, as we discussed above, it’s still a good thing. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be frustrated either, though. It sucks to be working on something and then have to delay it because of something out of your hands. Just don’t turn that frustration towards the individual.

Removing the stigma is one problem. Building what comes after is another. The core problem I’m curious about here is, how do communities make it easier to step down? Part of the answer is mentorship, but I don’t think mentorship alone solves it. After all, a community can be actively growing new contributors and still have no good answer for “who takes over the treasury tomorrow if Sam has to step back.”

I’m curious if having members in reserve roles would help. Would it be easier to step down from a position if there was someone ready to step up? Is it even possible for a community to identify “reserve treasurers,” “backup releasers,” or other similar roles? I don’t know. I feel like it might. Or at the very least, it creates some people for those people to talk to about the challenges of the role.

Alternatively, should communities place term limits on high leverage positions? It’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t continue to trot out our best champion to continue to advance the community in high leverage ways. I suspect most volunteer organizations experience existential dread on multiple fronts at all times. But maybe it’s logical to occasionally put forth a fresh face to help them grow, develop, and allow different perspectives into the community.

I don’t think there’s a singular answer to this problem. Each community has to manage these challenges based on their own context and circumstances. I don’t know if it’s reserve roles, term limits, or something else entirely. But sustainability isn’t about an individual holding on just a bit longer. It’s about whether a community has built a pipeline that can sustain itself past them stepping down.

If you have thoughts, comments, or questions, please let me know. You can set up a meeting with me, or find me on the Fediverse, Django Discord server or use email