One method I've found to work well, especially with engineers:

Make it clear to the team that the new leader is stepping up temporarily to fill a significant business need. That the engineer is doing the team a favor by doing this and that the plan is for it to be temporary because that engineer is a great IC.

It then becomes very easy for the new leader to go back to being an IC. They can even be thanked for stepping up to help the company during a critical time. They can also easily do it again in the future.

If the person is a great lead and gains the team's respect, then simply make it permanent.

That last bit makes the rest look like a rather transparent attempt to mask a trial period.

That's exactly what it is. But people all knowing a thing individually and a thing being announced to the group are two different scenarios.

That is fair because it allows the person a chance to test it out as well. Both would need to agree. When they go back they go back with respect.

Polite fictions make the world go round!

IC?

IC stands for Individual Contributor.

Questions for you,

Does your student org suffer from student churn? As in, it's active from Sept-Apr, and 'dead' between May-Aug? Is the idea of student buy-in/engagement something your org has to contend with with?

We are the SMD, an association of Christian student unions in Germany. Although we do have some supporting full-time staff members, all of the work in our local chapters and quite a bit of the work in our national leadership is the responsibility of student volunteers (like myself).

Speaking locally: if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't. Obviously, attendance at our events varies widely between term-time and holiday-time, but we do have enough active members to guarantee our weekly meetings taking place whenever.

Of course, recruiting new active members is a constant and central challenge, but thankfully, my group has been able to maintain a pretty good level (~20 active members out of ~60 regular visitors). Most of the work our regional full-time staff do relates to coaching these active members, and especially the group leaders they elect each semester.

Does that answer your questions, or did you want to know something else too?

I was probing for the nature of your org because I hail from one of the largest student housing coops in Canada. It sounds nice at first, but the headaches/politics/etc are proportionately sized. We instituted terms of office for board execs some 6/7 years ago, though the internal power structures that people spoke about in this thread are very much a thing here.

It was a soberly disappointing read, if I'm being honest. When you say, "if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't", I wish I could jam that into the minds of our members. That said, there was a post on HN about loneliness the other day that had over 1000 comments, and I believe that's exacerbated in our metropolitan city; an existential threat to the cooperative spirit. We're working on it, will continue.

PS: Greetings, and blessings, from Canada.

I wish you all the best, and thank you for the greetings! :-)

I don't doubt this but I'm going to point out this will also introduce politics and campaigning. People will probably tend to group up.

That is a danger, although I personally haven't experienced it yet. Actually, we tend to have the opposite problem, that too few people are willing to take on the responsibilities of a leadership role. We have more potentially good leaders declining to take the role out of lack of self-confidence than we have bad leaders trying to take it.