Category: leadership

Down with Budgets!

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Down with Budgets!

And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Example one: a recent discussion on the ASAE Collaborate executive list about trying to balance the annual budget cycle with making room from innovation.

Example two: this week, Jeff De Cagna did a webinar on his new e-book Associations Unorthodox. It focuses on six radical changes Jeff recommends associations make to position ourselves for the future. Shift #3? “Eliminate budgets.”

The problems with budgets (at least as we currently construct them) include:

  • They’re mostly backwards looking, based entirely on what happened last year, plus or minus a few percentage points.
  • They’re constructed and approved sometimes as much as 18-24 months before the money allocated it actually going to be spent.
  • They treat estimates like certainties, and then allocate every penny of expected revenue.
  • We use them to evaluate staff, holding our teams to meeting our budgets to the penny, and evaluating them on how well they do.

Extra revenue or less expense is always OK, of course, but extra expense? Even for an amazing opportunity or really important strategic investment? Well, you’ll just have to wait until the next budget cycle comes around. 18 months later, when you can actually spend the money, the opportunity has flown.

Why do we act as if budgets are set in stone? Why don’t we treat them as an estimate that’s open to revision based on changing circumstances? Or, as Jeff suggested, allocate some buckets of money to be spent on our organizations’ top strategic priorities, then leave it up to the staff and volunteer leaders responsible for those priorities to figure out what are the best investments in programs, products and services to meet those priorities?

Of course, that requires that you have ways of measuring the success or failure of what you’re doing other than “we met/didn’t meet budget this year.”

Did I just answer my own question?

 

Unsuck Your Meetings

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

WAY back on Tuesday, August 1, the weekly #assnchat topic was productivity and time management, a personal favorite.

I didn’t exactly do a rigorously scientific poll, but the #1 answer to “biggest productivity killer” was: meetings. Planned meetings, unplanned meetings, drop in meetings, “do you have a few minutes?” meetings – just about everyone hated meetings.

“Of course!”, right?

Confession: I have an (earned) reputation as someone who is high-energy, highly productive, never misses a deadline (99% of the time, I deliver early), cranks out the work, usually at above-average quality.

I am about 1000% *more* productive now that I’m working for myself and not spending 25%-50% of each day in meetings.

(Look out, world.)

Given that everyone was sharing the hate for meetings, I pretty quickly posed the question: “how do we unsuck meetings?”

Answers included:

  1. People receive a formal agenda in advance. No agenda = no meeting. After all, if there’s nothing you need to cover, why force everyone to sit around a conference table for an hour?
  2. There are defined outcomes. Again, if you’re not trying to accomplish anything – or you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish – why are you wasting everyone’s time?
  3. Collaboration takes place. I’m not so sure about this one (more below).
  4. Clearly defined and communicated action items. This is more of a post-meeting item, but I agree that any decisions that are made need to be documented, any tasks that need to be done need the same, and you must assign responsibility and due dates.
  5. NO standing meetings. Ooooo. This is a tough one. If you have a busy, high-profile group, there’s pressure to have standing meetings, or you fear not being able to get them together when you need them. On the other hand, if we dramatically cut down on the number of meetings we have (by, say, killing standing meetings), the problem might fix itself.

On the whole “collaboration” issue, I agree that TRUE collaboration can bring about better results. But it seems like “working collaboratively” has been dumbed down to “let’s have a zillion meetings and include anyone and everyone who’s even peripherally related to what’s going on.” And that demonstrably make us less creative and ultimately, less productive. Turns out, the best way to work in teams is to assign out pieces of the project to individuals, let them go away and do the work on their own, and come back together periodically but briefly to attack problems people need help with, and have ONE person (the project manager?) assigned to do the coordinating.

Finally, a thought exercise: the next time you’re in some interminable, agenda-less, all hands on deck type meeting, look around the room. Who’s there? Guesstimate her/his hourly rate (annual salary/2 and drop the thousands is close enough, plus about 30% for benefits – so $100K a year = $65 a hour), then add it up around the room and multiple times the number of hour/s you’re all stuck there.

Does it still seem worth it?

A World Without Boards

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on A World Without Boards

A million years ago back in Dallas (actual time: just over a month), Jeff De Cagna, in his unsession on Associations Unorthodox, has asked us to think about radical questions to ask.

Now I love the idea of a radical question. One of the focal points of my consulting work is that asking the right question is as important as getting the right answer, if not more so. Too often, we ask the wrong question, come up with a truly genius answer, and then end up frustrated when it doesn’t fix the problem. And then we kick ourselves for coming up with a bad solution, when that wasn’t the problem at all. We started in the wrong place, so it was going to be virtually impossible for us to end in the right one.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Here’s my radical ?: are boards the best way to run our orgs? What would the alt be/look like? #asae12
— Elizabeth Engel (@ewengel) August 13, 2012

Now, as my wise friend Leslie White, the excellent risk management consultant, points out: assuming your association is formally incorporated (which about 99.876% of us are), you are legally required to have some sort of board.

(Thanks, Leslie.)

So I guess my real question is: why do they operate as they do?

I know not all boards behave badly. But over the years, I’ve seen personal agendas, ego-based posturing, arrogance, cluelessness, personal aggrandizement, meddling with issues outside their ken, lack of willingness to take appropriate responsibility, and lack of willingness to ask difficult questions, all to an alarming degree.

And I don’t just blame the individual board members. We, as association professionals, do a poor job of properly training and preparing them for board service, and then setting and enforcing boundaries. It’s no wonder they have a tendency to run wild.

The reason it becomes a big problem is that the board has a lot of power.

Why?

It’s not for legal reasons.

And I’m not saying that no board should ever fulfill the common responsibilities of financial oversight and planning and managing the chief staff executive. I’m just asking why we act as if they have to.

I don’t have an answer to the question of a world without boards – or at least, pace Leslie, where board service is dramatically different.

But if we aren’t being well-served by the model (and some of us plainly aren’t), why not look for an alternative?

Welcoming a New Chief Executive

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Welcoming a New Chief Executive

If you’ve been paying attention to CEO Update, you’ve probably noticed that announcements of CEO retirements are increasing and, as a result, the listings of CEO openings are picking up.

That means a lot of CEOs are going to be starting new positions soon. I’ve had the opportunity to be part of the new CEO welcome team in previous associations, and I picked up a few ideas along the way:

First of all, whether you’re the new CEO, part of the staff welcome team, part of the rest of the staff, or a board member, I recommend starting with the excellent article Jackie Eder-Van Hook wrote for Associations Now a little over a year ago. It clearly and concisely lays out what the board, the new CEO, and the staff can do to help prepare for and facilitate a smooth transition.

Secondly, I’ve noticed that your new CEO’s background and your internal structure have a major impact on what you need to prepare to help her transition. If your new CEO comes from an association background, she’ll know how to run an association, but she’ll need to be quickly brought up to speed on your industry or profession, particularly if you have any major advocacy issues in play. And she’ll need to be quickly introduced to key players inside and outside the association. She’ll need a group of advisors (maybe the board, maybe additional people) who are known and respected in the industry who can teach her about it.

If your CEO comes from the industry or profession, she will know the key players and issues, but she’ll have to be educated about thinking about them and relating to people as a representative of the whole industry, not just her own company. And she’ll need a primer on how running an association is like and not like running a business. And a solid #2 or senior team to help keep the business of running the association going while she learns.

If your CEO comes from Capitol Hill…well, I don’t recommend doing that unless you have a strong internal structure, including a true COO (not just a glorified director of finance) who is responsible for running the association day to day. Because a high-profile lobbyist is just that. You’re buying influence, and expecting that person to run the organization as well is a big mistake.

Regardless of where you find your new CEO, she will need:

  • The current full financial and membership picture. And don’t even try to hide bad news. If you do, you’re setting her and your organization up for failure.
  • A list of the true decision makers in the organization. Which may or may not be the same as the board and/or senior team. If she really can’t make a decision without running it by the assistant conference director (for whatever reason), she needs to know.
  • The time and structured opportunities to get to know people. It’s hard to do this, because a new CEO will want to hit the ground running with all her great new ideas, and that’s good and appropriate (that’s why you hired her, right?), but she also needs space to get familiar with the staff and internal dynamics and current culture.
  • Clarity about people’s real expectations. Does the board expect her to lead, or to manage process? Is she supposed to be a change agent, or not upset the apple cart? What level of interaction do staff members want and expect?
  • All your policies, processes, procedures, work plans, strategic plans, audited financials, board books, committee books, schedules, style guides, branding rules, annual reports, etc. But don’t dump it all on her in a big pile all at once. Create a clearly labeled library on a shelf in her office so can review and assimilate all the information at her pace.
  • A group of CEO peers she can turn to when she has questions that aren’t appropriate for the board or her #2. That’s probably something she needs to put together for herself, but you could do worse than suggesting ASAE’s CEO membership and symposia and, if appropriate and offered in your area, something like DC SAFE.

CEO transitions are scary for everyone – the new CEO, the outgoing CEO, the board, the staff, the membership – but with some preparation, transparency, and cutting everyone some slack, they can also be a springboard to take your association to even greater heights.

Process Killed the Association Star

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on Process Killed the Association Star

Jamie Notter recently recapped his notes from the MIX Mashup, an invitation-only conference on the future of work, or, to quote their website:

“What will it take to make our organizations highly adaptable, endlessly inventive, truly inspiring, and genuinely accountable?”

That’s a critical question for all of us to address. Jamie also asked the blogging community to think about the points raised at the conference and to write response posts. This is one.

One of his notes from a panel on “innovation all the time” was:

Genius isn’t hidden. It’s afraid of your processes.

Associations do this all the time. In far too many cases, our default answer is “no.” Why? Say it with me: “Because it’s against policy.” Our default mode is “slow.” Why? Because everything has to run through 3000 internal groups and committees, then it goes to a member committee that only meets twice a year, then it goes to the board, which also only meets twice a year, and before you know it, 18 months have elapsed and the original opportunity? It vanished.

New staff and new volunteers start working with our organizations. They’re full of ideas, energy and excitement. This is her new job! She’s ready to kick some ass, build on what her predecessor did, and take your association to the next level! This is his new volunteer assignment! He’s honored to have been chosen, and he’s now even more deeply invested in your association than he was when he decided to offer his name up as a volunteer, because he made the cut!

And then our reified processes kick in, and the cavalcade of “no” begins.

  • We tried that five years ago, and it didn’t work.
  • We can’t make that change, because we always do it this other way.
  • Our members won’t like it.
  • Our senior team won’t like it.
  • Our board won’t like it.
  • The committee won’t support it.
  • It’s a risk we’re unwilling to take.
  • We’re not comfortable trying it a different way.
  • I don’t have that skill (and I don’t want to learn it).
  • What if something goes wrong? What if it’s not perfect? What if it FAILS!?!?

And, inevitably, that new staff member gets beaten down. Maybe she stays, and she starts keeping her ideas to herself, and maybe she walks out the door and takes them with her. That new volunteer gets discouraged. He becomes the “show pony” committee member, when what he wanted to do was be the “work horse.” He becomes disillusioned, cynical and disengaged. If you’re lucky, he keeps that to himself. If you’re not? Hello, membership decline.

We need to shift our mindset from a default “no” to a default “yes,” even if it has to be a qualified yes.

How do we get there? I don’t have the complete answer, but I do have some suggestions:

  • ALWAYS let people spend some time researching their ideas to see if they’re viable.
  • Create a budget of time AND money, even if it has to be small, to try new things.
  • Quit being so afraid of criticism. If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re coasting.
  • Quit being so afraid of debate and disagreement. You’ll never get to the great idea if people can’t challenge the good enough idea.
  • Build REAL relationships with members and volunteers. The only way you get leeway to try stuff that might not work is by earning it.
  • Remember that the whole environment has changed, and what happened five years ago is not a predictor of what might happen tomorrow, with THIS team and THESE members in THIS situation.
  • Dump your 400 page policies and procedures manual. Follow Adobe’s example of a “fairly open philosophy” (not just about social media but about all your policies and procedures) governed by “guardrails” that keep your staff and organization legally protected while giving them as much freedom within those guardrails as possible.
  • Celebrate failure. Everyone says that, right? How do you do it? Offer a valuable prize (an extra week of vacation?) to the person or team that blew it, and then learned something major and valuable they shared with the rest of your staff.

What do you think? How do we get to “yes” in our organizations?

It’s Our Fault

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Overheard the other day: “You don’t want to have a debate in front of your CEO.”

Are we sure about that?

We all complain that our CEOs are out of touch. Don’t lie, you do too.

It’s out fault.

When we’ve completely insulated them from the sausage making, we can’t get mad when they have no idea how the sausage gets made.

I’m not arguing that your CEO needs to join every second of every standing staff meeting of every department in your entire organization all the time. Meetings are damned expensive. Look around the next time you’re in one, and mentally calculate the per-hour cost of all those people sitting around the table listening to pointless “updates” with no required action or attached decisions. An $80,000 salary means about $40 an hour, plus about another $20 an hour in benefits. $60 for one hour for one person. Tossing the CEO in the mix dramatically ratchets up that cost.

But if your CEO never hears the options or sees the thought processes that go into narrowing them down and selecting one, it’s no wonder she seems constantly in the dark. She is. And you’re the one who’s keeping her there.

What Do You REALLY Want to Know?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on What Do You REALLY Want to Know?

Data, data everywhere – but what does it MEAN?

We can measure a lot of stuff – opens and clicks and visits and time on page and community engagement scores and number of members and average tenure and number of attendees and satisfaction scores and followers and fans and shares and who’s talking about this and reach and RTs and responses, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

In fact, we can measure just about everything at this point, if we’re dedicated and have reasonable tech systems. So we drown in data, inundate decision makers, and produce analysis paralysis.

We lose sight of why we were tracking all this stuff in the first place: to make an impact. To drive decisions. To change our behavior and our organizations.

So the next time someone says, “Let’s start tracking this new metric!” make sure to ask why. Why do you want to track this? What are you looking to accomplish? What are you trying to decide? What impact with the data have on our organization? How will what you discover change your behavior?

Remember, the flip side of “you can’t change what you don’t measure” is “measure what you value, or you’ll only value what you measure.”

Who Are Your Allies?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Who Are Your Allies?

Associations, particularly small associations, tend to suffer from a lack of resources, aka “that’s a great idea, but we don’t have any money for it.” Which can have a seriously negative consequences on impact and what the organization is able to accomplish.

One way to address this is through creating a network of allied organizations.

So how do you do that?

The first step is research. You need to figure out what organizations have similar enough, but not identical, missions and audiences. You’re looking to compliment each other, not to compete. And you want organizations that are at a similar level of influence. Too many orders of magnitude bigger or smaller, and the power dynamic gets out of whack, which can make it hard to find mutual benefit.

The next step is to think through what mutual benefit might look like. What can you offer that they might want? What do they offer that you want? Can you create packages of roughly equivalent value? Possible areas of interest might include discounts for members on programs, products or services, exhibit booth swaps, conference speaking session swaps, mailing list swaps, ad swaps, article swaps, guest blogging, joint products, advocacy alliances, joint workshops or webinars, applying for research grants together…think through everything both organizations offer and look for places you could work together.

Third, you have to make contact. This is where things like LinkedIn can come in handy. Look for a path, ideally, to the person who seems most likely to be able to say yes or no, but also realize that the first person you’re able to connect with might not be the right person to negotiate a relationship. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone, and do be persistent but don’t be obnoxious.

Assuming you find the person with the appropriate authority and willingness to make a deal, the next step is to negotiate something that will work for both of your associations. You want both organizations to have an initial positive experience, so your beta should be structured to make that as likely as possible, which means start small. But brainstorm big. Assuming your first test goes well, you want to have ideas waiting in the wings to expand the relationship.

Lather, rinse and repeat with additional organizations, and watch your association’s sphere of influence expand exponentially.

Reaching Detente With Your Chapters

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Reaching Detente With Your Chapters

One of the truisms of association management is that national/chapter relationships are often…fraught. Even though we’re all ostensibly on the same side, it doesn’t always feel that way. Each side feels like the other is holding out on the them or trying to gain advantage, and the lack of trust that results makes it hard to communicate and to work together for the good of the organization as a whole and, ultimately, the profession or industry you serve.

How do you get past this?

I was recently chatting with some colleagues who were working through this exact problem. Details concealed, of course, but a little background. The organization has chapters in every state. As is common, some are quite strong and many are less so. The national provides staff support for chapters, but it’s in the form of two staff members who are both in DC (and in the eastern time zone).

The national wants to switch to an “account executive” model, dividing the country into regions and locating a regional chapter support manager in each of them. Those regional managers would still report to the national membership director, but they would work remotely and be charged solely with supporting the chapters in their region (so they would really work FOR the chapters).

Sounds great, right? Unless you’re a strong chapter that’s worried that this is a power grab by the national. And there is one chapter in particular with a strong, nationally-known executive and a full staff of their own. The national staff is concerned that she will lead the revolt that will doom their plan to help struggling chapters by providing better overall support and coordination.

What we realized is that this apparent negative could actually be a huge advantage. But it would all depend on the approach. Going to the strong chapter executive with, “This is the plan that we, the national, in our great and mighty wisdom, have devised for you, the poor little chapters, and you’ll accept it whether you want to or not!” would result in disaster. It turns her into an opponent immediately. “My chapter is just fine, and we don’t need your help/interference, thanks.”

But, if the national approached the strong chapter executive with this as a POSSIBLE idea to provide better support for the chapters that they’d very much like her to PILOT for them before they consider rolling it out to all the chapters, suddenly, we’re on the same side of the table working together to solve a problem.

Of course, the national has to be genuine. The program really IS a pilot and is open to modification – or even being dumped – based on the experiences of the beta group, which should probably consist of some or all of chapters in the strong chapter executive’s region. The staff person would remain at the national headquarters during the pilot, but he would switch his work schedule to better align with the region’s time zone. And if the beta testers came up with a better idea, the national would pilot that as well.

What kind of tiger-style management-fu can you deploy to start standing next to your chapters facing issues together rather than standing opposite them and *being* the issue?

The Eternal Butts in Seats Debate

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on The Eternal Butts in Seats Debate

What do you notice – and reward – in your staff? Time at desk? Effort? Results?

As you’ll soon discover, I’m pretty clearly in one camp.

Some places focus on hours. Were you there at 9 on the dot, did you take extra time at lunch, did you leave early?

And for some particular positions, that might make sense: retail (where you have posted store hours), customer service (where the phones/email accounts are supposed to be staffed certain hours), reception (where the desk is supposed to be staffed certain hours), shift work.

Raise your hand if you – or your staff – do one of those things.

Let’s face it: if you’re reading this blog, there’s a good a chance you’re what’s known these days as a “knowledge worker,” someone who is valued for the knowledge she brings to a particular field of expertise.

So since knowledge workers are valued for expertise, it makes sense to measure them by results, right?

This concept is captured well by ROWE – the Results Only Work Environment.

Unfortunately, too many of our organizations are mired in a 1950s-era mentality that we judge people based on whether or not they’re putting in their hours. And making the leap to evaluating based on outcomes can be scary.

The thing is – as with many issues in the modern office – it’s a management issue.

What would it take to stop evaluating people based on “was he in his seat from 9 to 5 every week day?”

  • Flexibility – obviously, this is not something that’s going to work in a rigid culture.
  • Trust – you’re not going to be able to watch your people every minute, since they’re going to work when, and where, it makes the most sense for them.
  • Clarity – I think this is the real rub for most offices. We measure people based on butts in seats, or effort alone, because we have no clear, measurable, concrete goals for them. “Did you work at least 40 hours (and the right 40 hours) this week?” has to stand in, because we have no idea what we actually need our staff members to accomplish day to day, week to week, and year to year.

But if you can manage to make the switch – and make no mistake, it does require a major cultural shift, at least for most offices – it can accrue tremendous benefits to your organization. ROWE has been proven to reduce stress, increase productivity, increase health and well-being, and reduce turnover. And that makes complete sense when you think about it: your staff members get to dump their commute entirely (or commute at off hours, or only some of the time), work when they’re at their most productive and in the environment that makes them most productive, and manage their personal lives in ways that make sense, which makes them happier, which in turn makes them more productive.

So what are you waiting for?