Swimming A Guide to Association Chapter ... - David BarrettSwimming . in the Deep-End . A Guide to...

Swimming in the Deep-End

A Guide to Association

Chapter Leadership

Kevin D. Martin, PMP, PMI-ACP David Barrett

First Edition

KEBS Publishing, Collingwood, Ontario

Swimming in the Deep-End - A Guide to Association Chapter Leadership

2

Table of Contents The Authors ....................................................................................................... 4

Forward ............................................................................................................... 7

Introduction ....................................................................................................... 9

General Advice for Current or Future Board Presidents / Chairs ..........11

6 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Leadership Tomorrow .....17

5 Things a Leader Should Do to Set a Good Example.............................21

Board Governance ..........................................................................................23

Strategic Planning ............................................................................................27

5 Reasons Strategic Plans Fail .......................................................................35

Honesty & Integrity – Key Elements for All Managers and Leaders .....37

Managing our Volunteers ...............................................................................41

Communicating is a Science ..........................................................................49

3 Ways to Say Thank You ..............................................................................51

Are You Practicing ‘Good Meetings’? .........................................................53

Membership Development ............................................................................55

Event Management .........................................................................................59

Cool Ideas for Any Board Members ............................................................69

It Pays to Be Nice ............................................................................................73

Who is Your Coach? .......................................................................................75

Temporary Close .............................................................................................77


4

The Authors

Kevin D. Martin, PMP, PMI-ACP brings decades of leadership experience in Information Technology, Call Center Operations and Project Management. His vision & leadership helped to build the award-winning Alamo PMI Chapter, while focusing on building high performing teams to achieve business value success. He brings years of corporate experience, solving complex technical and business challenges, for Fortune 100 companies in Oil and Gas, Banking, and Financial Services.

He holds degrees from St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas – Bachelor of Applied Sciences and Master of Business Administration M.B.A.- Finance. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Darden Executive Education Program and the Leadership Development Program (LDP) at The Center for Creative Leadership.

He is a faculty member at the University of Texas – San Antonio, with a focus on project management and agile delivery practices. An avid reader, Mr. Martin still finds time to read 25-38 business/leadership/self-improvement books each year.

He is an international speaker in high demand and enjoys the variety and challenges of today’s business world with increasing complexity, speed and competition.

Kevin invites you to join his journey to obtain his lessons, insight and thoughts about the future of leading successfully. Dream Big, Work Hard, Give Back!

Kevin can be reached at [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


5

David Barrett is a professional speaker, regular blogger, podcast host, author of 5 books and education advisor.

He specializes in helping people and organizations ‘Manage the Uncertainty’ by creating healthy projects and strategies.

David has been in the business of project management since 1997. He is the founder and past Managing Director of ProjectWorld,

ProjectSummit and BusinessAnalystWorld conferences held around the world.

He is the National Program Director for all Project Management training out of the Schulich Executive Education Centre, Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada and in partnership with nine other universities across Canada.

He is the founder and past Executive Director of ProjectTimes.com.

David has been a member in good standing of the PMI since 1997. Although it risks showing his age, he is proud of his ‘relatively’ low membership number of 61472!

David has held board positions for numerous charitable and not-for-profit organizations.

David’s web site is www.DavidBarrett.ca

He can be reached at [email protected]

http://www.davidbarrett.ca/

mailto:[email protected]


6


7

Forward

Back in 2014, one of your authors hired the other author to present at their PMI® Regional Leadership meeting in Dallas, Texas. Given that this gathering was strictly for chapter leaders, the required keynote presentation had to be a little different than the regular conference keynote.

So the title “Things I Learned From Interviewing 25 Past Presidents of PMI® Chapters” was born. We reached out to 50 past presidents from around the world and quickly turn that into 25 interviews.

The speech went well and was repeated a number of times throughout future PMI® regional meetings. But it has not been repeated for a few years.

The foundation of this ‘booklet’ is that research project and speech. It has been supplemented with other real-life experiences by both authors and a series of posts from one of our blogs.

Our objective is to share the lessons learned from 25 association leaders out there (and ourselves) with current and future board members not just of the PMI®, but any other association as well.

We hope that, regardless of your position today, we will be able to offer learning and advice that will make your experience as a board member more enjoyable and your contribution to the community more fruitful.

We do want to make a note that this publication is a work in progress. We see this as the first edition of what could be many. In order to grow this body of knowledge, we will continue our research but we encourage you to forward your experiences and advice to us as well.

Our promise is that we will gather from you and others in order to continue this journey of learning.

Kevin Martin David Barrett


8


9

Introduction As we begin our journey, we would like to make one very important note. One size does not fit all and scalability is critical in almost everything you are about to read.

In our experience with PMI® chapters, at any point in time, we are seeing three very distinct sizes of chapters. But in a blink, what you did BEFORE, won’t take you where you want to go. As you scale the size of your organization, the size and complexity of the work changes to accommodate the growth. You will require more volunteers, more cashflow, more products and services as you seek to serve your growing association.

Chapter Membership <800

With this size chapter, the primary focus is finances and membership.

In this early stage, you are seeking to provide basic services, market the value of your association and generate positive cashflows to sustain your operations. Our advice is to create a resource that all your members would value and select volunteers to create the product for public sale. The profit margin should be enough to cover your production costs by 150-200% and create residual value for your customers.

Chapter Membership 800-1200

Now the primary focus is on resources and governance.

In this middle growth stage, your initial resources will be stretched to cover more customers and your board governance will definitely need to expand to reduce the span of control for any one member and segment the duties to achieve more focus and increase collaboration efficiencies.

Chapter Membership >1200

Now the primary focus is on governance and growing into a business

In this final growth stage, you are operating in an ongoing concern, meeting customer expectations and are successful with an in established reputation as a valuable organization in the community. However, your


10

board governance will once again need to be revised to meet growing demands and span of control issues. If you haven’t already, this will mean moving from a single board structure into two levels: an Executive and Operational board of governance model. The Executive board is filled with seasoned veterans of association service who remain very strategic thereby allowing the more junior Operational board members to focus on the day to day delivery of the organizations products and services.

So, as you read please remember that not all of this advice fits every scenario. One size does not fit all and scalability is critical.


11

General Advice for Current or Future Board Presidents / Chairs

Here are some tips and tricks that have come from our discussions with past board members and presidents. Spend time with former presidents and board members. Seek out advice from those that have been there before you. It seems so simple but frankly, very few people do it. Why re-invent the wheel? These folks have been through a lot, if not most of the challenges you are about to face, so spend time with them, pick their brains and even set up a process where you will be revisiting them every once in a while. We have even seen some board presidents set up an advisory board just for them. This will be extremely effective especially on occasions where things are not going very smoothly. Listen to people around you all the time. But you must understand and they must realize that just because they have an opinion and maybe even speak the loudest, your job is to listen. The way you respond and how you respond is the critical element of your leadership skills. You do not answer to one or even a vocal small group of your members. You answer to all of the members who are represented by the board. Your job is to listen and take what you’ve learned and what you’ve heard into the system for evaluation, consideration and then take action. Run the chapter like your business. Your Board of Directors is your advisory board but they do have a vote in a very democratic process. Your members are your clients who expect a good product and good customer service. Treat your volunteers and everybody else who works for the chapter as any legitimate HR department would - professionally, fairly and with respect. Manage Your Strategic Plan Closely. We talk about strategy and strategy execution in a separate section of this book but suffice to say here that you need to have a strategic plan and you need to manage it carefully. Your strategy needs to be reviewed every year and it needs to serve as your guide to the operation of your organization. This might be a good time to mention that very often, new board members will come on with a definite vision of how things should be done, and it is not the


12

way it’s been done now. In other words, they are coming in or on board to change things- to the better as they see it. To make matters worse, these people are often very strong, very vocal have a very difficult time seeing things other than the way they do. A good strong strategic plan that is managed closely and carefully gets you through this scenario. Any change to the plan and to the way we operate is open for discussion but only when we review the strategic plan in our annual meeting. These words will serve to shut down a lot of people if they see a plan in place and realize the no one can make a quick change without going through the process. Deliver a Great Product. Just like a business, your chapter or association delivers a product or service and it is your job, as its leader, to make sure that you are doing a great job at that. Be sure that any output through education or meetings or webinars or whatever are evaluated afterwards and continuously subjected to critique for potential improvement. This process should be evident to your members, as well, so that they can see that you’re doing your best to deliver a great product. You Need Sustainable Income. As an association chapter leader, you should know your numbers like the back of your hand. Your annual revenue versus your expenses. Cost of management versus cost of delivery. The rate of cost increases. You must have a good grasp of where your numbers are coming from and how sustainable they are. Your authors have seen their fair share of financially misguided and mismanaged chapters. This responsibility is yours and only yours. Regardless of who you assigned to the role of financial management, it is still your responsibility. Stay on top of this at all times. Limit Your Risk. We come from the project management field and so risk management is second nature to us. But even so, you would be very surprised at how many chapters in our world put themselves at incredible risk through events or other financially unwise decisions. Manage risk and always know the worse case scenario for any major financial decision. Address your bi-laws. In many cases, your bylaws are managed and/or dictated by your head office or your national association. If they’re not and the responsibility resides in your hands, be sure they are


13

always kept up-to-date. Review the bylaws on a regular basis for timeliness and current environment awareness. As we all know, things change rapidly around here, and your bylaws may not be keeping up. Build the foundation first – then look at the shiny things. We love this one because so many chapters, especially new ones, love to move way too fast at the beginning of time. Establish a strong foundation for as many years as it takes before you start playing with the shiny stuff. Create that sustainable income, strong bylaws, a good team of volunteers and board members and a great product delivered in a timely and cost-effective way to your members. This is all good strong foundation stuff. Once you have all of this well-established and running smoothly, then you can start thinking about annual conferences. partnerships with other associations, new ideas to expand rapidly and other, as we say, “shiny things”. Learn the Art of Delegation. Board leaders and board members must learn the art of delegating the work. In most cases, there are loads of people out there who would love to do a little bit here and there. They don’t want the big job, but they are quite happy making some kind of contribution. Learn how to delegate the small chunks of work that need to be done. You’ll need to learn how to manage those people, follow-up, coach and mentor but it is well worth it for you and your chapter. Prioritize. If you are new to a board or new to a board chair position, you will quickly become overwhelmed with all the things going on. Understand that you cannot do everything, so delegation is critical but prioritization is even more important. You may have another job - one that pays for the food on the table - and everyone needs to understand that, especially you. Prioritization means that you will be doing the right work for the right people at the right time with the right effort. And that is all we can expect. When any of those elements get out of control, something is going to break. Praise in Public – Criticize in Private. In different words, know when to keep your mouth shut. Whatever goes on in the board meetings must be kept private and privileged and so the rules are different. But in public all board members and leaders must be very careful about what they say.


14

You need to be transparent and adaptable. The mark of a great leader: transparent and adaptable. The adaptability part is very important. Many leaders have very strong opinions about many things but the best of them will adapt as required. Listen to people and look at all sides of the issues and if you have to change your stand, do it. Keep conflict out of Board meetings – only look at solutions. This comment goes to personal conflicts within your board. Dealing with this stuff is a waste of everyone’s time at those meetings. Take them all off-line and deal with them between meetings. Act locally – think globally. Good words from a few people that we interviewed. All of your local members and constituents are watching both you and your product. Working with these folks and delivering your product to these folks is the most important part of your job. But the best leaders will also be continuously looking beyond trends, successes it at other chapters and ways that they can improve locally because of what is happening globally. Wait, listen, wait some more and then act. This is good advice for all leaders. Take your time, digest, seek advice and, when you are ready, take a stand. The role of president is far more demanding than you think. This advice came from more than a few people that we interviewed. Be prepared to hear it all! If you have done well with the other aspects of association leadership, the members will see you as THE face of the organization. When they have feedback, good or bad, they will begin with you. From “the dues are too high” to “there is too much garlic in the mashed potatoes.!” Be prepared to take it all in, respond with an appropriate level of concern and promise that someone will look into the issue and get back to them with a response. Our purpose is to promote the profession - remember that. This is something that a lot of us forget once we get involved at the board level. If we are running a chapter of a regional, national or worldwide association, we are representing our profession. Our product or services all shed light on what and who we are. As leaders, we need to be reminded of this continuously.


15

We want to finish this section with this. In all your days as a professional, you won’t get this opportunity as a leader of a local board or association very often. Vision, strategy, mentoring and more plus friendships and professional contacts that will remain with you for years to come. You could call this a ‘leadership master class’. Holding a leadership position in an association or any volunteer organization is a chance of a lifetime. Enjoy it.


16


17

6 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Leadership Tomorrow

Many of us are in what I call a pre-leadership position. We are in a role where we are managing people and making mid-level decisions on projects and initiatives that are important to the health and success of our organizations. Generally, we are looking forward to a future as a senior leader – here or elsewhere.

If you know me, or have heard me present, or been a regular reader of this blog, you might know that I often refer to our Professional Strategic Plan: a process that creates an action plan for our professional future. Within the plan, we will find action items to get us from ’here’ to ‘there’.

So what if we are managing today and want to become leaders tomorrow? What should I find in the list of action items in my Professional Strategic Plan?

Actually, there are two parts to this list: one for immediate action and one that addresses parts of the plan that can’t happen overnight.

This week we start with the short term list. 6 things we can do today to prepare for leadership tomorrow. In my presentation “From a Good Manager to a Great Leader” I call this ‘act like a leader before you are one”:

1. Knock your responsibilities out of the park.

In everything you do, do it beyond expectations. Kill it – day in and day out. This level of performance will get recognized by your managers, your peers and especially the leaders in your current organization. This is one of the most important traits of any future leader. Show your stripes now.

2. Help your boss succeed

My Father-in-law used to say “make heroes out of everyone around you”. You do not have to be the star attraction to get recognized. The


18

‘supporting role’ is often the more important and many times the most rewarded.

3. Seize leadership opportunities, no matter how small.

Take on anything you can now to practice being a leader. Events, presentations, marketing campaigns, new product launches – anything. You won’t be left out there alone, hopefully. Use the experience to learn and to explore your new skills.

4. Don’t be a jerk

Jerks complain a lot but don’t contribute to any solutions. Jerks make life miserable for others and put our organization’s reputation at risk with behavior that is unacceptable these days. Jerks don’t believe in team work and don’t believe that paying it forward has any merits. Don’t go there.

5. Find role models

Find people who you want to emulate, who are doing what you want to do in the future or stand out as examples of the kind of leader you want to be. If you know them personally, foster that relationship, feed it, nurture it and make lots of notes. If they are a public personality and inaccessible in person, read everything they write, watch them on Youtube or on Ted Talks and attend any event that gets you closer to their thoughts, ideas and dreams.

6. Build Relationships

Now. Not later. Connect with key people in your life on a regular basis. Set dates in your calendar to touch base every few months. Find new relationships that might be able to connect you to key people some day in the future or who are authorities in their own right. The relationships in your professional life are probably the most important asset you have. Now is the time, when you don’t need it, to seek out and establish your professional support system so that it is there for you when you really do need it.

The Harvard Business Review (Fall 2014) said “If you want to become a leader, don’t wait for the fancy title or the corner office. You can begin


19

to act, think, and communicate like a leader long before that promotion. Even if you are still several levels down and someone else’s calling all the shots, there are numerous ways to demonstrate your potential and carve your path to the role you want.”

Are you planting the seeds today for your new leadership position tomorrow?


20


21

5 Things a Leader Should Do to Set a Good Example

I was recently listening to a group of teenagers talk about their summer jobs and most of the talk was a rant about the leadership style that one of them was dealing with.

I heard the words, “They don’t set a good example” numerous times in the rant. Coming from a teenager, this raised my ‘leadership radar’. Great, good and even mediocre leadership has to start with setting an example. You cannot preach one thing and do another.

As a leader, you are always being watched. Your team is taking its que from you: the good and the bad.

Here are 5 things you should do to set a good example:

• Timeliness • Performance • Commitment • Follow Through • Dealings with People

Timeliness. You are always on time, to a fault? Do your meetings start on time and end on time. Do you arrive at work early – like clockwork? Do you make promises and deliver on time… all the time?

Performance. Are you are known for your excellence in performance – or at the very least, a performance level that is recognized as the very best you can do?

Commitment. Are you looked upon as the most committed to the organization or department?

Follow-through. Do plans never die on the vine with you? Do you follow through on everything?


22

Dealings with People. Are you the one in the group who defines kindness in another’s troubles, empathy for those who need it, forgiveness always and a smile even through your own troubles?

If people start arriving at meetings late, seem to be slacking off, look like they don’t care anymore, deliver late or seem to be no longer getting along with others, look in the mirror. You might be a lot closer to the cause than you think.

Yes, leadership is tough. Everyone is watching you constantly and expecting you to set the tone and to set an example. Great leaders set great examples… all the time.


23

Board Governance

In our experience, sitting on a Board of Directors is one of the most difficult parts of the puzzle. Very often we have people, like ourselves, in a leadership role at the board level - sometimes with little or no experience in the role of board chair or board member.

In our interviews with 25 past presidents of PMI® chapters, almost every one of our interviewees offered comments and suggestions around this topic. It is definitely an important issue.

Here is a collection of some of the comments, suggestions, tips and tricks that we heard.

Depending on the chapter size, you may be wise to split your board into two: Governance and Operations. This is a standard setup for larger chapters. One group manages governance issues and the other is more hands-on managing day-to-day operations. Another format we see is a standard board with department leads reporting to them (non-board members). In our opinion, both these formats do the same thing - splitting the governance and operations groups.

Develop a transition plan at the start and continue to manage throughout the years. Many boards have been caught off guard without a likely successor to the chair or to lead positions. It is best to start your discussions with potential successors at least 2-4 years before they will be asked to take on a leadership role. You may even want to have a couple of potential candidates already on the board are willing to step up. Having a strong leader to run the board is critical and so identifying your future leaders 2 to 4 years out is advisable.

Develop a rigorous election process and stick with it. If you are able to run your elections virtually, you will obviously get more people involved.

Limit board tenure. Chapter presidents should be there no longer than two years. However, they should be in a position of President Elect for the two years prior so that they can learn and be mentored and coached. Ideally, they will stick around for a couple of more years as Past President, giving us a total of six years without counting any of the years


24

before “President-Elect”. If you include these, it could be as many as 8 to 10 years of service and that seems to be plenty for everyone involved.

When searching out new board members, be sure you have a strong vetting process that makes it abundantly clear to all candidates about the work involved and the responsibilities they will be taking on. You do not want board members there for the wrong reasons.

When picking your board members, pick for their skill sets and not necessarily for their personality. Identify the areas where you will need new board members to step in and seek out those types of skill sets.

Your board should have a code of conduct that everyone agrees to on an annual basis. Respect, politeness, contribution levels and more should all be part of this document that everyone reviews and possibly even signs annually.

Your chapter should have a rigorous on boarding process for all new board members. This would include, but not be limited to, a binder with job descriptions, strategic plan details, roles and responsibilities and more. You should not assume that everyone knows what they’re doing as they come on to the board.

All board members should know your business inside out. What we mean by this is that they are a beacon for your area of interest or community of practice and people will expect knowledgeable resources at this level. Your new board members should be told that they should understand your services and products to a detailed level that will allow them to carry on an educated conversation with anyone out there.

Stop reinventing the wheel. If your chapter has not a already done so, you should be documenting:

o Policies and procedures o Job descriptions o Sponsorship package descriptions o Speakers available for events and more

As each new group takes over, all of this information should be readily available and at hand.


25

As a board leader, you should be careful about picking your battles. In simple terms, don’t sweat the small stuff. Deal with the important issues and make the important decisions but do not get dragged into the mud with the day-to-day operations of the chapter.

Delegate. And then delegate some more. People want responsibility, and this is a great place to get it. Let them go. They may not do it your way and may not even do it the right way at all but in the grand scheme of things, is it really that important?

Don’t avoid the hard decisions. In many board of director scenarios we are dealing with our friends or associates we’ve known for some time. Making decisions that might threaten these relationships are difficult, but we have to do it. If you delay the inevitable, you will regret it later. Be decisive and quick.

Being a member of one of these boards is a privilege and ultimately an incredible experience. Regardless of our lot in life, we will learn and grow as professionals and personally as well. Enjoy the ride.


26


27

Strategic Planning

Every association and not-for-profit organization needs a strategic plan.

This process of creating this kind of plan is an excellent review of three things:

• the current state • the future state • the plan to get from one to the other

Without a plan like this, most organizations run the risk of becoming stale and not responding to their customers and members. Without a plan we don’t have a guideline or roadmap to follow. Have you ever seen the new board member arrive for his or her first meeting to try to change everything? A good strategic plan, or roadmap, will prevent anyone from coming in and claiming that they have a better idea. The answer to these types of people is ”We love your ideas but we just have to wait until the next strategic plan review in order to suggest any changes to our current plan.”

Not only is it important to create a strategic plan, it is just as important to plan out the execution phase. 60% of strategic plans, suggests Forbes.com, never even get off the ground and 50% of the rest will fail. The statistics are a glaring signal that there is actually a fourth element to this process: the strategy execution plan.

So here are some tips, tricks, ideas and thoughts on creating a solid strategic plan from beginning to end and hopefully through to a successful completion.

The Planning Process

Most organizations will set aside a half day or more for this planning process. There are many important elements that you should be thinking through prior to and during the event.

Use a facilitator. Ideally someone from the outside should be guiding the meeting along. This will provide two important elements: an


28

objective outsider who can moderate conversations without the baggage that most of us on the inside have and a professional who knows how to manage a meeting of this type.

Get off site. Get away from the distractions, the desks and telephones and other meetings going on at the same time.

Have the right people in the room. Be sure that anyone who could make or break the strategic plan, in the future, is in the room. You very well might have ‘naysayers’ lining up to challenge the plan and they especially are important players in this process. Include them.

Don’t invite the wrong people. If they have no influence, or authority and if they won’t be able to provide any major contribution - do not include them. This may fray some egos but with them, you run the risk of bogging down the meeting and adding too many cooks to the kitchen.

Have your research done... well before the meeting. Your half or one day off-site gathering is no time to be searching on Google or looking up financial figures or checking out the competition. All of this needs to be done beforehand and all of this information needs to be readily accessible.

Do not assume that everyone knows what strategic planning is all about and how the event will work. Explain the process right up front to everyone. You may very well have some very senior people in the room the do not want to admit (strangely enough) that they’ve never been through a strategic planning process.

Do not assume that everyone thinks like you. You will most likely have detractors in the room and people who are not onside with your ideas. A strategic planning meeting that is simply set up to execute your ideas is one thing but more typically you will find yourself in a strategic planning meeting where we are evaluating different ideas and different courses of action. You need to be open-minded and welcome differing opinions. You need to be ready for the occasion where you lose the vote. That’s all right.


29

Do not ignore the time and effort your plan will take going forward. So often our plans look good but are simply not implementable. Don’t go there.

The Planning Meeting

We want to mention here, as we alluded to above, that there are different styles of strategic planning meetings. Some are simply to rubberstamp one person’s ideas while others are designed to evaluate many options and try to come up with a consensus of where we are headed. Both of these need to be handled quite differently.

The open meeting, with lots of ideas and where plans are not cast in stone will take longer, of course, and involve a process where we brainstorm, evaluate options and narrow the ideas down to those that we want to take on over the next years. Be prepared for this process. If you do not know how to run a brainstorming session, find someone in the organization, or from outside, that knows how.

Elements of the Strategic Plan

It’s pretty simple really:

• where are we today - the current state • where do we want to be at a set time in the future or over time -

the future state • how we can get there - the plan to get from here to there.

Where are we today? The Current State

This is the segment of the strategic plan that most organizations miss.

They think about the future and do not spend the time on understanding the current state. Quite frankly, this is the most important piece of all. Get this wrong and everything else in the plan is at risk. If you don’t know where you are today it is impossible to plan the journey.

The current state will take time and effort and typically a lot of research if it has never been done properly before.

Here are most of the elements you need to think about:


30

• Where you are today – describe in as much detail as possible: • Financial snap shot • HR - The People -how many, doing what for whom? • Your Core DNA – what are you as an organization • What do others think about you • Your Mission statement • What or who is your market? • Your product or services evaluation • SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and

threats. • External environment • Internal environment

Your competitive analysis. How strong or weak are they? Exactly what are they doing and how are they doing?

We would like to spend a moment on the SWOT analysis. Frankly, we’re found that many people just don’t understand this piece.

Strengths - this is anything and everything where we believe your organization is strong. Not necessarily the strongest in the market but simply strong. Great product line, loyal customers, great locations, good profit margin, loyal members, engaged clients or members. This list goes on and on depending on the industry or business you are in.

Opportunities - not in the order of the acronym because actually this is a list of opportunities you have - directly related to the list above. If you are strong here, then are there any opportunities you might throw out (even thinking outside the box) that we should recognize? As an example, if our association chapter has an ability to attract great speakers, then what can we do to leverage this strength in order to improve the organization.

Weaknesses - a list just like the one above that identifies any and every weakness that we might have in our business.


31

Threats - again like opportunities these are directly related to the list of weaknesses above. In fact, simply list each weakness again and describe any threat you can think of as a result.

Where do we want to be at a set time in the future or over time - the future state

The second element of the strategic plan is the future state. As we have mentioned, this section could go one of two ways: this is where we are going so let’s plan around it or where do we want to go and what might that look like.

If it’s the former, we still have lots to do. The future state is a description of what we, as an organization, look like at some time point in the future.

If it’s a latter, this piece will include the brainstorming, analysis and selection process that we talked about.

Regardless, this piece requires a great deal of thought and documentation around a point in time that could be as far out as three or five years. It’s not easy but it’s essential.

Define what you want to achieve or, in other words, exactly why are we heading to this point at this time in the future?

• What’s in it for us or what’s in it for our customers or members?

• What will you be? To Whom? What are we doing? Who we doing it for? Has our customer base changed or has our membership changed?

• What will be our key priorities? • Where are we located? • What areas will we be serving – geographical or by industry • Who is running the show? • What is our HR complement at the time? • Do we have new debt?


32

• What does our bank account look like?

All of these details need to be ironed out as we look to the future. If we want to grow our membership by 25%, this is what we need to look like. If we want to be offering new products or services to our customers, this is what we look like.

The key here is to have a very clear description of the future for everyone involved.

How we can get there - the plan to get from one to two

And finally, we get to the plan on how to get from here to there. We, the authors of this book, come from the project management world and so this is actually the easy part for us. But we recognize it is not easy for most.

In order to get from point A to point B or from here to there, we need to think about who can do what, where and when. We need to create a plan that makes sense for everyone. We need to evaluate the tools that could be required and the resources we will need including people, money and time.

If your organization does not have the expertise for this piece, then may we suggest you hire a project manager on contract to create a plan and to show you how to manage this plan going forward. Well worth the time and effort.

Strategy Execution

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare.” —Japanese proverb “Strategy execution is the responsibility that makes or breaks executives.” —Alan Branche and Sam Bodley-Scott, Implementation

“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” —Alvin Toffler

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” —Jack Welch


33

As we said earlier, most strategic plans end up in very nice-looking binders on a shelf. Senior management, or board members, are good at creating the strategy but, typically, not great at the execution phase.

Strategy execution is a pretty broad topic and one which we cannot go into too much detail on in this publication. However, here are some tips and tricks on ensuring that your strategic plan is not one of the ones that gets lost in the shelf.

Someone needs to be accountable. As the chair or president of your board, it is your responsibility to make sure that someone in the organization is ultimately responsible for the execution of the plan. This does not mean one person does all the work, but like any good project management role, this person is in charge and responsible for tracking progress, communicating throughout the process to all major stakeholders and to be sure that the plan is driven to a successful end. In some large organizations, we have a dedicated person with a title that sounds like Chief Strategy Officer. On many board of directors, it could be one board member who takes this on as the sole project of responsibility.

Communication is critical. Right from the start, all of your members or employees or major stakeholders need to be aware of the plan: where we going and how we can get there? Understand that the first question everyone will have on their mind is how does this affect me? If you are in a not-for-profit or association environment, fellow board members want to know how much work will be involved and what kind of pressure this will put on the rest of their lives. In a corporate environment, every employee will wonder what does the future hold for them. Communicate, communicate and keep communicating. Where are we going, how are we doing and what will it take to get to the end?

Continuously Evaluate and Measure. For your customers, for your members and, most importantly, for you and your team. In order to get the strategic plan done, we need to continuously ask ourselves “how are we doing?”. Create a scorecard, establish 10 questions to ask every quarter or use any means possible as an evaluation tool.


34

Pick the right people for your team. So often, we hear the excuse “somebody else was responsible for that”. Absolutely unacceptable. If you are the chair of the board or the CEO of the company, it is your job to make sure that the right people are in place the make it all happen. Resourcing the work with people that are dedicated to the plan and that have bought into the strategic direction is critical to your success.

Remember that any plan can be changed. Things happen and we have to be flexible or agile enough to be able to go back to a plan and make the adjustments or in some cases completely rewrite it. That’s all right.

So, strategic planning – critical. Strategy execution – don’t forget it.


35

5 Reasons Strategic Plans Fail

Every organization needs a plan. Every leader needs a plan – a vision for the future. Every leader needs to know where the ship is headed and needs to drive toward that vision day in and day out.

The strategic plan is probably the most important tool that any leader has at their disposal. The strategic plan drives everything within, and a well-run organization should be able to connect everything it does back to that plan.

An article on November 9, 2015 by Harvey Schachter of the Globe and Mail entitled “Unlocking The Seven Words That Define the DNA of Your Business” describes the scenario well” A “two-day weekend retreat at which a bundle of officials gathered, developed a plan, announced it on Monday and then along with everybody else forgot it by Thursday.”

What happened?

We go back to work. One of the most prevalent reasons that we fail to execute the strategic plan is… we go back to our day jobs. We mean well, but the moment the sun rises, we head back to the trenches where the short terms goals and objectives take over, where we are forced to deal with the issues at hand. Slowly the plan for the future takes a back seat to reality.

Lack of accountability. The plan looks and feels good but no one in the room, nor anyone else outside the room is accountable for making it happen. Without someone being ultimately responsible for ‘Vision 2026’, it is not going to happen.

Poor communications. The binder is definitely pretty. But no one is reading it. No one is going to walk in to the office of your C-Suite team and pick it up to read. You sent an email to your top management team to announce the plan, but that is where it stopped. The strategic plan needs to be communicated to everyone from top to bottom. You need buy-in. It needs to be brought up on stage, introduced and laid open for


36

comments and questions. It needs to be placed in the corporate intranet or even, in some cases, on the internet for everyone outside to see.

You do not have a suitable culture to support the plan. This one could actually lay over all other reasons for strategic plan failure. Organization’s culture drives everything: people, processes, dreams and plans. Without a culture to support the future, the future will fail. That culture is defined and managed from the very top and plays out in the core of organization. This is where the strategic plan lives or dies – at the core for the organization.

You do not have the right people to make it happen. Without a team that can execute the plan effectively, your plan is doomed. In many cases this starts at the very top. There are many examples of great organizations stumbling on vision because the key person, the CEO, was not the right person to drive the plan. Not every leader is cut from the same cloth. Possibly, the new vision or plan needs someone very different to make it work.

Then we move down the chain to the HR team that will need to make sure that the right resources are in place. And the finance team to make sure the budget is there. And this goes right through the organization. The right people are key to the plan and without them in place the future of your strategy is dim.

Many strategic plans fail. These 5 are just some of the reasons.

The message should be clear to all. The strategic planning process has a life span that goes way beyond the publication of the plan. Success execution of the plan is what will make or break you as a leader, and your organization as a leader in your industry.


37

Honesty and Integrity – Key Elements for All Managers and Leaders

As the summer of 2014 draws near I am thinking about the key elements of good and great leadership and the management of people. There are many. ‘Google’ the top 10 traits of great leaders and you will find 20-30 unique traits over numerous lists.

Today I begin a series that will look at the most popular key leadership traits. I will look at different opinions, views and ideas and words of wisdom on each element.

Today we start with honestly and integrety. These two words appear on everyone’s list. Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying “The first step toward greatness is to be honest.”

Over my years in business, for myself and for others, I was often challenged by a decision I had to make regarding a course of action, a conversation or a plan. I had to decide between door #1 and door #2. Each was legal and above board. But one door would lead me into a space that I would question or feel ever so slightly guilty about. In one case, I wouldn’t tell the whole truth but the results favoured me over someone else. In another case, one of the options would mean that I would always know that got the deal by slightly altering the truth about a competitor. And then there was the day that I had the option of cutting a big corner to get a job done – knowing that it would be years until anyone noticed but that I would be long gone by then.

Many people will look at ethics and honesty as grey as opposed to black and white. This is a mistake. There is nothing grey about being ethical and honest. These people will tell you that we are all sinners – it’s just a matter of scale. No. The decisions we make everyday land on one side or the other – never on the fence.

As the beacon of your team, your company, your division, people will look to you as an example. Cut the corner, make an exception, act slightly unethically and they will ALL take note.


38

And without honesty and integrity there is no trust.

Jim Clemmer is a writer on all things about leadership. In a recent post he says: “Honesty and integrity are motherhood leadership phrases. And they should be. They are fundamental to leadership. Honesty and integrity produce trust, which produces high levels of confidence. High confidence encourages people to dream and to reach for new horizons. High confidence fosters risk-taking. Risk-taking and initiative are fundamental to organization change and improvement.“

Our ability to lead others is directly related to our ability to forge strong relationships. Strong relationships are dependent upon trust. Trust provides the glue.

As a leader of a team or group or a whole company we are being asked to communicate information about many things. Strategy, results, plans, deals and more. Some of us will look at the details of the brief and think about twisting the information ever so slightly in order to hide or exaggerate something. No one will know.

A recent survey by The Discovery Group, a company specializing in employee opinion surveys, found that 52% of employees don’t believe the information they receive from management. Misinformation festers a lack of trust. It will infiltrate all parts of the business going forward. Can you believe that… 52% don’t believe what management says!

This highlights an important point. Honesty is not just telling the truth. It is just as much about telling all of the truth. Holding back information or even hiding information will eventually catch up on us. Trust gone. The power of your leadership gone.

As a great leader you need to set an example for everyone around you. You need to establish a standard of behavior that includes how you communicate, how you act, how you react and how you interact.

Jack Zenger is a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine. He recently posted: “Our ability and courage to speak honestly with one another is most certainly at the heart of treating one another with respect. Indeed our research on this leadership quality of integrity paints an interesting


39

picture. We found that leaders who received high scores on honesty and integrity also received high scores on the following five behaviors:

1. Approachable

2. Acted with humility

3. Listened with great intensity

4. Made decisions carefully

5. Acted assertively”

Trust, leadership and integrity all lead to other key traits of great leaders. A great career needs a strong foundation of honesty.


40


41

Managing our Volunteers “The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in the service of others.” M. Gandhi

If your organization relies on volunteers in some way, shape or form then you’ll know how difficult this area can be. Dealing with volunteers is not easy. And in many cases, this includes our own board members -so this section includes them.

In our 25 years of serving in groups of all sizes and focus, we have found that excellence in volunteer management, as a leader or participant, can be highly rewarding while, at the same time, it can also be unbelievably complicated and frustrating, if you aren’t well prepared.

We will break this chapter into three sections:

• Acquisition • Alignment • Action • Accountability

Acquisition Do you know and understand the stakeholders that you serve? Start there and define the attributes, demographics of the people and the opportunities for products and services to meet the gaps that those individuals may not know they need, have, or want.

Organizational & Role Definitions

As the leader, you must be sure to help define the operational lines of service and collaboration opportunities for your volunteers. The best way to build confidence in potential volunteers is to allow themselves to envision their service in a role and to define those roles well. From this we create a living document that can be used to communicate, resolve any potential disagreements around responsibility, and to expose any possible gaps in future products and services.


42

Skills Required for Each Role

Once the organizational roles are defined, then you must work with your team to define the required skills that a successful volunteer should possess. This should include a review of soft and hard skills and an assessment of their personality type. There are several fun and interesting tests you can use as you build and develop your team. Some more popular tests include: Myers-Briggs, DISC, animal, character role and even shape and color-based personalities. Find a fun one but don’t use it to classify or judge, as can sometimes happen with any question-based test that assigns a characteristic.

Job Descriptions & Responsibility

Finally, to complete the cycle for acquisition, you must lead your team to define job descriptions that eliminate as much ambiguity as possible and give order to coaching sessions in the future. Delegate this work to allow your team members to engage in the definition of what they will be responsible for delivering. Adjust the document as you learn more and keep it up to date so that it will serve as the outline for regular coaching sessions.

Alignment Getting more done with less people! Defining the roles and the process by which work is accomplished, is key to preventing lower performance results. Your role as a leader is to help clarify and drive ambiguity out of the operating environment. We encourage you to begin with simple words. It sounds so easy, but it is not. Here is a common example from the workplace. It starts with a simple statement, “Let’s all go have a nice lunch.”

Now, we promise that nearly every word in that simple statement is ambiguous and will lead to rampant dissatisfaction of the stakeholders if we don’t take the time to discuss, clarify and define a vision around the definition of success for that otherwise simple event.

“Let’s all,” - exactly who are we speaking about, by role or even better by name.


43

“Go have,” - is that a comment on how we will travel, the mode of transportation or something else?

“A Nice Lunch,” what would make it nice, are you buying, what time do we have lunch, is that today or someday?

As with any simple statement, we should be curious and ask questions, confirm assumptions and make sure we have a clear plan, before we enthusiastically jump to conclusions that would lead to a “terrible lunch.”

Survey of Volunteer Skills and Attributes

An excellent method of improving your volunteer skills in aggregate is to deploy a regular survey, or a volunteer database, to manage your most valuable resource, the composite value of your volunteer’s skills, network of associates, knowledge, experience and attributes. If you need to encourage participation, a quarterly prize for those whose information you maintain is a reasonable price to pay for up-to-date knowledge.

Goals for Individuals and Teams

To performance manage and measure continuous improvement, each team and individual should be given goals to accomplish, with dates and acceptance criteria. I have found the best goals are so big, that one person working alone can’t achieve them alone. It requires collaboration, team building and builds a sense of team work that will serve the organization for years to come. Anytime a goal is so finite that it promotes isolation and self-interest, the group has suffered. I think a balance of individual and team goals is so very important we highly recommend that you don’t allow individual silos of narrow focus to work against your organizational goals. Watch for these ideas as they are budding and coach against any ability for a volunteer to achieve this method of serving.

Training

As a leader, you should plan and expect to support your team with the tools and training they need to be successful. Everyone, can benefit from continuous training, to include classes, reading, strategic thinking


44

and many other forms of professional improvement at the forefront of your service or industry. As the leader, you must set the example and demonstrate new learning through engaging conversations, listening to the needs of your volunteers.

Coaching

As a leader, you should seek coaching for yourself and your volunteers. This is regular conversations providing detailed feedback as close to the observation as possible to the person being coached. When done properly, it is the most impactful and effective use of time for both parties. Be as specific as possible, look for people doing the behaviors that lead to success and coach out the behaviors that may lead to lower results. There a many good books on the proper use of this technique, but very few of us take the time to learn new techniques.

Recognition

A quick note on volunteer recognition. Your authors have seen many chapters of the PMI® run volunteer appreciation events once a year. While this sounds very nice we would like to suggest that it’s a mistake. Volunteer recognition evenings are great only for two people: the volunteer and the board members shaking their hands. If that’s all you really want to do, then that is fine.

But we think the volunteers should be appreciated in front of the whole chapter or in front of as many people as possible.

So how about appreciating a small group of volunteers every event of the year? It becomes their special night with possibly their family in attendance and in front of lots of people there for other reasons. To us, this is a much better way to extend your appreciation for jobs well done.

Action

Making progress daily is the key to achieving goals. Progress over perfection, is the motto of every successful implementation of behavioral change by a leader. All too often, we can forego progress, because we have sacrificed it on the altar of BIG changes. When an incremental and iterative framework of change model, produces better


45

results, given the speed of change in today’s world. The pace of change is getting faster and not any slower. The techniques used in the past are becoming less effective and new techniques are required as people and processes become more complex.

We have seen some chapters create a volunteer committee that reports to the board. If you have a lot of volunteers contributing to your chapters success in many different ways that this committee is a great idea. The members of the committee are in charge of selecting the volunteers, on boarding, and tracking their activities. This committee is also the first line of dealing with issues as we talked about in the previous section. They would also be in charge of a clear set of definitions and expectations for each role and maybe even time tracking if required.

Plan

All too often, when a team is new or the pressures to perform are upon the team, there is a false sense of urgency to start producing something, ANYTHING! As a leader, you should remind the team that a good plan is worth so much value, throughout its lifetime. It should be the first product your team produces, with a sense of balance of duties, a vison for success and a measurable time horizon. Then make it visible and readily available for others to see, discuss, measure and get a sense for the work, the timeline and then track to completion. Print it, post it on a visible or virtual “wall” so it is seen by every volunteer on a regular and frequent basis.

Collaborate to Achieve More

As a leader, you should create an environment, where everyone has an important contribution, senses the value of that contribution and feels accountable for delivering their part of the3 team goals. Watch for words from your volunteers like “I am just a.” This is a verbal indicator that they may not see the value or have individual self-esteem issues, that you can respond to in a coaching role, to reset their perception.


46

Set & Track Interim Milestones

As a leader, you should help your volunteers “right size” their focus, by creating interim milestones, that create an environment of achievement, along the path to ultimate success. If your annual growth goal is 100 new volunteers, create monthly quotas, tied to weekly actions, that will give the team early indications on the journey to achieve the annual goal. Then adjust your daily actions to respond to the measures you are experiencing. It provides an environment of no surprises, interim success or failure feedback and an opportunity to do something sooner than later. Measure, measure, measure! It will serve to change behaviors.

Accountability As a leader, once your team is up and performing, you must be vigilant to observe and address gaps, that lead to bigger issues. In my experience, when issues arise it is generally in the areas of mission alignment of the volunteer, vision of where the organization is going or basic values. Values are best defined, by James Clawson in his book “Level Three Leadership” as VABE’s. That is the person’s individual values, attitudes, beliefs and expectations. Once you assess these in an individual volunteer, through curious questions, looking for organizational alignment, you may find gaps, with which you can discuss the proper plan of action to gain alignment.

“Only the Title, Please”

As a leader, you may encounter a “volunteer” who is seeking only the position for the title that comes with the assignment. Coaching this form of volunteer, out of your organization may be your only recourse. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen more often than it should.

Hidden Agendas, Changing Agendas

Sometimes people volunteer for positions with all good intentions but have a very difficult time delivering. We’ve seen this so many times and the results can be anything from uncomfortable to disastrous. Volunteers need to be given a clear set of expectations before they accept the position.


47

• Time • Effort • duration of commitment • and more.

They need to clearly understand that by accepting the position, they are making a commitment to more than just yourself or the board but to all members of the chapter or Association as well. Having said that, our experience shows that many will nod up and down and guarantee their commitment at the beginning.

If you end up with volunteers that are not pulling their weight or not meeting expectations, however uncomfortable you might find this, they need to be told and given a very polite warning that they need to live up to your expectations or they will be asked to step aside. If things don’t change, you need to pull the trigger and replace them. We know that this sounds a little rough, but the members expect no less from you.

We tend to treat our volunteers too gently. We, you and they, need to understand that we are a business and we need to behave like a business, not a club. As employees need to be managed so do volunteers and, most importantly, a commitment is a commitment.

But not everyone is in it for the right reasons. Hopefully you can create a process to bring on volunteers that are there to contribute and to be able to identify those who are there for something other than what it really should be.

One of your authors has seen this scenario play out but with a very ugly twist. The volunteer wouldn’t leave and started threatening legal action. Obviously, this is not something that you want to happen so the warning here is to make sure that you have that door available to you. Review the bylaws and make sure that legally you can replace people and during the on-boarding process, make sure that everyone understands the rules.


48


49

Communicating is a Science

Great communicators are well recognized in every organization. So are the poor ones. Which one are you?

I have a keynote speech I love doing called ‘What’s in Your Communications Engine?’ The foundation of this session suggest that communicating is a science, not an art. Each communication ‘project’ should be approached in three phases:

• The preparation • The delivery • The follow-up

The Preparation

Stop before you speak, present or write. Think about your audience. Who are they, what is their problem, issue or need that you might be able to address? Where are they on the decision tree or influence scale? Put yourself in their seats for just a moment and imagine that you are listening to you!

Go over the environment in which you are delivering. If this is an in-person presentation, is the technology in place and does it work for you? Is the room big or small enough to make the message easy to receive?

If this is a written report, do you understand the level of detail that your audience really requires? Do you really understand who the readers are?

In any case, are you ready for all possible responses? Are you prepared for the questions? Are you ready for the objections?

There is no replacement for good preparation. Slow down. Do your homework and go in with confidence.

The Delivery

Let’s keep this one short and sweet – practice, practice, practice. Or proof, proof, proof. Many of us spend too much time creating pretty Powerpoint (or in my case, Prezi) presentations and too little time


50

making sure we deliver well. Practice a speech or presentation in front of a loved one, a peer or even a one month old baby. Practice a one-on-one sales call in front of a mirror. Have someone in your life read your report first. Get a professional to read your article before publication if it is that important.

A well delivered message is imperative to your success and thus you need to spend time reviewing and practicing before delivery.

The Follow-up

Here’s the part where many of us fall down. We need to spend time afterwards thinking about how we did. Our follow-up will address questions like:

Did my audience understand my message?

Do they have enough information as a result of my presentation or report?

Did I deliver as well as I could have?

Was I prepared enough?

Is there anything I could do better next time?

Communicating is a science. It should not be taken lightly. We need to prepare, practice and learn from our experience. Great communicators are well recognized in every organization. So are the poor ones.

Which one are you?


51

3 Ways to Say Thank You

When was the last time you said, ‘thank you’ unexpectedly to someone on your team?

This past weekend was our Canadian Thanksgiving – a wonderful time to spend with family, eat way too much and give thanks. This weekend always gets me thinking about our professional lives and the art and science of saying ‘thank you’.

I am talking about the unexpected “thank you” and not the obligatory thank you. The latter is required politeness and professionalism. The former is good relationship management.

I try to make a point of saying thank you to people in my professional life, unexpectedly, as often as I can.

Here are three ways that work for me.

An impromptu lunch. Not too fancy and certainly not expensive. Maybe just a sandwich on the corner but a time for you and someone on your team to talk. The way this really works though, is to spend that hour or so talking about everything other than work. Get to know them, dig into their pastimes and hobbies and find out a little bit about the family. This kind of impromptu chat can be so appreciated by people at work. The final 10 minutes is the ‘thank you’ – a sincere expression of gratefulness for the part they play on your team.

Write a letter. If you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that this is an ongoing theme of mine. Get your letterhead with your name on it – it is not that expensive. Handwrite a sincere expression of appreciation and stick it in the mail or drop it on their desk. In this case, without the lunch, you might even consider a gift card – the local liquor store or coffee shop or even bookstore. I can tell you that nine times out of 10 that person has never received a letter of appreciation from anyone professional in their life.

Create a monthly or quarterly award program for you to recognize one or even a few people for their effort and hard work. Forget the


52

plaque and the picture on the wall. Give them a card with the gift card inside and hold them up in front of everyone for a genuine thank you.

A couple of words of warning. Don’t do any of this too often as it will seem as ingenuine. And on that awards program, if you started it and don’t repeat it as promised forevermore you will lose face and credibility very quickly. I’ve seen this happen way too often so don’t do it.

Note that my ways of saying ‘thank you’ do not include email, texting or any other electronic format.

So, who deserves a thank you from you this week? Go get ‘em.


53

Are You Practicing ‘Good Meetings’?

Do people leave your meetings saying “That was a really valuable use of my time” or “What a great meeting!”? Or do you hear “What a waste of time” as they are walking out the door?

It is so easy to bash meetings: a waste of time, poorly organized, a lousy chair, no real purpose, out of control.

A company called Meeting King Consultants surveyed their customers and heard that:

• 37 percent of employee time is spent in meetings • 47% consider too many meetings the biggest waste of time • 39% of meeting participants admitted to dozing off during a

meeting • over 70% brought other work to meetings

But why just bash meetings? Why not fix them?

Great meetings can be very worthwhile, valuable and important to the cause. The same survey as above said “92% of meeting attendees value meetings as an opportunity to contribute to the organization”

So how do we ‘do’ good meetings?

In my mind, there are four major components to good meetings:

a good foundation

purpose

structure

measurement

A good foundation means that we are going to meet with all the right pieces in place: people, facility, food, documentation and technology. The first 10 minutes of a meeting is not the time to realize that you don’t have the key people involved. Meetings are not the time to be


54

wasting other people’s time and energy when they really don’t need to be there. Early morning meetings require coffee. Meeting between noon and 1pm require lunch. The facility needs to be the right size, all required documentation needs to be available during the meeting and you need to make sure that your technology works. A solid ‘foundation’ will position the rest of the meeting for success.

Purpose means that we all know why we are in the meeting. Too many meetings waste too much time because we really don’t need to meet. Every meeting should have a declared and stated purpose and every attendee should know why they are there.

Structure is more about the mechanics of the meeting: a chairperson, a scribe and a timekeeper. An agenda that is distributed ahead of time, that we follow and that we stay on top of. Minutes from previous meetings are reviewed at the beginning and not the end of each meeting. Ground rules or terms of engagement on which we all agree: respect for people’s time and opinions, timeliness and more. Someone recently suggested that your agenda should include all questions that need to be addressed in the meeting.

Measurement means that we go back and ask ourselves and others if the meeting did what it was supposed to do. This ideally is addressed before we adjourn the meeting. It always brings back the purpose of the meeting and reminds us that we weren’t there just to waste our time and that we had a purpose in mind. Some people might take the second step to ask how we could have spent the time any better.

We need to stop wasting our time and the time of others with lousy meetings. Our meetings should be purposeful, well-run and efficient. They should have a goal in mind and everybody involved should be able to benefit from the time spent. Anything short of this is an example of bad meeting practices.

Is it time you looked at your meetings and asked yourself, or others, how you are doing?

Are you practicing good meetings?


55

Membership Development

“We have had three big ideas at Amazon that we have stuck with for 18 years, and they are the reason we are successful. Put the customer first. Invent. Be patient.” J. Bezos

Can it really be that simple? If your association strategy is to serve a chosen community, it certainly can be that simple. As we look back, the groups that do well have a focus like no others in the delivery of their products and services. Maintaining this over-riding mantra to serve and put the customer/member first, followed by excellent market and stakeholder segmentation, based on empirical data, will position your group to be THE leader in your area of service. Membership streams into your organization, can begin in many forms. Good stakeholder identification, beyond the obvious first line member group, will open your potential membership landscape. Be creative, consider all the ideas for potential members, then prioritize them and develop and plan to market, acquire and retain those members.

Acquisition

The least expensive, in terms of time and money, pathway to acquire members is a professional reputation for excellence and sincere attention to customer satisfaction at the individual level. As the leader, you will be exposed to all forms of feedback on your organization. It is your job to promote process excellence to address and respond to all feedback from members. Social media has exploded in this space, not always with the message you prefer, so your organization should have a robust social media team and process to quickly and visibly manage this area of member satisfaction. What you do to the least of these members, will speak to the community about your heart to serve the community and your members.

Mission, Vision and Values

As the leader, you must make your mission, vision and values as simple and clear as possible to help members see your values. We recommend this for two reasons. First so potential members can envision


56

themselves as being aligned with your organization and second, so it will sustain the test of time and set the foundation for member retention. Well written, these artifacts seldom change and provide long term value for your ongoing efforts, year after year, decade after decade.

Alignment

The primary drivers behind members joining your association are networking, regular and special events, training and community relationship building. THE number one predictor of membership growth is how well your organization makes a potential member feel during their first opportunity to engage with them. We recommend you use several strategies to accomplish this goal: face to face, your online presence, emails, new member coupons, membership events and every innovative idea your team can imagine. Try new things, find what works, who the event attracts and use a method to track, which of the marketing methods is most effective & efficient.

Action

Create a comprehensive membership plan to diversify and manage every demographic segment of your potential community. For current members, be sure your products and services remain fresh and growing, to retain them. Acquiring members is expensive, so continue to invest in their advanced products and service needs.

Create a view of your membership from a number of different aspects to include: industry, company, years of professional experience, professional certification, age, sex, home zip/postal codes, work zip/postal codes, etc. All of this will produce invaluable insight into new products, programs and services that may meet a need for the industry, company or demographic groups, that you uncover in your analysis. Examine this information several times a year and track it year over year to uncover the data that will separate you and make you organization more valuable to members.

Listen

The lost art of listening, can be the single most important factor for your organizations membership excellence, to include growth and


57

retention. We see regular examples of bad customer experiences. Members who attempt to give feedback are discounted, ignored or left dissatisfied in some manner. With decades of board experience, one of us came has created a great method of responding to complaints from association members. It is an easy three step process:

1) Let them know you have heard their feedback, by repeating it back to them. This forces you to focus solely on their message and confirm to them that you have heard and internalized their feedback.

2) Let them know that you are willing to work their issue without a commitment of priority or deadline.

3) Ask them to assist the organization by joining the volunteer or advisory teams, to help add visibility and value to the issue they have raised.

Be Authentic

Trust and authentic service to others is the new untapped foundation of relationship management.

The more positive cycles a member has with your organization, the deeper their relationship is with your organization. Promise less and deliver more. Be careful, when making promises you will have trouble keeping. When you promise, you must deliver. Otherwise, it will be deemed as a failed or faint-hearted attempt, to simply avoid conflict. Let your responses be firm, cautious and complete. Members will appreciate your honest comments, even if they may be less than satisfied with the outcome.

Feedback

Deeply invested members in your association are priceless to your long-term success. Members who are deeply invested, will deeply engage and give you feedback on what is working for them and what expectations are not being met. Therefore, you must find ways to collect regular and frequent feedback, using a wide variety of tactics and methods. At face to face events, you can assess feedback in verbal and survey collection methods. The authors have even used live polling to collect feedback on a series of issues. Your online presence should have a place for


58

feedback to be directed to the leaders, at all times. An annual comprehensive survey should be executed that covers all the important goals that your organization is tracking. All feedback is a gift and all failure is leadership failure.


59

Event Management

The core to any association is the delivery of content. When we ask our members why they are part of this association or community, the top three answers are:

• education • networking • jobs • and these three things can only come in the form of some kind

of event. • Associations run different types of events throughout the year: • monthly meetings • annual conferences • webinars • career days • professional development days

Let’s look at each one of these separately.

Monthly Meetings

Someone once told us that the key to getting a new member to stick around for a year or more after joining are the events they attend and the presence of the education and networking components above. If they learn something new and meet someone new - they will come back.

Monthly events, or meetings, are typically the core of content delivery for most associations. Local chapters are responsible for organizing these events that will deliver the content and networking that members expect.

You can’t please everyone all the time. It would be unusual that all 10 or 12 of your events hit the nail on the head for me every time. Your events should be designed to attract the largest widest audience as possible, but it isn’t easy.


60

Let us start with some thoughts on general format.

Every event should have a networking portion at the front end. This means that no one sits down at the tables and stares at the wall or talks to the people they know. Close off the table area or the room where you will be eating to force people to network.

The dinner thing isn’t totally necessary these days. We remember a chapter of the PMI® running monthly meetings that included a sit-down three-course dinner for years and years. With the membership of just over 6000, they were attracting about 150 people each month to these events. One year, the board decided to experiment without the dinner, moving the start of the event a little earlier and get people out by about 8 o’clock. Their numbers swelled to over 300 every single time.

If you can cut your expenses to something reasonable (i.e. without the dinner) we suggest that you try to run the events for nothing. Use your chapter budget to present these monthly events at no cost to your members. Your sunk cost will include space, coffee and tea and maybe a snack but ideally you have other activities that can cover these costs.

This last point gets us to the issue of alcohol. These days, we learned that it is not necessary to serve alcohol, especially if you are not serving dinner. If you are still doing the dinner thing, then unfortunately the cash bar is the norm and your costs will climb with the bartender charges and minimum $ amounts.

Your speaker should never go over one hour and your sponsor messages should each be limited to 2-3 minutes maximum. Chapter business should be kept to a minimum unless it’s your Annual General Meeting.

If I’m a new member and I’m looking for networking, education, professional development units and maybe a job, I would be thrilled at an event that looks like this:

5:30 pm Networking 6:30 Welcome, announcements and sponsors 6:45 speaker 7:45 close and networking


61

Your speakers should be as generic as possible, in order to attract as many people as possible. If you advertise a speaker that will address a topic that is really narrow, your audience will be much smaller than one speaking about something that we all are interested in.

Be careful about polling your audience and asking them what they want. We have seen decisions being made by event planners based on a request from a small proportion. However, a good look at the response rate will show that well under 5% had made the suggestion.

“Based on audience feedback, this month’s speaker will tackle the topic of advanced quality management.” This event is not going to sell even though 5% of the chapter said they wanted someone to speak about quality management. Be careful of making decisions based on feedback from a percentage of the population.

Great topics that will always attract larger audiences:

• leadership • communication skills • negotiating • managing stress • time management • dealing with difficult people

topics that will typically fall flat for the larger portion of the audience:

• any story about one project only unless it is really topical in the area and contains lots of ‘juicy details’

• advanced technical topics. In the project management world space, this would include risk, quality, planning control, contracting, procurement. (hummmm sounds like the PMBoK)

• introductory technical topics. repeat the list above

and any presenter who represents a vendor. This last point is really important as you are only getting get one view of the world and most likely a pretty good sales pitch. Do a few of these in a row and I’m never coming back.


62

Many of the following ideas come from our survey of 25 past presidents of PMI chapters conducted in 2016.

If you want to serve those looking for a job, hold a job scrum within every meeting - recruiters included. Make it really quick and give recruiters and any other organization no more than 15 seconds to pitch the position or positions. At the end of the 15 seconds, they point to a space in the room and tell people to meet them there at the end of the night if they are interested. This is a really great idea for the job hunters and makes life very simple for everyone. But it has to be fast and it has to managed by a very strong facilitator who can cut people off as they go overtime. That’s alright. They will learn for next time.

Some chapters cover a very large area so offering monthly events in multiple sites was suggested. Obviously, the work involved multiplies numerous times but with good delegation and separate teams of people to manage each location, this can be done

Some chapters have a difficult time finding locations at which to hold their events. An idea… get local companies to host an event and provide free attendance to all of their employees in return. This also serves to be a great marketing tool for non-members working in an organization.

Buy your own projector, especially if you are changing locations all the time.

Do a ‘birds of a feather’ activity at the start of every event. Take 10 to 15 minutes at the start of every event to give everyone an opportunity to meet someone new. As we said earlier, if your new members meet someone new every event they will always look forward to the next one.

Set up a concierge desk at every meeting for questions. This could be just one member who can answer questions about new membership, certification, courses and other related topics.

Annual Conferences

Full disclosure, one of the authors started his own project management conference in 1997 and grew it to four countries and many cities, running hundreds of events over the years. So, some of these


63

suggestions comes from many years of experience. But as well, both authors have spoken at many events throughout the years and have observed some of the good and some of the bad.

There are many ways to deliver an annual conference to your members. You may do a one-day event with keynote speakers and track sessions, it might be a two-day event of the same style, or it could be one day with just one speaker in a workshop format. In the world of the PMI®, we use words like professional development days, symposiums, annual conferences and, depending on the chapter you were speaking to, these titles are all interchangeable regardless of the content.

For this section, we will focus on the one or two-day event with keynote speakers and track sessions, a very common product out there.

This type of event can be very attractive to a very large base of members so long as you follow a couple of rules:

Keynotes must deliver topics that will be of interest to everyone in the crowd. This means inspirational stories and or sessions on leadership, communications or the likes. If it is a plenary session (one speaker to all) like all keynotes are, you must avoid topics that are advanced in nature or too basic or one industry related. In the PMI® circles, topics to avoid would include agile because not everyone is into agile these days, anything around the PMBoK because not all of us are interested in the PMBoK, or even some of the futuristic topics like artificial intelligence or digital transformations or the like. Your keynote should stick to topics about inspirational stories, personal development, leadership, and career development advice for the audience, regardless of their level.

Track sessions should be no longer than 75 minutes or 90 minutes each and offer options to everyone in the audience so that no one will be disappointed with the selection. This means advanced and introductory topics running against each other, agile, risk, quality topics sprinkled throughout and even some soft skills as options for those who want them.

Depending on the size of your conference, you might be looking at somewhere between three and five breakout rooms per timeslot. Anything less than three will probably not offer enough variety.


64

The ideal breakout room size is about 30 to 50 people so with a conference or event of 150 people, three rooms would be ideal. An event with 1000 attendees might be thinking larger rooms but at least five options per timeslot.

If you are running an annual conference, you would be wise to pull together an advisory board but remember that they are “advisors” and not decision-makers. One of your authors used to run an advisory board for every event he held over 20 years. At the beginning of each meeting, he would remind everyone that they are advisors and that in the end, their words and suggestions would be taken into account. This gets back to the comments we made earlier about being careful of who you listen to. You may have one person on your board adamant about a topic but as a conference director, or board member, you may know differently. Don’t fall into the ‘topic trap’ just because one vocal person thinks it’s a good idea.

Having said that, an advisory board is a great way to test the waters and run ideas by people. It is also a great way to reach out to the community through the members to find great speakers, sponsors and other volunteers. And note, your advisory board is not just made up your association board members but should include regular members, sponsors and vendors and maybe even a few past speakers. This way you will get some great advice about past events and what went right and what went wrong and what we should do going forward.

We have seen many variations on pricing for these events. We would like to make a note here that even though you are a not-for-profit organization, this does not mean that your event can’t make a profit. In fact, in most cases this is the biggest profit-making event of the year so don’t blow it. Because of this event and the money it leaves every year in the account, chapters are able to provide a lot of other free services and/or discounted products.

We suggest you price one day at your event in line with any other one-day training available in your marketplace. If your local vendors are offering a two-day course for $350, why do you need to run an event with multiple speakers, professional development units, a vendor showcase and great food for $150 for two days. This does not make


65

sense. Our suggestion is to make the price attractive but not way off the local standard for one or two days of training.

Vendor showcases are great and everyone loves them but these folks should not be presenting in the track sessions.

Webinars

Webinars are relatively new to most chapters.

The upside is that they are attractive to dispersed audiences and people who are interested in the topic or professional development units and who don’t have the time to get to the in-person event. They cost very little and, coming from a webinar speaker himself, they are easy to attract great speakers.

The downside is that they are technically difficult to run.

If you’ve never done a webinar for your chapter before, we suggest you start slowly and simply. Find someone, or an organization, that can run it for you and show you how. Designate someone on the board or in your chapter who can spearhead these offerings. Once you can run them on your own without any help, make sure that your designate has a backup in someone that they are training along the way.

There are many tools out there that you can use to deliver your webinars. Speaking directly to the PMI® chapters out there, at the time of writing, your head office has a contract with Adobe for the use of Adobe connect. All chapters have access to this tool. However, like any of these tools, they are not easy to run and so you should have someone that really knows what they’re doing. It is no fun having 50 or 150 people logged-in for a presentation online and have something technically go wrong.

But if you have the expertise available, these are great offerings. The best part of all is you can attract speakers for very little cost or even free, from around the country. All you have to do is be available for one hour to present online to your audience.

Timing is pretty simple: our suggestion is 7 PM your local time. This will provide you with the largest audience possible.


66

Career Days

This is an event that many chapters of associations love to run maybe once a year. If you have large number of members joining because they are looking for work, this is a very much appreciated effort. Bring in as many vendors and recruiters as possible and make them pay a nominal sum for a tabletop. When I say nominal, I mean $500 - $1,000. And while it is called ‘career days’ you may want to consider a Saturday event. They don’t have to be long as it doesn’t take long to make the contact for either party involved. We’re not talking about full-fledged interviews but rather establishing an interest that can be followed up later.

Professional Development Days

Most chapters of the PMI®, where your authors are most experienced, use this term for one day workshops or courses delivered by one instructor. You can install sponsors but frankly the are sitting around doing nothing for most of the day. This is a one-day course, with workbooks and breakout sessions.

Our members really want to go deep in many topics and this is how you do it. Agile, leadership, career development and more are great topics for this kind of product offering. Ideally, something north of 15 people with prime number at 30 to 40. Having said that, one of your authors has presented one of his one-day workshops to audiences larger than 150 people a couple times over. This is not an easy thing to do but well-managed, it is possible

Pricing should be set at the going rate of any other one-day workshop available by your own sponsors or vendors in your neighborhood. This means somewhere between $200 and $400.

**************

So, there are many ways to deliver great content to your members throughout the year. Many chapters will experiment with different products at different times in different formats and this is a really good thing to do. But remember that regardless of your success, changing it up every once in a while, is recommended. Polling your members is a good thing but be careful of listening to the loudest voices from the


67

smallest numbers. And get rid of those rubber chicken dinners and make those monthly events free!


68


69

Cool Ideas for Any Board Members

Create a Mentoring Program for your chapter. We have seen two types of programs of this nature within chapters:

For project managers - where we match senior or experienced project managers with newcomers or juniors. The risk here is setting expectations. Some people will come into a mentoring program like this expecting senior people to be there trainers and coaches. But properly set up and clear from the start, this can be a great program for chapters and very attractive to new members.

Career development - where we match organizations and people with those looking for jobs. In the author’s world of project management, many of our members join originally because they are looking for jobs and this kind of service would be very attractive. As well current members between positions will be interested.

Online voting for AGM – some chapters are struggling to get people out for their annual general meeting and thus the voting process. We have seen our voter participation double when this process is taken online. While it doesn’t get the people out to the annual meeting, it certainly does get members more engaged. There are many platforms out there that chapters can use and we encourage those that are already online with their AGM voting to spread the good news and help others.

Use vouchers for new members and renewals – One of your authors heard this term ‘Monkey Money’. A chapter offers $35 or $50 to new members once they join. They are not real dollars but rather ‘monkey money’. This is money that your new member can use for future event registration. It costs the chapter nothing and in the experience of the chapter we heard this from, there event participation rate has more than doubled over time.

Apply for the Chapter of The Year Award – In our case, the PMI® has a series of annual awards available to chapters in four different areas. We have heard of a few chapters applying for this award without really caring about the outcome but more in it for the process. This


70

application process allows for a thorough evaluation of the current state of your chapter and is well worth the effort.

Hire an administrative assistant – Many chapters are not large enough to do so but this is certainly worth considering for those that are getting to the point where it could pay off. By hiring a part-time administrative assistant for just a few hours a week, you will take the burden away from current volunteers for chapter event registration, management and more. As you grow, you can increase the hours and increase the amount of involvement.

President’s Council - most of the people that come onto the boards of our chapters or associations are doing so for the first time. As they grow through the 2 to 4 years of commitment, some will find themselves in the position of president or chair. The best thing this person can do is admit that it is the first time in this role and any advice and assistance would be worthwhile. Your authors have seen many chapters create a President’s Council. We see two different ways to do this. The Council can be made up of only past presidents and meet maybe once a year for general viewing and advice. Or the Council can be made up of an advisory board that meets as much as four times a year to be more involved. Either way, the advice and assistance is invaluable for any chapter president.

Corporate Council - a variation on the president’s counsel and much more engaging for the community, a corporate Council would meet on a fairly regular basis and offer observations and advice to the chapter board. This draws input from local and large organizations who would certainly be a source of members for the chapter. Getting them engaged is critical if you want their support.

Collegiate competition - many of our chapters are located in the midst of university and college campuses. By creating competitions around your knowledge areas you are engaging your future members and providing a great service to the community and the university or college.

Create regional committees - if you are serving a large geographical area it is a great idea to create regional committees to stimulate and manage


71

participation in local areas. It is impossible to serve everyone from one central location.


72


73

It Pays to Be Nice

I am on a plane today – winging home from Barcelona, Spain after a 10 day biking/touring/visiting our daughter vacation. The good news is that I am on this plane. The bad news is that I should have been on this plane yesterday.

You see, our son, Rob, is an Air Canada pilot which gives us ‘privileges’ as his parents. We are allowed to travel relatively inexpensively for personal reasons only, but on stand-by. You are never guaranteed a seat with this system and as parents of an employee, our ranking is so low that this set-up is often very risky. But sometimes you have to try and this is what we did for our return flight this week.

So yesterday it happened. We thought we each had a seat and in fact, we were assigned one when we checked in. But then ‘stuff’ happened and we were informed that they had room for only one of us.

I would like to say that Karen and I flipped for the seat but I can’t. We said our good-byes and I watched her walk down the ramp.

So, there I was with the five Air Canada ground crew looking at me and frankly, expecting the typical backlash they get when customers have problems. But what was I going to do? The system is clear, they followed the rules and I knew the risks. You can complain and get nasty or you suck it up, smile and be very nice to everyone.

I took the latter course. I did my very best to relieve them of any worries that I was upset and would react in a way other than the way I did. I lightened the mood fast, smiled and even made them laugh.

It really does pay to be nice. While the experience sucked, lots of good things happened. The details aren’t important but rest assured, when I arrived back the next day to check in (this time with a booked seat) they were thrilled to see me. An old friend!

So here I sit, on my way home, care of Air Canada Rouge and thinking that:


74

Rules are rules and if you understand them up front and they don’t go your way, your job is to smile and say thanks anyway.

Smiling at people who work in a stressful situation is good for them and it might just be good for you.

When everything starts to go wrong, the more you smile, show respect for those you are dealing with and take deep breaths the better things will work out.

And finally

Being a parent of an Air Canada pilot has it’s rewards because he is a great guy – not because you get to travel (almost) free.


75

Who is Your Coach?

Wayne Gretzky has a coach and he’s arguably the best hockey player in the world. Lebron James has a coach. Most great artists have coaches. And many people in business today have coaches. My brother, past managing partner of a major law firm in Canada had a coach. Many senior executives have coaches. And I have a coach.

Who is your coach?

It doesn’t matter how good you are or where you stand in your profession – you should have a coach.

A quick search of a definition reveals ”The coach develops specific skills for the task, challenges and performance expectations at work.”

In the book The Keys To Our Success in which we collected one chapter from 25 different project managers asking of the question “What is the one nugget that you take into every project that makes you successful?” my contribution was entitled “Never Going Alone”. In it, I stress the need to find people around you who can complement you, fill in the gaps and help you get through those tough periods in your career.

As a project manager or business analyst or leader, we are constantly challenged by people, circumstances and change in our day-to-day work. We cannot be expected to deal with these issues on our own. In fact, our senior management team does not expect us to deal with these issues alone. As I look at my team members in the past, the most impressive and the most successful of them sought out advice through coaches, mentors or simply close advisers on a regular basis. And they freely admitted to this. This screams strength and confidence to me.

The smartest of us know where we are weak, know when we need help and when to seek out people who can provide that support.

Coaches come in many different flavours: formal or informal. The formal coach is most often hired on a contract basis and paid for their services. The formal type of coach is typically a general business coach but extremely valuable in any type of environment. The informal coach


76

could be a friend, family member or peer who agrees to meet on a fairly regular basis to help you when required.

In either case this advice, or relationship, is extremely valuable.

So, think back to that moment most recently when you were stressed or confused or had to make a big decision and ask yourself how different that journey could have been if you had someone to talk to immediately or within a few days.

Or ask yourself where you will be in 3, 5 or 10 years and how you are going to get there. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a coach to help you plan that journey and hold you accountable for the action items required to get there?

Regardless of how great or confident you are, I guarantee a coach in your life will change things dramatically.

Once again I ask, who is your coach?


77

Temporary Close

We weren’t sure what to call this final chapter. ’Conclusion’ or ”Final Chapter” didn’t seem quite right so we are going with Temporary Close. As we said at the beginning, this body of knowledge is a bit of a journey, so we are not done yet.

We hope you have learned from this and picked up some nuggets that can help you in the great work that you do.

But we encourage you to forward your ideas and experiences in order to help future board members as well.

Our promise is that we will keep this up to date and release future editions as required hopefully accumulating knowledge and experiences from all of us.

Until the next edition, thank you, once again, for all that you do for all of us.

David and Kevin

Date post:	14-Jul-2020
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	0 times
Download:	0 times

Swimming A Guide to Association Chapter ... - David BarrettSwimming . in the Deep-End . A Guide to...

Documents