What does the vice-chair actually do?
By Erik Reagan · · 4 min read
Look up the vice-chair in your bylaws. On most boards it’s one sentence: the vice-chair shall perform the duties of the chair in the chair’s absence. Which means that on most boards, the vice-chair’s job is to hope the chair stays healthy.
That’s a wasted seat. You’ve elected a capable person to an officer role, and the role as written asks them to do nothing for a year and then, possibly, everything at once. A vice-chair position worth electing someone to has three parts.
The understudy, done properly
The one-sentence version of the job — be ready to step in — is real. But readiness isn’t a state you occupy by sitting nearby. It’s built with reps.
Chair a full meeting at least once a year. Not the ten minutes while the chair takes a call — a whole meeting, agenda to adjournment, with the chair in the room as a regular member. Handling a motion, keeping time, drawing out the quiet trustee, landing the meeting on schedule: these are skills, and the first time someone exercises them should not be the month the chair’s employer moves them to Denver.
Sit in on the check-in with the executive director occasionally. Not every one — that conversation works because it’s small — but a couple of times a year, so the relationship at the center of the chair’s job isn’t a total stranger to the person who might inherit it.
A vice-chair who has done both can step in mid-year and the board barely feels the seam. One who hasn’t makes an emergency out of a calendar event.
A portfolio of their own
An understudy with nothing else to do disengages, and rightly — watching is not a job. The best use of the seat is to hand the vice-chair a real portfolio, and there’s a natural one: the board’s own health.
The chair runs the board’s work. Someone should be minding the board itself, and the vice-chair is well placed for it:
- The self-assessment. Someone has to make the annual board evaluation happen — pick the timing, send the thing, bring the results to a meeting where they’re actually discussed.
- Onboarding. New trustees need a first-year path — the orientation, the buddy, the checklist. The vice-chair is a fine owner for whether that path exists and gets walked.
- The committee-on-the-board work. If there’s a governance committee, the vice-chair often chairs it or sits on it. If there isn’t, the vice-chair is it: watching term expirations, thinking about the officer pipeline, noticing when a committee has quietly stopped meeting.
This portfolio has a second virtue: it’s the best possible apprenticeship. A vice-chair who has run the self-assessment and the onboarding cycle knows the board — its people, its gaps, its habits — better than any packet could teach.
The chair’s honest counsel
Here’s the part no bylaws mention. The chair of a volunteer board gets almost no feedback. Trustees don’t critique the person running the room; the executive director is the last person who can. So chairs drift — meetings run long, one voice dominates, a habit calcifies — and nobody says anything, because nobody’s job is to say anything.
Make it the vice-chair’s job. The vice-chair should be the one person who can say, privately and kindly, the meeting ran forty minutes over and you talked more than anyone else in the room — and the chair should hear it as the role working, not as a challenge. Agree on this out loud when the vice-chair takes office: part of this job is telling me what nobody else will. A chair with one honest mirror is a better chair for years longer.
Is the vice-chair the next chair?
It depends entirely on your bylaws, and it’s worth making explicit either way. Some boards elect a chair-elect — the succession is the point, and everyone serves knowing it. Others elect a vice-chair with no ladder implied, and the next chair might come from anywhere.
Both work. What doesn’t work is ambiguity: a vice-chair who assumes they’re next and a board that assumes they’re not is a resignation waiting to be drafted. Read what your bylaws actually say, and if they’re silent, have the governance conversation before the next election, not after. (How the handoff itself should go is its own topic.)
The one-sentence version
Give the vice-chair real reps at chairing, real ownership of the board’s own health, and a standing license to tell the chair the truth — and say out loud whether the seat leads to the gavel, because your bylaws decide that, not custom.