The Chairman's Gift Revisited

I wrote a blog post back in July 2012 called The Chairman's Gift. It's a pretty popular post, making most of my year-end Top Five lists, and capturing the eighth most number of pageviews from among the more than 600 posts that have appeared on this blog.

In it, I describe a tradition we have in our association of giving a gift to our outgoing Chairman of the Board. Unlike some other associations, who traditionally give a desk clock or a Mont Blanc pen in these circumstances, our tradition is to give something with unique value and importance to the person receiving the gift. We want to get our outgoing chair something he or she will truly remember. Something he or she will appreciate just as much as we appreciated his or her service as chair.

Over the years we have given a great variety of items, usually enlisting the secret help of the chair's spouse to help us identify the right thing. We just went through the ritual again at our Board's fiscal year-end retreat -- the place where we set our goals for the new year and one chair passes the gavel to the next. And the look on our outgoing chair's face when he opened his gift -- at that very moment, like a kid opening a box on Christmas day, before he had the box fully unwrapped, but when he realized what it was that we had given him -- that's what reminded me of the message I had written in that post seven years ago.

As wonderful as it is to thank, to delight, to touch the person who I've worked with for another successful year in leading our organization forward, the best part of this tradition continues to be the message it delivers to everyone else at the retreat.

The other folks sitting at the banquet tables, some of whom have been part of the association leadership for years and others who are attending their first event. Folks who may not have known what they were getting themselves into when they accepted the invitation to attend or to join the Board of Directors. Folks who had sat solidly in "listen-only mode" for the strategic discussions we had just had for the past day and a half.

To those people, most of all, the chairman's gift, and the manner in which it was given and received, demonstrates more than anything else we could do that this association is a family, and that we care about each other in ways that go beyond financial reports, strategic objectives, and key performance indicators.

And that, as I said seven years ago, is worth the extra time and expense we put into our chairman gifts.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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