Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry M. Robert

This short work is commonly known as “the classic manual of parliamentary procedure.” And if my experience is in any way typical, it is casually referenced far more frequently than its principles and procedures are rigorously applied.

As the blurb on the front flap describes:

Even groups which have their own constitutions or bylaws frequently state that procedures not covered therein shall be governed by Robert’s Rules. One might not be able to identify General Henry M. Robert, but almost everyone knows that Robert’s Rules is a standard manual outlining the conduct of meetings.

Something that surprised me is what that outline actually looks like. Here’s one I found on the Internet that’s very similar to the one reproduced in my copy of Robert’s Rules:

Got that? Ready to chair your first session, guv’ner?

Much more useful that this chart and the encyclopedic description of each line that follows is the few places where the General offers some practical wisdom for anyone seemingly foolish enough to go down this road of managing his parliamentary procedure.

The chairman should not only be familiar with parliamentary usage, and set the example of strict conformity thereto, but he should be a man of executive ability, capable of controlling men; and it should never be forgotten, that, to control others, it is necessary to control one’s self. An excited chairman can scarcely fail to cause trouble in a meeting.

Anachronistic with regard to gender, sure, but as important today as it was in 1905. Anyone who has spent any time in association board meetings has undoubtedly seen the contrasting results affected by chairs who meet with Robert's admonition and those who do not.

But there's more:

A chairman should not permit the object of a meeting to be defeated by a few factious persons using parliamentary forms with the evident object of obstructing business. In such a case he should refuse to entertain the dilatory motion, and, if an appeal is taken, he should entertain it, and, if sustained by a large majority, he can afterwards refuse to entertain even an appeal made by the faction, while they are continuing their obstruction. But the chair should never adopt such a course merely to expedite business, when the opposition is not factions. It is only justifiable when it is perfectly clear that the opposition is trying to obstruct business.

Another pervasive problem even today -- factions using the very forms of parliamentary procedure to bend an assembly to its will rather than to its own. Chairs should have none of it, and must be able to master those factions at their own game when needed.

Some final advice from the General:

A chairman will often find himself perplexed with the difficulties attending his position, and in such cases he will do well to heed the advice of a distinguished writer on parliamentary law, and recollect that

“The great purpose of all rules and forms is to subserve the will of the assembly rather than to restrain it; to facilitate, and not to obstruct, the expression of their deliberate sense.”

That seems far more useful to me that the entire Table of Rules. Err you might, but never do so in support of obstruction; only in your efforts to quell it and to allow the will of the assembly to sensibly take form.

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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.

My Top Five Blog Posts of 2019

I've been posting these Top Five lists at the end of every year for the last seven years. Over those seven years, a handful of posts have come to dominate them. Their popularity, it seems, feeds on itself, with more and more people accessing them every year (probably in part because I keep promoting them through these Top Five wrap-ups at the end of each year).

So, for this year I decided to do something different. Here's a look back at the five posts on this blog that received the most page views in 2019 -- excluding those that have appeared on previous Top Five posts.

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1. Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of democratic India. His daughter was Indira Gandhi, the woman who succeeded him as prime minister and was eventually assassinated. But as the pages of this remarkable book open, those things haven’t happened yet. The book is a collection of letters, written in 1931-33, when Indira was between 14 and 16 years old, and her father was serving time as a political prisoner.

Partly to help keep his mind active and partly to help his daughter develop an appropriate appreciation for world history, Nehru wrote these letters without notes or other reference materials, relying primarily on his own knowledge and beliefs of what had created and shaped the world around him -- thousands of years of history, from the beginnings of civilization, to the aftermath of the First World War and the initial stirrings of the Second.

And throughout all the letters in this long book, I think it is important to remember that, whatever the reader’s own political and economic beliefs, the words he is reading are the simple and straightforward prose of a loving father writing to his daughter.

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2. The Chief Detail Officer

In a linked TED talk, Rory Sutherland persuasively makes the case that organizations don't spend enough time working on the small stuff. That, in fact, there is a bias in most organizations that big problems have to be met with big solutions--solutions that have to be conceptualized by powerful people and executed with lots and lots of money.

Sutherland doesn't claim that approach won't work in some situations, but he comes out stridently for a different approach, embodied by something he calls the Chief Detail Officer, the CDO. This isn't the person responsible for coordinating all the details. It is the person responsible for finding small things that cost little that have tremendous impact and making sure they are done right and consistently.

I've seen the need for such an approach myself, and can cite at least one circumstance when some small detail meant a great deal to one of my association members.

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3. Closing the Office vs. Working From Home

Unusual winter weather and the changing nature of our technology and connectivity expectations causes me to first rethink and then abandon my association's "office closing" policy.

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4. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

It's one of the many "mini term papers" I tend to offer up, free of charge, to desperate freshman English majors the world over.

My overall theses: This is a story of a boy becoming a man, and the changes he has to go through in order to make that transformation. The boy is named John Grady, and there is an exchange between him and a criminal in a Mexican prison that pretty well describes the difference between boys and men.

The world does not often test the bravery of a young boy. But as he grows and begins to make his way in it, it will test him, and if the boy passes the test, he will no longer be a boy. Regardless of his age—and John Grady is sixteen—if he can stand up to world and hold his own, he is a man.

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5. Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Closing Time, in case you didn’t know, is Heller’s sequel to Catch-22, and I feel pretty much the same about it as I did about Catch-22. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t think I’ll read it again.

It is a book written by an older generation and, I fear, for an older generation. Heller constantly plays with the cultural touchstones of his generation, naming one of his characters Strangelove, and including a curly-haired writer named Vonnegut in several scenes. And like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, Closing Time's protagonist seems to move through time throughout the course of the novel.

It gets confusing, and much would probably be revealed on a close second read. Surely someone (if not Heller himself) has diagrammed the novel, and such an exercise would undoubtedly reveal that the protagonist is both the cause and effect of the novel’s action, with effect probably preceding cause in at least one situation. At least things feel that way.

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My thanks to everyone who has been reading what I've been putting up here. I hope you plan to stay engaged in 2020.

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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.

Image Source
https://www.fastweb.com/college-scholarships/articles/college-scholarships-2019-edition

Eight Is Enough

Eight years ago, on September 5, 2011, I made my first post on this blog. I called it "Recipes for Innovation," and in it, I talked about several things that were heavy on my mind at the time, including my then soon-to-be-ending first foray into blogging, The Hourglass Blog.

Since that time, I have managed to make a post appear here every Monday morning, a post almost always focused on some aspect of my professional experiences as an association executive. That has helped create a library of more than 400 posts, most of which I have indexed into one of the "Blog Topics" shown on my home page: Core Values, Generations, Innovation, Leadership, Member Engagement, Strategy and Execution, and Workforce Development.

But there are two other Blog Topics on that list.

Starting on September 24, 2011, with Women with Men by Richard Ford, I began the Books Read series, where, every other Saturday, I started posting a sometimes short and sometimes very long "personal take" on one of the more than 800 books that I've read. More than 200 such "personal takes" have since appeared on this blog.

And starting on July 13, 2013, with Columbia by Eric Lanke, I began the Fiction series, where I post, when the mood strikes me, some of my original fiction. Lately, that has been draft chapters from Dragons, my newest and as-yet-unfinished novel, appearing on every other Saturday, alternating with Books Read.

Now, truth be told, after eight years of consistent blogging, my creative energies have come to derive much more satisfaction from these two kinds of "Saturday" posts -- from Fiction and Books Read -- than they do from anything I'm continuing to post in for the "Monday" Blog Topics. Some weeks, I'm sorry to admit, it's a tremendous struggle to get something useful put together for Monday morning. It feels like I've already said everything I can in subjects like Innovation, Leadership, or Strategy and Execution.

So I'm making a change. I'm going to stop posting things here on Monday mornings, preferring to dedicate more of my time to composing the Saturday posts focused on the books I've read and the ones I'm writing. That, increasingly, is where my creative spirit wants to go, and, lately, it feels like I've been battling my own obligation to provide relevant Monday content.

If you've been a loyal reader of this blog, what can I say, other than 'thank you'? I hope you decide to keep on reading, because I'm certainly going to keep on writing.

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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.

Image Source
https://malaphors.com/2017/04/24/hes-really-ahead-of-the-eight-ball/

You Are The Association

This past week one of my staff members retired from working for our association. She has been with the organization for just over 30 years. At the celebratory lunch we threw in her honor I asked her how many former Executive Directors of the association she had worked with.

She she, somewhat matter-of-factly, that our association has had a total of five Executive Directors in its history, and that she has worked for four of them.

This was not the first time I had reflected on how much institutional knowledge we were losing with her (very well deserved) retirement, but her response really brought that reality to the surface for me. We're a small and somewhat long-tenured staff, but we had seen a handful of departures over the last few years, really bringing down our average years of service. Now that the 30-year veteran has retired, there's still one staff member with 20 years of service, another with 19, and then it's me, with 12. Since we have a total of 12 staff positions, that means that nine of the twelve have less tenure than me. Or to be precise, have been hired in the last 12 years under my leadership.

That is a very interesting way of looking at the situation. As the President/CEO (we switched away from the "Executive Director" title during my tenure), I always knew that I was the leader of the association, but being reminded that I was directly responsible for its staff team made me take a fresh look at the responsibility.

I've already written about how, when it comes to institutional knowledge, I can no longer rely on any of my Board members, since none of them had been in our leadership for longer than I have. And now, it's made apparent to me that I am among the longer-tenured staff members the association has.

It leads me to a startling conclusion. As the President/CEO, I am not just the institutional knowledge of the association, I, in fact, am the association, in a way that no single other person can be. Not only do I know where we've been, I also know where we're going and am actively working with Board and other staff members to make that happen.

It's a perspective, I think, that only long-tenured association executives can have.

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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.

Image Source
http://harbus.org/2018/personal-presentation/businessman-looking-in-mirror-pan_12170/

Meetings with Purpose

I think I've mentioned before that I got my start in association management as a meeting planner. When I started I had zero experience. It was entry-level, and someone simply gave me a chance to provide myself. I found that I had a knack for it, and pretty soon my career in association management was off and running.

I say association management, but honestly, for a time I thought I might be looking at a career in meeting planning. I even contemplated getting my CMP to help bolster that possibility.

But eventually I decided that it wasn't meeting planning that I was interested in. It was association management, and meeting planning had simply been my introduction to it.

That backstory affords me a different take on meeting planning than most meeting planners. With no wish to denigrate, meeting planners are cut from a different cloth than association management professionals who know how to plan meetings. The incentives and reward systems are different. To describe it as simply as I can, for the meeting planner the goal is that the meeting run smoothly. To the association management professional the goal is that the meeting achieves its purpose.

Now, these are not mutually exclusive goals. In fact, they support each other to such a degree that it's almost impossible for one to occur without the other -- but only in one direction. In other words, it's completely possible to have a meeting run smoothly that does not achieve its purpose, but it's next to impossible to have a meeting achieve its purpose if it doesn't run smoothly.

This one-way co-dependency creates a trap that too many association fall into. Knowing that they can't achieve their meeting's purpose without it running smoothly, they elevate the importance of a smooth-running meeting in all of their decision processes.

Smooth running means not going over budget, so let's cut a corner here. Smooth running means automated processes, so let's forget about customizing the name badges too much. Smooth running means the right number of box lunches, so let's enforce our rules about needing a ticket in order to get a lunch.

If you follow this logic long enough, you'll soon realize that you've stripped all the humanity out of your meeting. Or worse, you won't realize it. Instead, one of your attendees will point it out to you. I used to look forward to coming to your meetings, but now they feel so impersonal and regimented. I don't think I'll bother coming any more.

This is a major problem because almost every association meeting has the same common purpose: bring people together so that they can learn, connect, and have fun. Without that, there's no point in having the meeting in the first place. Your members are not coming to your meeting so that they can follow all the rules you've put in place to make sure the meeting runs smoothly. They're coming to your meeting so that they can learn, connect, and have fun.

That's the purpose of your meeting. Don't let your meeting planning get in the way of that.

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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.

Image Source
https://images.app.goo.gl/g7XHurAUmGTeULs48

The Lost Art of Reading Blogs

In last week's post I made a passing reference to one of the main reasons I keep blogging -- namely, that I enjoy having readers respond to the things I write. And I promised more on that subject this week.

Well, it's true. I do like having readers respond to the things I write here. But here's something else that's true. Almost no one ever does.

Here's a quick story. At this conference I attended a few weeks ago, I had a friend and colleague of mine mention the draft chapters of the novel I started posting here at the beginning of 2019. He told me that he hadn't gotten around to reading them yet, but that he had them bookmarked and was looking forward to diving it. Then he asked me what kind of feedback I'd received on them so far.

I looked at him and smiled. "You're the first person who's even mentioned them to me."

The look on his face was priceless. I don't think he thought it was possible. A: That I could post such a thing and not get any feedback on it. And B: That I would bother to post something like that if I wasn't getting any feedback on it.

Welcome to the world of blogs. Say whatever you want. Almost no one is going to read it and, of those that do, almost no one is going to have any kind of reaction.

That's okay. I get it. We're all busier than ever. And if there is a skill set that is increasingly absent in our society, it's the one associated with long-form reading and writing. You're more likely to get a reaction from a ill-conceived Tweet (assuming a bunch of additional ill-conceived Tweets count as a reaction) than you are from 500 words that you've carefully considered and curated. Sorry. #TLDR.

Which is why it's all the more remarkable when a reaction is actually received. Hey. I read this. I agree. Or I don't. Either way, thanks for putting it out there. I appreciate it.

That's a big part of why I keep doing this. Because when those connections are made the results can be pretty amazing. I've made friends. I've gotten consulting gigs. I've interacted with some of my favorite authors. All because I put my thoughts down in writing and posted them in the public forum we call blogs.

It's not for everyone. But for me it's been pretty satisfying.

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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.

Image Source
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ianm/2009/08/06/10000-unread-hotmail-emails/

Creating an Educated Workforce in Three Phases

Two weeks ago, I posted about an upcoming panel discussion I was asked to participate in -- a panel on how associations are successfully working to develop a better educated workforce for the industries they represent. That post can be found here.

Well, that panel happened at a conference I attended last Thursday, and I thought I would provide an update. Believe it or not, I had someone reach out to me over email, interested in hearing more. As a quick aside, having readers respond to the things I write here is one of the main reasons I keep blogging. More on that next week.

As I sat up there on stage listening to my co-panelists talk about the work their associations were doing to develop educated workforces for their industries, I quickly recomposed what I was planning to say in my head. I tend to do this a lot, seeing different (and sometimes better) patterns in things when forced to look at them through other people's eyes. Instead of focusing on the four stacked programs I described in my previous posts, I described what I saw as the three phases my association had (so far) gone through in our journey towards building a better educated workforce.

Phase 1 - Building college curriculum

My association's workforce journey really began with our members expressing a specific need. They would hire an engineer out of a good university, or a technician out of a good community college, and the individual would have no background or understanding in fluid power - the technology my association represents. The employer in question would have to spend two years training the graduate in things they felt should have been part of their educational experience.

To respond, our association began building partnerships with instructors at 2-year and 4-year colleges, and providing them with resources to develop the curriculum pieces they needed to teach our technology in the frame of their existing programs. We thought if the schools would only teach our subjects, the people hired out of those schools would be ready to go to work on day one.

Phase 2 - Developing middle and high schools programs

But it wasn't enough. Especially at the 2-year level, our curriculum was an elective, and too few students were electing to move into it. Now that we had the college education programs we wanted, we had to build a pipeline of students interested in studying those subjects.

That meant creating outreach programs for middle and high school students. We had to get younger people interested in and excited about our industry, so we built several programs designed to engage middle and high school students in fluid power-themed design/build competitions. Our most successful, the Fluid Power Action Challenge, started with twelve students in one competition, and has now grown to encompass more than a hundred events and 21,000 students.

Phase 3 - Stacking everything in the same communities

But that wasn't enough either. As those Action Challenges rolled out across the country we realized that it did little good that have a great middle school program in one community unless there was also a great high school and tech school program in the same community.

This is really when the strategy described in my previous post came online for us, where we are now consciously building "Fast Track to Fluid Power" Hubs in communities around the country. Each has a community-wide middle school Action Challenge, a series of local high schools with fluid power-specific programs in each, a central community college with a validated fluid power degree or certificate program, and, perhaps most importantly, a committed group of industry members willing to serve as judges, coaches, and mentors in these various programs.

After the panel, I got a lot of good feedback from people who had been in the audience. Evidently my comments had resonated strongly with them, but one consistent question kept coming up.

How? How does your association manage all of this activity?

I could tell the people asking the question were coming from a place of already over-taxed association resources, where any foray into workforce development felt impossible because they had no spare resources or staff people to dedicate towards it.

And I'm pretty sure my answer didn't help set their mind at ease. There is no magic formula. Like everything else in our world, if you want to succeed you have to dedicate resources to it. In our example, out of a staff of twelve, we have four full-time positions dedicated to these programs, including a newly-promoted Vice President of Workforce Development.

We certainly didn't get there overnight, but our Board, recognizing that "creating an educated workforce" is one of the four major objectives of our association, has supported this growth in resources every step of the way.

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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.

Podcasting Creates Interest and Excitement

Today we launched a podcast at my association. It's called Fluid Power Forward, and on it, we plan to interview interesting people who are helping to move fluid power technology forward. If you're interested, you can listen to our first episode here.

The project was fairly long in coming. The idea was first hatched at the tail-end of 2018, when I realized that there was a lot of interesting things going on in our industry, that we consistently presented and talked about those things at our workshops and conferences, and that podcasting might be a (relatively) quick and easy way to capture some of that content and push it out to a much broader audience.

As an avid podcast listener, I already had some ideas about how such a "show" could be packaged and delivered, but still what followed the initial idea was about six months of planning, developing, branding, rehearsing, recording, and packaging. As I write this today, I'm still a little surprised that we've got it up a running. I've got a soundboard and microphone at a table in the corner of my office, a love-hate relationship with Skype and Audacity, four episodes "in the can," appointments on my calendar to record two more, and plenty of lines in the water for future guests.

Lots of things surprised me along the way -- and I'm sure those surprises aren't over yet -- but one surprise that really stood out to me was how consistently the idea of doing a podcast was positively received by the people hearing about it.

My staff loves the idea. I've kept most of them somewhat at arm's length as we developed and learned how to deliver it. As you can see from the graphic, my face (and voice) is plastered all over this thing, and I think I instinctively knew that I needed to keep it close to my vest if it was going to sound authentic. But now that it's up and running I'm talking about it more broadly in the office and everyone seems engaged and excited by it.

But more than my staff, my members are also totally on board. For the first few episodes I reached out to members I knew well -- folks who I thought not only had interesting technology to talk about, but with whom I already had some kind of rapport. That, I thought, would make both me and them more comfortable, and help ensure that the first few episodes (which can often be clunky as the podcaster in question is learning their equipment and figuring out what they are really doing) go more smoothly.

When reaching out to them, I felt like I was asking them to do me a big favor. It's an experiment, I told them. If it turns out bad we won't use it. But they were all immediately on board. It's great, they told me. We'd love to participate. One even told me that his boss was especially interested and would be listening. Whatever they could do to help, just ask.

And now that the word is out that we're podcasting, the messages are starting to roll in from people who would like to get involved. I'm not naive -- for most this is an opportunity to promote themselves and their technology, but that's okay, because that's what the podcast is for. As I said, there are a lot of positive things going on in our industry, and generally speaking, not enough platforms from which to promote them.

In some ways, I suppose it's surprising to me that a fresh approach on an unmet need should be met with such interest and excitement. But I guess, in most ways, that shouldn't really be surprising at all.

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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.

Developing an Educated Workforce with Technical Colleges

I've been invited to speak at an upcoming conference I'm attending on how my association is successfully working to develop a better educated workforce for the industry we represent. I won't be speaking alone, since this is not a challenge that confronts only my industry. I'll be part of small panel of others, each of whom is trying to tackle the problem facing their industry in their own way.

My association, through its associated and strategically-aligned, tax-exempt charitable foundation, is addressing our industry's challenge on two fronts -- only one of which I think I will have time to talk about at the conference. That front has us partnering with 2-year technical colleges to create and support degree and certificate programs that teach the competencies our industry has already identified as representing the workforce skills they seek and have trouble finding.

But it's not just the technical colleges that get our attention. In order to make sure there are enough students in the programs that they offer, we also have to work with high schools and even middle schools in the same communities to make sure there is a "pipeline" of students interested in pursuing this line of education and getting jobs in this industry.

We actually use the word "pathway" when talking about these programs. We seek to create a pathway into our industry. We are building a series of programs that first introduce our industry's technology (i.e., fluid power) in middle schools, then provide fluid power educational experiences in high schools, then fluid power degrees and certificates in tech schools, and finally connections to jobs in the fluid power industry.

To help keep all these programs connected -- especially in the minds of the companies that support and want to engage with them -- we have recently organized them under a single brand, something we're calling the Fast Track to Fluid Power. “Fast Track,” we tell potential supporters and participants, is a workforce development pathway that connects local technical colleges with industry partners and high school teachers. The network creates awareness and interest in fluid power and leads students along a path that leads to careers in our industry.

There are four connected program pieces in this pathway:

1. The Fluid Power Action Challenge engages thousands of middle school students in learning about and having fun with fluid power. It raises awareness among students, educators, and parents. Industry partners serve as coaches and judges.

2. Fast Track High Schools are each equipped with fluid power lab equipment and curriculum. They teach real-world fluid power and generate interest in fluid power careers. Industry partners visit the schools frequently and provide mentorship and career encouragement.

3. Fluid Power Scholarships are offered to graduating high school students in order to pursue fluid power degrees or certificates at designated technical colleges. Industry partners serve on the scholarship review committee that makes funding decisions.

4. Fast Track Technical Colleges are schools with a 2-year degree program validated to teach core fluid power competencies. Industry partners provide on-going curriculum guidance and student internship opportunities.

Notice how we have defined a role for industry partners in each one of these connected programs. This, we have discovered, is absolutely essential to their success. The association can do a lot to provide support to the schools and to resource the programs, but only the companies in the industry itself can connect with the students and bring them into the positions that they are trying to fill. Their participation is a make-or-break proposition for our entire strategy.

These are some of the details and observations that I hope to share at the upcoming conference.

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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.

Image Source
https://www.amc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/787146/accessories-flight-keeps-mcchords-c-17s-airborne/

Keeping Up with the Waterfall

My association's Board of Directors has eighteen people on it. Whenever I'm comparing notes with other association executives about how big our boards are, I usually joke that I like having eighteen people on my Board because it guarantees that I can get at least twelve to show up at my Board meetings.

I'm only half joking. It's not unusual for three or four Board members to be unable to attend any particular Board meeting. Thankfully, these are not the same three or four Board members every time. It's just reflective of how busy everyone's schedules are and, increasingly, how little control we have over them.

But now a new dynamic has begun to creep into this environment. It's not just busy schedules keeping Board members away from Board meetings. It's job transitions keeping Board members from being Board members.

In the past month, for example, I had two such issues occur. One Board member got a new job at a company outside of our industry. That makes him ineligible (and frankly, uninterested) to continuing serving on our Board. Another Board member got a new job at a company inside our industry -- but that company already had a representative on our Board, and it's a violation of our bylaws to have two people from the same company on our Board of Directors.

I have an Excel document that I've been maintaining for years. It reflects an on-going record of every position on my Board of Directors, who has held each seat, how long each term is, and which positions are currently vacant. Because, like many associations, we stagger the terms on our Board, and because I've color-coded each block of staggered terms to better illustrate how long they last and when they become vacant, one past Board chair once referred to the document as my "waterfall" document, the color-coded blocks cascading down the page in something that appears something like a waterfall.

Keeping up with this waterfall has become a central function of my position. Development of future leaders is not something I can afford to ignore in my association, because there is almost always a Board vacancy that needs filling. And with these latest vacancies, two important things occurred to me as I was manipulating and updating this document.

First, I'm so glad I started this document. Keeping up with all these changes, and communicating clearly with the people that the Excel cells represent -- everyone knowing what position they represent on the Board, when their term starts and when their term ends -- would nigh well be impossible without it. In a very substantial way, it's amazing that there's never been a case when someone came to a Board meeting they shouldn't have or didn't think to call and provide a legitimate reason when they couldn't make one they were supposed to attend.

And second, it's time for a new joke. I like having eighteen people on my Board, not because it means I'll have at least twelve at my Board meetings, but because it means I'll have at least twelve of those positions filled.

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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.

Image Source
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-water-appear-white-while-going-over-a-waterfall.html

The Right Way

It's budget time at the association I work for. And what I mean by that is that the budget for our new fiscal year has been approved by our Board of Directors, and now it's time to code all our projected expenses for upload into our accounting system, and to prepare the worksheet by which all our staff members can be sure to submit their expenses to the right codes as their invoices come in throughout the year ahead.

It's a fairly straightforward yet tedious procedure. For a variety of reasons, much of it has to be done manually. Cutting and pasting from last year will give you a good start, but there are always just enough changes from one year to the next to force you to go through every item, line by line, to make sure each one has the right expense code attached to it, it had the right number, and that number is appropriately allocated for the months in which the expenses are likeliest to occur.

And while we were doing this, something obvious occurred to me. There are hundreds of different ways to code a year's worth of expenses. Reasonable people may have reasonable disagreements about how they should be coded. Some of those people may go so far as to say that their way of coding the expenses is the "right" way to code the expenses.

But, in truth, there is only one right way to code expenses -- and that is how the worksheet we take so much time creating says they should be coded. Someone may think that their way of coding expenses is better, is more efficient, or makes more sense. But those aren't factors that need to be taken into account.

The goal of the exercise, after all, is not to code expenses in the "right" way. The goal is to get everyone in the organization to code expenses the same way. A crazy set of expense codes, after all, is more valuable to the organization than a logical set, assuming that everyone understands and agrees to code their expenses in alignment with the crazy set, and refuses to do so with the logical one. In that case, it is the crazy set that actually provides more reliable and predictive information to the organization.

Remember that the next time you're in a group that seems to be arguing over the right way to do things. Getting it right is often far less important than getting everyone on board.

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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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Participation Tracking Is Not for the Faint of Heart

We track our members. We don't use face recognition software, metadata, or complicated algorithms. We use an even more diabolical mechanism. Microsoft Excel.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about the sometimes difficult work of maintaining a member participation tracking system in your association. A way of knowing how many and which programs or activities each member is participating in. When done consistently, it provides invaluable information about which members are engaged and which are not, which members are likely to renew and which are not, and which members you should be seeking to engage and which you should not.

I had a meeting this past week where we took a fresh look at our system. It's a surprisingly complicated engine and it was probably due for a tune-up, so the meeting was a good use of our time. As we went through the many dozens of details, I was struck (again) by a really important decision we had to make in setting the system up.

As I said above, the purpose of our tracking system is to understand which members are likely to renew their membership and which members are not. The implied correlation is therefore that participating in programs is aligned with a member's likelihood to renew. Those members that engage in few or no programs are at a heightened risk for non-renewal, and therefore warrant additional attention and marketing from the association.

That, I hope, is pretty straightforward. It's an assumption, but a reasonable one from where I sit. But the next decision is often fraught with difficulties. Given that the goal is to predict which members may or may not renew, which programs should you track? All of them? Or just those that are highly correlated with member satisfaction and a member's likelihood to renew?

Our answer is the latter, and that's one of the things we did in our recent tune-up meeting: go through all the programs of the association and decide, based on which we believe are highly correlated with member satisfaction, which we should track and which we shouldn't.

The problem is that not everyone may agree with the decisions in this space, and there is unfortunately a large absence of data on which to base some of these determinations. And even asking the question can sometimes lead one down a rabbit hole one would rather not go down.

Our Annual Conference? That's correlated with member satisfaction, right? I mean, if someone is taking the time and paying the cost to attend the conference, they're likely to renew their membership, right? What about our data programs? If the member is contributing their own data to help us to produce that benchmark report for the industry, then they're obviously interested in staying a member, right? And what about our trade show? And that job fair we launched for our industry? Members who participated there are satisfied with their membership, right?

Typically, my short answer to all these questions is "yes." It frankly has to be. To make the exercise worthwhile, we have to accept that higher levels of member participation in programs equals higher levels of member satisfaction.

But that, admittedly, is a generalization, and there are undoubtedly circumstances where such a correlation does not exist. They went to the Annual Conference, but were unimpressed with the speakers. They give us their data, but no one in the company can find a use for the resulting report. They exhibit at the trade show, but they didn't get enough leads out of it. They show up at the job fair, but are still struggling to hire the right people.

My advice is not to get trapped in these details and concerns. Separate satisfaction surveys and interviews are a better way to make these assessments and to correct them if necessary. When working on your participation tracking system, stay focused on the goal of just tracking participation where you think it matters.

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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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https://www.noobie.com/how-to-use-microsoft-excel/https://www.noobie.com/how-to-use-microsoft-excel/

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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https://iamdeewallace.com/product/gift/

Customer Service Not Worth Emulating

A bit of a rant this week.

On my most recent business trip, a staff member of mine rented a car for us. She is not a "preferred" member of the rental car company she worked with, so she had to stand in line and wait to be served.

It was awful. There was only one agent working the desk and I counted nine people in front of my staff member. I timed how long the first person took at the counter. Eleven minutes. I timed the second. Twelve minutes. At that rate we were looking at an hour and a half wait.

Then a second agent appeared and began helping the next person in line. All right, I thought. Now we're down to forty-five minutes. I can handle that.

Except that after the first agent finished with the customer he had been helping when the second agent appeared, he announced he was going on his lunch break and left. There were still five people in line in front of my staff member and three more that had queued up behind her.

At that point, I pulled out my smartphone and rented a car from the same company on their mobile app. As a "preferred" member, I was able to skip the remaining line and head directly out to the lot. After a quick stop at the "preferred" desk, my staff member and I were in a car and heading to our destination, no questions asked.

Now, this is not the first time I've experienced the kabuki theater that is the rental car counter. Before becoming a "preferred" member I had stood in that interminable line myself, and am still occasionally subject to it when traveling with someone else.

One big question I have is why. Why, in this day and age, is the process of renting a car anything other than the "preferred" experience? "Preferred" or not, we all make the reservation online, we all choose our options, we all enter our drivers license and credit card information. Why is any other step necessary other than showing your license and proving you are who you say you are?

But an even bigger question I have is how these companies stay in business if this is their model of customer service. Imagine an association conference in which the registrant shows up after having registered and paid online, and then is forced to stand in line where the association takes ten minutes with each and every person ahead of them to both verify their information and to try to upsell them on a variety of products and protections they have already decided they don't need or want.

How long would that registrant stay a member of that association? How long would that association be in business?

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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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https://www.masterfile.com/search/en/people+in+queue+texting+images

X Matrix by Darrell Casey

There’s a long subtitle here: “Strategy Deployment and Execution Process for Breakthrough Business Performance.” The book was given to be by the Board chair of the association I work for and, although clearly written for a manufacturing environment, there are some transferable ideas that could benefit those non-profit organizations.

X Matrix is the name of the system the author describes in what is obviously a self-published and, unfortunately, typo-riddled treatise. He calls it that because the basic framework is a matrix with a big X in the middle. It’s going to be too hard to describe, so here’s the essential picture:

See the big X in the middle?

You’re supposed to start at the bottom with your Breakthrough Objectives. In the manufacturing world, that might be something like “Reduce reject parts per million by 90% in 3 years.” In my association’s space, the Breakthrough Objectives translate most easily to the Idealized States of our Success Metrics. Let’s use the one associated with our own manufacturer members as our example. Given our analysis of the marketplace, there are 250 companies that are eligible for manufacturer memberships in our association, and who would find value in the member benefits we offer. At the end of our last fiscal year, we had 193. So, “Grow to 250 manufacturer members in 10 years” would be our Breakthrough Objective. That’s what Casey would call the “WHAT?”

Next comes the “HOW FAR?” These are the Annual Improvement Objectives. You know what your Breakthrough Objective is, but achieving that is supposed to take you three to five years (or in my case, ten). How much of that are you going to get done this year? In the manufacturing world, that might be something like “Reduce reject parts per million by 45%.” In my association’s space, the Annual Improvement Objectives translate most easily to the Goals that we set for each Success Metric. To continue our example, we’ve set as this year’s goal growing from 193 to 200 manufacturer members in the association. So we would write “Grow to 200 manufacturer members” on one of these lines and associate it with the Breakthrough Objective by putting an X in the box that aligns with both of these lines.

Next comes the “HOW?” These are the Annual Improvement Priorities. You know how far you want to get this year, but how are you going to do that? Which key processes are you going to focus your attention on so that you can actually reach your Annual Objective? In the manufacturing world, that might be things like “Improve quality of raw materials,” or “Improve machining processes,” or “Introduce quality checks earlier in manufacturing process.” In my association’s space, the Annual Improvement Priorities translate most easily to the Program Objectives that we’ve aligned with each Goal. Same logic. At the programmatic level of our association, what are we going to work on so that our Goal can be reached? To continue our example, we can write things like...

Ambassador Program: Connect targeted prospects to membership ambassadors at conferences and convert them as new members.

Member Retention: Identify members at-risk for non-renewal, organize and conduct a program of contacts encouraging engagement in association activities and programs, and highlight the benefits of maintaining membership.

Non-Renewal Conversion: Convert non-renewing members to membership within this fiscal year.

Trial Membership Program: Offer targeted prospects limited access to association market information and statistics and/or free or discounted access to selected association events, and convert them as new members.

...on these lines (all of which I abbreviated above), again connecting them to the right Annual Improvement Objective by putting Xs in the right boxes.

Next comes the “HOW MUCH AND WHEN?” These are Targets to Improve. We know what our Annual Improvement Priorities are, but how are we going to execute them and measure their success? In the manufacturing world, if the Annual Improvement Priority is to “Introduce quality checks earlier in manufacturing process,” then the Targets to Improve might be to “Hire more quality managers,” or “Review new quality logs in weekly meetings,” or “Train machine operators in basic quality assurance techniques.” In my association’s space, the Targets to Improve translate most easily to the Action Plan steps that we create for each Program Objective. They are the concrete steps that we will take to ensure that the Program Objective is achieved. To continue our example, focusing solely on our Ambassador Program, we can write things like “Identify prospects,” “Assign prospects to Board members,” and “Organize networking event at conference” on the these lines, and connect them to the “Ambassador Program” by putting Xs in the right boxes.

Still with me? Because we’re almost done. The last step is “WHO?” as in Resource Deployment. You’re supposed to fill in people’s names on the lines below the Targets to Improve and connect them to the Annual Improvement Objectives with more Xs in the right boxes. In my association example, I can assign each Objective to Alan, Bethany, Charles, and Dana.

And that’s it. That’s the system. A whole strategic and operational plan in one glance. It works great in my oversimplified example, where we’re dealing with only one Breakthrough Objective and only one Annual Improvement Objective. Start multiplying those items (as you do in any real organization) and the chart begins to grow more and more complex, until its utility has been replaced with the significant effort it takes to maintain and follow it.

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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.

Two Kinds of Association Executives

There are two kinds of association executives. Those that come from the industry their association represents, and those that come from the field of association management.

I am the latter.

In my experience, executives that come from the industry their association represents generally know what to do, but have to learn how to do it. And executives that come from the field of association management, generally know how to do things, but have to learn what to do.

That's one way of looking at things. Here's another.

There are two kinds of association executives. Those that are Executive Directors, and those that are CEOs.

I have been both.

In my experience, one of the core jobs of the Executive Director is to frame a discussion so that the Board can decide the association's strategy, and then execute that strategy. And one of the core jobs of the CEO is to frame a discussion so that the Board can help the CEO decide the association's strategy, and then execute that strategy.

Two different kinds of two kinds of association executives. What kind are you?

What kind do you want to be?

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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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https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-2175932-portrait-two-executives-conference-room

Is Your Content Generalizable?

I attend a fair number of education programs and, as a result, listen to a fair number of speakers and presentations. Sometimes, the most rewarding kind of speaker is someone from outside my industry, speaking on how they address and solve challenges in their industry. I can often find nuggets of wisdom or new ways of approaching my own challenges by listening to these kind of speakers. Innovation frequently comes, after all, straight out of these attempts at cross-fertilization.

To make this kind of thing work, however, it is important for both the speaker and the participant to understand which parts of the presentation are generalizable and which are not.

Let's say you're listening to a presentation from a speaker outside your industry. She's talking about a common problem -- something facing organizations of all types in all industries -- and she's presenting a case study of her own business. When faced with X, my company does Y.

You recognize X as the common problem that it is, but you also realize that Y won't work in your organization or perhaps in your industry. It relies on a resource or a tactic that you don't have access to. Let's call that resource or tactic Z. So you ask the presenter a question. Let's assume you don't have access to Z, and therefore can't use Y as a solution to X. What do you do then?

You're essentially looking for the speaker the generalize her strategy. To step up and out of the specifics of her own situation, and help you tackle the challenge you actually face from a fresh perspective.

In my experience, some speakers can do this and some can't. Some will accept the challenge you've given them and start brainstorming with you. Don't have Z? Hmmm. Then you can't do Y. In that situation, I would probably do A, or maybe B. In this situation, A and B are the nuggets of gold you're looking for, potentially new ways of tackling difficult problems in your industry.

But some will retrench on Y. They can't generalize. They are so myopically focused on their own situation and the solutions they've created that they'll simply reject, perhaps unconsciously, the premise of your question. They'll start talking about Y again. Even though you've told them Y is impractical in your space, it's so practical in theirs that they won't be able to abandon it.

Whenever this happens, I usually find myself asking if the speaker in question really understands her own content, or the audience she is speaking to. Her purpose in speaking, after all, is not to just relay information, but to teach me something new.

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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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https://videohive.net/item/office-girl-making-a-failed-presentation/6567624

Contacts of Quality, Not Just Quantity

I lead a trade association. That means that our members are technically companies, not people; but, of course, the companies in question are made up of people, and we work hard to maintain good contacts and communications with those people.

A common objective for trade associations is to grow the number of contacts that they have at each of their member companies. Frequently, even though the decision to join or renew membership in the association rests with one individual, it is seen as advantageous to have a number of other "champions" within the company who find value in the association's programs and services. In making her decision, the boss may very well ask around her organization. "Is anyone getting any benefit from this expensive dues payment we make every year?" If the answer is yes, the boss is much more likely to keep writing those checks.

In this spirit we recently did an inventory of the contacts in our member database. We typically classify our contacts based on the role that they play in their company -- for example, are they an Executive? a Marketing Professional? an Engineer? a Human Resource Professional? And in our first pass we focused almost exclusively on quantities. How many contacts do we have? How many in each category? How many per company? How many in each category per company?

It was a good first dive into the subject, but the quantitative focus immediately revealed some weaknesses. For many companies, we have almost an overabundance of contacts in our database. Names and emails no one in my staff organization is familiar with. Some of them dating back years and years.

My initial reaction was that we need to inventory the quality of our contacts as well as the quantity. For how many companies, for example, can we say we have a solid Executive, Marketing, Engineering, and Human Resource contact? Solid as in someone on staff can put a face with a name and that they participate in some activity of our association?

Whatever that number is, working to increase that -- rather than just the raw number of contacts per company in the database -- seems much more likely to pay dividends when it comes to our member retention and engagement objectives.

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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.

Image Source
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/happy-business-people-shaking-hands-after-reaching-an-agreement-gm958662444-261768839

Explaining Red Lights Is Good, But That Doesn't Make Them Not Red

This article on Forbes.com caught my eye this week. It's titled Why Companies That Embrace "Red Is Good" Get The Best Results, and it makes that very argument -- that companies that rigidly adhere to an honest and unflinching measure of their success, even if it means putting those dreaded red lights on their color-coded dashboards, do better than those that purposely or otherwise fudge their yardsticks to make sure their dashboards are always covered with those pleasing green lights.

I found it reminiscent of a blog post I wrote almost six years ago. In, When Red Lights Mean Go, I describe how I typically sort the green, yellow and red lights that appear on our program performance dashboard into an "innovation matrix," where the level of risk associated with each program can more easily be taken into visual account. In that post, I made the following observation about this technique, and about red lights in general:

The red lights always scare people. By themselves, they represent failures. They indicate that we failed to meet the identified metric of success of some of our programs--and some people don't like to admit that. But in the context of our innovation matrix, the red lights also become part of our success. After all, innovation doesn't happen without them.

All of this is a timely reminder for me, as my association is beginning to assemble our final assessment of progress that will be reviewed and discussed by our Board at their strategic retreat at the end of our current fiscal year. As the data comes, we're seeing what we typically see, mostly green, a few yellow, and a handful of red lights, reflecting a year of solid success with a few areas where we fell short of the stretch goals we had set for ourselves.

For me, this is always first and foremost an opportunity for exploration. Why? Why did we not reach this goal? Typically, the answer falls into one of three buckets: lack of resources, lack of opportunity, or lack of effort; and usually in that order. Like many associations, ours is one in which our goals often outstrip the time and financial resources that we have at our disposal.

But that reality doesn't protect us from the often subliminal forces described in the Forbes.com article. People have responsibility for achieving the goals we assign to them (or that they accept themselves), and people don't like having red lights associated with their names. There is an attendant loss of prestige and, depending on the goal's connection to our bonus and compensation plan, also the possible loss of financial reward. Often, when explaining the factors that went into missing the goal, the plea will be made to change red to yellow, or sometimes even to green.

The factors are always taken into account when setting goals for the future, but the process of explaining why a light is red should never lead to changing the color of the light or the substance of the goal in question. Doing so risks creating a false level of success for the organization and, most damaging, a false understanding of the organization's execution capability. Because at the end of the day, that's what all these green, yellow, and red lights are actually measuring -- the ability of the organization to first say what it is going to achieve, and then achieve it.

And if you don't have an accurate view of that capability, how can you ever set realistic goals in the future?

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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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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-20/traffic-light/9277328

I Want the Right Pageviews

This week's blog post is partly inspired by this post on Seth Godin's blog. In it, he makes the case that the idea of "reach" is overrated.

Why do you care if you can, for more money, reach more people? Why wouldn’t it make more sense to reach the right people instead?

I agree entirely. Here's a specific case in point.

My association has a website. There's a lot of good content up there, most of it intended for our members. But there are a few pages that focus on what fluid power (the technology my association represents) is. Those pages aren't really for our members. They already know what fluid power is. We don't have much of a public relations or advocacy focus, but as the trade association representing the fluid power industry, it feels wrong not having some information up there about what it is and what it does in the market.

Here's the problem, though. Every time we go to look at our web analytics, guess what comes up as the page with the most pageviews? That's right. It's our "What Is Fluid Power?" page. There are some in the organization who track and trumpet this. Look at how many pageviews our website got last month! We must be doing a really great job.

I have a different view. Let me phrase it in striking terms so I can underscore how strongly I feel about it.

I don't care about the people visiting the "What Is Fluid Power?" page of our website. They -- whoever they are -- are not our members, and our website is not for them.

Do you know how I know they are not our members? Look at the traffic source for all those pageviews. The vast majority are coming from organic search -- meaning that they are typing "what is fluid power" into Google or Bing or some other search engine and finding our page in the results that come back to them. Our members aren't doing that.

Show me the pageviews of the people coming to our site because they've bookmarked it, or they clicked on one of the links in our member e-newsletter. Those are the right pageviews to watch and pay attention to, because those are much more likely to be our members.

As someone whose job depends on connecting our members to the programs and services of my association, I can't get complacent about this. I simply do not want more pageviews for the sake of having more pageviews. I want more of a certain kind of pageviews -- the ones that reflect our members reading and accessing our programs.

When I talk about the "right" pageviews, those are the ones I'm referring to.

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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.

Image Source
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgdlWhMZAw