From the Desk of an Association Executive
Going against your gut: seeking understanding even when you and the Board don’t see through the same lens.
Have you ever met a Board member who came to the table without any ideas? Of course not! That is why they step up to serve – to positively influence the future of their association. Some of these ideas are small while some are grand. Some ideas might begin in the realm of the strategic but quickly wander into operations.
Leading an organization can sometimes feel like being a feudal lord trying to maintain an uneasy peace with a rotating cast of characters that make up your organizational governance. We manage the Executive Director role and the Board of Directors, helping them to understand which realm belongs to them (strategic) and which realm belongs to me and senior staff (operations). This relationship is constantly in a state of flux. As new Board members and Presidents come and go, we renegotiate the borders yet again. Even in a time of relative peace in this little fiefdom, you can always count on ideas. Sometimes, these ideas are tossed like hand grenades from one realm to the other.
Over the last several years, I have spent considerable time trying to defuse one specific hand grenade. I never saw it tossed; I inherited it from my predecessor and it was launched at the only Board meeting I wasn’t at in 7 years! A Board member had suggested we develop workload units (like time studies) for the profession we serve. The idea was minuted and added to the action plan where it sat idle for some time. We were in a time of major change and our focus was elsewhere. So, the idea sat.
I would have been happy to cut it loose. We had much more important tasks at hand but the Board member who suggested it felt very strongly that this was desperately needed.
At the time, I didn’t value it because I really didn’t understand it. I knew from the experience of many professions (and I provided reams of data to support this) that attempts to create a workload system that could be applied across the entire profession and that could actually work was a bit of a fools’ errand. Millions had been invested by professions bigger than ours and yet the dialogue that followed implementation always centered more on why the units of measurement were not appropriate for this hospital or that patient population. There always seemed to be a reason why they could not be applied for any given circumstance or they were wilfully ignored. Professions who had these tools had no mechanism to enforce them. At the end of the day, if the work needed to get done, out went the workload units. They might as well have been expensive bookends, simply sitting on a shelf gathering dust. However, my Board did not share that interpretation.
After several unsuccessful attempts to convince our Board not to pursue this project, at multiple Board meetings, I decided to take another path. I took my spot at the front of the room, armed with a marker, flipchart and inquiring mind, and led a session to try to unpack this idea once and for all. Where did this idea come from? Why couldn’t we shelve it? Was it the best investment of our members’ money to create a tool no one could use? I questioned everything I could think of, did my best to suspend judgment and just flip charted the responses. What I discovered was that it really wasn’t workload units the Board was looking for. At the time, they couldn’t articulate what they wanted to create. Workload units were simply the closest thing they could picture. After much questioning, we began to peel back the layers and get to the core of the issue.
The Board was expressing concern around a lack of tools for members to use when they felt they were overworked, burning out or being asked to work at a pace they felt negatively impacted the quality of their work. They didn’t have an appropriate resource to help them navigate these issues. This was our light bulb moment.
Armed, finally, with a better understanding of the strategic issue being highlighted, staff were able to start looking at the best way to address it. After all, the Board is there to set the destination, while the staff decides the best course to get there. We were back in our appropriate realms and ready to get to work, once clarity had been achieved.
The end result will be a Mental Health toolkit; an online resource for members to be able to understand the various elements of mental health, assess how they are doing and how their work is impacting them, and give them the tools to take proactive steps to live a mentally healthier work life.
While we are still in the development phase, I am very excited about what we’re creating. It may well end up being one of the most impactful projects undertaken during my tenure as CEO. As we are preparing content and gathering member stories, it is difficult not to find some of the experiences heartbreaking but I am filled with hope because we have started an important dialogue.
It is amazing to me that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. A persistent Board, passionate about an idea, just needed a little nudge to find the words to articulate what was needed. Had I gone with my gut instinct and cut it loose we would have missed a wonderful opportunity to add value to our membership and to add a timely, relevant tool for our members.
Having reflected back on this process, I’ve learned that not all ideas are hand grenades. Don’t get me wrong, some are. Boards may get overzealous, when passionate ideas blur the boundaries between the strategic and operational realms, but I know they mean well. We sometimes have to fight to keep the borders of our respective realms well defined. But we have to remember, that in the vast majority of cases, we are all coming from a place of positive intent. When we stop and try to seek better understanding, when we peel back the onion and seek thoughtful insights on the ideas that come forward, wonderful things can be done. And sometimes, the job of an association exec is to help an idea find the light of day, because it might just be golden.
Christine Nielsen, MBA (c), BHA, MLT, CAE is the CEO for the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, Hamilton. She has been involved in the not for profit sector since 1997.
She is also the Past Chair of the Canadian Network of Agencies for Regulation (CNAR), Ottawa. You may contact her at [email protected].
