What is the Role of the Secretary?
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- What is the Role of the Secretary?
The role of the Secretary is to support the Chair in ensuring the smooth functioning of the Management Committee.
In summary, the Secretary is responsible for:
It is important to note that although the Secretary ensures that these responsibilities are met, much of the work may be delegated to paid staff or volunteers.
Given these responsibilities, the Secretary often acts as an information and reference point for the Chair and other committee members: clarifying past practice and decisions; confirming legal requirements; and retrieving relevant documentation.
What this means in practice depends on the style and size of the organisation:
The Secretary themselves will carry out all these duties and may also take a greater role in the day-to-day administration of the organisation. This can become a time-consuming role. Some management committees have more than one person with formal responsibility for secretarial tasks (e.g. a Minutes Secretary, Correspondence Secretary and Membership Secretary). Others delegate some of the administrative responsibilities to volunteers outside of the management committee to reduce the burden.
Many activities can be delegated (e.g. record keeping, taking minutes, filing correspondence, communication of activities etc). The Secretary then ensures that their responsibilities are met, but will have less involvement in actually carrying them out.
Each Management Committee will have its own way of doing things, and the way in which work is shared out can also depend on the skills, interests or amount of time that a person has to offer. Always ensure that the role description for your Secretary matches the current dynamics of your organisation. (see links below or download: Developing Role Descriptions.)
The responsibilities of the Secretary of a Management Committee are outlined below:
Ensuring meetings are effectively organised and minuted
– Liaising with the Chair to plan meetings
– Receiving agenda items from committee members
– Circulating agendas and reports
– Taking minutes (unless there is a minutes secretary)
– Circulating approved minutes
– Checking that agreed actions are carried out
Download: The Secretary’s Role at Meetings
Maintaining the Secretary’s role at meetings
– Keeping up-to-date contact details (i.e. names, addresses and telephone numbers) for the management committee and (where relevant) ordinary members of the organisation
– Filing minutes and reports
– Compiling lists of names and addresses that are useful to the organisation, including those of appropriate officials or officers of voluntary organisations
– Keeping a record of the organisation’s activities
– Keeping a diary of future activities
Upholding legal requirements
– Acting as a custodian of the organisation’s governing documents
– Checking quorum (minimum number of members who should be present) is present at meetings
– Ensuring elections are in line with stipulated procedures
– Ensuring organisation’s activities are in line with its objectives
– Ensuring charity and company law requirements are met (where relevant, unless there is a separate company secretary)
– Sitting on appraisal, recruitment and disciplinary panels, as required
– Ensuring meetings are in person or online in line with governing document
Communication and correspondence
– Responding to all committee correspondence
– Filing all committee correspondence received and copies of replies sent
– Keeping a record of any of the organisation’s publications (e.g. leaflets or newsletters)
– Reporting the activities of the organisation and future programmes to members, the press and the public (unless there is an Information or Publicity Officer)
– Preparing a report of the organisation’s activities for the year, for the Annual General Meeting
Download: Characteristics of a Good Secretary
Download: Secretary Role Description
*Since April 2008, private companies are no longer required to have a Company Secretary, but Companies House needs to be informed if no Company Secretary is appointed and you must ensure this complies with your Articles of Association.
If your organisation is incorporated as a limited company (e.g. Company Limited by Guarantee or a Community Interest Company), you may also have a Company Secretary*, which is different from the role of an Honorary Secretary. This post carries greater responsibility than an Honorary Secretary to ensure that the requirements of Company Law are met.
Download: Company Secretary Role Description
Download: Company Law Help Sheet