In 2023 Claus Schindler retired: for decades the managing director of the Forum and something like its memory. Anyone who wanted to know which pipe was laid when, or which craftsman repaired the roof twenty years ago, asked Claus. Simply letting that knowledge walk out of the door was not an option. Nor was replacing it with a single person.
A facilitated process instead of a quick replacement
The Forum took the departure as an occasion to rethink leadership from the ground up. Facilitated by Ivo Hanke and Friederike Mainz, the community worked out over several workshops what a modern leadership team for the Forum has to be able to do. Which tasks are there in the first place? Which of them need paid staff, which can self-management carry? And how do you distribute responsibility so that it does not end up hanging on one person again?
The result is the leadership model in place today: a management spread across several people, with clear responsibilities and interfaces to the committees and working groups. On that basis new people were hired and the knowledge of Claus Schindler was handed over systematically.
What came of it
Today Friederike Mainz, Andreas Ruft and Nicola Sifrin run the business together, in close coordination with the board and the supervisory board. The generational handover, on which many self-managed projects founder, has been managed. And the process itself has become part of the Forum’s method: other transitions, for instance in the commercial units, are now shaped deliberately instead of left to chance.
OccasionRetirement of Claus Schindler, 2023
ProcessFacilitated workshops on the requirements of modern leadership
FacilitationIvo Hanke and Friederike Mainz
ResultManagement on several shoulders, successful transfer of knowledge