Best Of Zen

Association Zen Essentials

Welcome to the Best of Zen--selected posts from my Zen of Associations blog.  Below, my first blog post on August 12, 2006, says it all.  Do less. Be more. Ann Oliveri

Multi-tasking vs. Multi-purposing

In a time-stressed world, multi-tasking can create an illusion of productivity.  Multi-purpose actiivities, on the other hand, deliver more value per activity.  Yet how often do we take the time to create member experiences that deliver value in more than one dimension? 

Imagine that you are a member of your association and for every hour you invest in an activity, you derive immediate take-home value. You earn more and learn more. You feel privileged to contribute your ideas and experience because you belong to a community of peers you respect and admire.  And, you are proud of the fact that, together, you are serving a greater good, working for social justice.  Now can you imagine walking away from such an opportunity?  Never!

Mission-driven associations give members a way to live a life of purpose.  So, what's your mission?  Does anyone care?

Blah, Blah, Blah

When did we all start to look alike?  Are associations like long-married couples or people and their pets, looking so much alike we can't tell them apart? 

Lately I have been digging around any number of associations' web sites, looking in vain for a prospective client's heart and soul or checking out a client's competition, and come up empty.  Words, words, words that say nothing and mean less.  Generic, homogenized association speak!

FIrst, it was the switch to meaningless acronyms, abandoning names that identified our cause, and now it's meaningless mission statements, hollow core-values, and self-aggrandizing goals, like this one promising to be a model association that "facilitates the development and execution of coordinated strategy." And don't get me started on the fascinating lists of "benefits," like silly discounts and association code for ways to spend more money.

What happened?  Have we become so obsessed with being business-like that we sold our souls? The antidote is to be human again. 

• Stand for those your members serve, not just members' self-interest or (shudder) your own.  An association is the means to an end, not an end in itself. 
• Stop being a Raccoon Lodge--with apologies and abiding admiration for the mystic order of the Racoon and the Honeymooners--and become a movement.
• Find your voice, your personality, get real and you will truly engage people in your work. Leap out there and be a leader for responsible practice, for a world free from what you want to overcome.

When I land on your home page, show me who your are, what you love, and why I should care--instantly. 

When I read your mission statement, let me sign up--not as a member, but as a believer.

When I watch the video stream, inspire me, engage me, and show me a better future.

O-o-o-o-kay, enough caffeine for me this morning, back to work and hushed, modulated tones. Blah, blah, blah.

Sue P said:

This post should be required reading for all association execs.

Ann Feeney said:

Bless you for saying this! Associations and nonprofits have gotten too fond of sounding "business like," which means that they use the same bland terminology and buzzwords that could describe anything and therefore describe nothing at all. Business-speak feels safe and comfortable. It's blending into the crowd. But don't we want our associations to stand out of the crowd?

Intention Deficit

Mistakes were made, as we say in Washington.

Speaking in Baltimore at the Membership and Marketing Conference, I defined my goals for the session at the outset, but failed to provide sufficient context for my large and varied audience.  (Only a handful identified themselves as marketing professionals.)

So what disclaimers can I make next time to get us all on the same page?  Imposing the rigor of Twitter's 140 character limit, I distilled my point of view about the practice of association marketing, organized like course prerequisites in a college catalog.  Is this sufficient warning?

Association Marketing 101:   It's about their lawn, not your grass seed. Discounts and a directory are features, not benefits. Promise possibilities. Find out who cares.

Association Marketing 201:   Members are your products. Differentiate them from their competitors.  Build trust.  Grow leaders.  Reduce time needed to master practice.

Association Marketing 301:   Marketing is a perspective, not a title.  Get the right people in the room, united by one mission, yet free to design their own experience.  

Post-Doc:  Put it all into play on a larger stage. Advocate SR--shared responsibility. Start where you are. Engage members and those members serve.

Maybe speaker introductions should capture the speaker's POV--point of view--not their bios.

(Dis)Engagement

 How can we engage members in our work if association employees are leaving the better part of themselves at home?  For all the lip service given to "engagement" these days, I am amazed by the lack of engagement among association employees. 

Recently, I was hitting a brick wall of stony indifference with the senior management of a well known association, so I peeled them off for personal interviews.  One on one, I was impressed with each exec's energy and ideas, but when restored to the group, everyone shut down and spoke like robots.

The behavior was not a product of the recession--fear of losing one's job--this was the culture, engineered by the CEO to maintain an illusion of control.  The result was a senior team that quit long ago, but are still on the job. 

There is an alternative, one neatly articulated by Henry Mintzberg in the July-August Harvard Business Review on "Rebuilding Companies as Communities." 

Mintzberg argues for an alternative form of leadership, "a more modest form of leadership that might be called engaged and distributed management," what he calls communityship.  "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative."

To create community at work, Mintzberg recommends that you:

1. Start with small groups of committed managers.
2. Take time to reflect on shared experiences.
3. Use insights from these reflections to trigger small initiatives with potential to become big strategies.
4. Model behavior for others in the organization.
5. "(C)ommunityship is firmly established when the members reach out in socially active, responsible, and mutually beneficial ways to the broader community."

"(H)ealthy organizations take corporate social responsibility seriously and gain significant benefits in return. Employees of a company that barely functions as a community can hardly be expected to care about any other community.  But members of a company that has a robust sense of community realize how much their organization depends for sustained success on constructive engagement with the communities around it."

Do less. Be more. Engage members through opportunities to learn and grow, professionally and personally, reflecting on shared experiences in a community of practice, pursuing social justice while making a living.  And do it in every single activity you offer.

That's engagement.  The rest is empty promises of features and benefits in a brochure.

Jamie Notter said...

Okay, I personally hate words like "communityship," but I completely dig everything else in this post. It resonates with what Gary Hamel wrote in terms of "less hierarchy and more community." Also with Senge's definition of leadership as a system capacity, rather than an individual attribute. Nice post.

Start a Conversation on Corporate Responsibility

Last February, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association signed on to the Global Principles for Socially Responsible Associations and Nonprofits.  ASHA's executive director Arlene Pietranton told me it required a brief board discussion because the Global Principles align with ASHA's values and culture.  When we met at the Great Ideas Conference, her question was "Now what?" 

That question led us to tee up a larger conversation, a half-day experimental workshop, bringing together a cross-section of association executives and experts to talk about corporate social responsibility.

BOMA's Henry Chamberlain volunteered his boardroom and brought his senior management team.  Arlene Pietranton brought Janet McNichol, ASHA's HR director, and staff responsible for the internal green team and community service activities.

Creativity guru Rhea Blanken designed real-life role playing exercises that let us all practice how we talk about corporate responsibility, and as BOMA's Pat Areno said, "see yourself as others see you."

Here's what we learned:

• Get outside perspectives.  Practice talking about what you do.  Be ready for skeptics.
• Design the conversation.  Assign roles, limit time, build trust, take action.
• Map what you already do. Be more transparent.
• Spread accountability. Build responsibility into your RFPs and supply chain contracts.
• Widen the dialog. Engage members and their customers and clients.
• Get started!  Do something.

Susan Gorin, executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists, said: "Sustainable social responsibility requires ongoing discussion among all members of a community or organization (and) ensuring that there are different perspectives around a table when a plan is being formulated enhances the outcome."

For more on the workshop and a list off all the terrific people who participated, see my commentary in the June 5 Association Trends. For more ideas on how to start your own conversation on corporate responsibility, look for the forthcoming Journal of Association Leadership (Spring 2009) and my article, Shared Responsibility: Collective Action for a Sustainable Future.

Creative Brief

Have you seen the new ad for Shredded Wheat cereal?  Unchanged for more than 100 years, the iconic cereal promises to continue its boring way. In the ad, the corporate guy in a suit announces: "We put the NO in Innovation."

If you are boring and proud of your 100 year history of never changing, you too can be Shredded Wheat.

Odds are though you need a different approach. Given what's being thrown at us 24/7, improvisation and good reflexes count more than ever. No wonder simulations and gaming is so popular.  It's exactly the training and experience we need at work to navigate every day's helping of unexpected threats.

So here's the thing.  Control is an illusion.  Get over it!  Everyone attached to your mission needs to make 10,000 decisions every day, confronting challenges unimagined by you this morning.  Do you really think there is any competitive advantage in commanding an army of corporate droids, clones with one way of thinking and acting and looking?   Isn't it more feasible to have hundreds of different life forms, points of view and intelligences looking at the same problem or managing the same dilemma??

Problem definition is the challenge and focused creativity is the response.

You need to engage your team, your evangelists, your members in real-time inquiries to grow confidence and skills, to test assumptions and challenge conventional wisdom.  You need a shared set of principles to guide action.  You need clarity around your shared values and agreement around your goals. 

Sure, you need efficient processes, but more than that you need transparency.  The decisions you make are not as important as HOW YOU MAKE THE DECISIONS.The black box is empty, and we know it.

Keep your eyes on the prize.  HOW you mobilize others to achieve your mission IS your BRAND of experiencing the world.  Who are you taking along for the ride?

Be Distinct or Extinct

Now is when all that branding work you have been doing pays off. 

• Knowing what makes you indispensable, it's easy to discard the excess baggage. 

• Knowing what drives your share of heart, it's easy to be generous.  

• Knowing what sets you apart, it's easy to see what brings you together. 

If you don't know, there's no time like the present to find out.

As Tom Peters says, you can be distinct or extinct.  We are all in the anthropology business.  So what's your ROIR--return on investment in relationships?

Getting Serious About Diversity

On the brink of the last recession, after the dot com bust and before the 9/11 attacks--Joe O'Connor, the new chairman at the Urban Land Institute made inclusivity his cause for his two-year tenure.

Appointing a task group to identify the most effective means of engaging greater numbers of public officials, women, minorities, and young professionals, Joe gave us permission to get serious about diversity.  Despite the downturn, membership doubled.

Thanks to Joe, ULI stepped up to support a new initiative, the Real Estate Association Program (REAP), with an annual $25,000 grant and an equal amount in administrative, in-kind and staff support.  Funding continues today.

That was the beginning of my association with REAP, working with the founder, Mike Bush, to build a new talent network of career-changing minority professionals.  REAP is funded by dozens of companies and a number of commercial real estate associations, chief among them ICSC--the International Council of Shopping Centers--led by Mike Kercheval. 

The story of this industry-wide program appears in the 2009 edition of Association Now's Volunteer Leadership Issue. With permission, a pdf of the article Breaking Through is available to download at REAP's web site, projectreap.org.

By sharing responsibility across all segments of the business, pooling the efforts of many associations and a variety of employers, we all escaped from those well meaning, but lame, feel-good programs and shared the heavy lifting of creating genuine opportunity.   The real winners are the REAP associates who gained the widest perspective to find the best fit for their interests and abilities.

The quest now, in the face of the current recession, is to build capacity, transition beyond the founder to a new exec, and establish vibrant local networks in five cities.  Crazy timing, but when you are in it for the long haul, economic cycles smooth out.

Recalibrating Normal

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Association Management magazine--now Association Now--in response to the editor's question: "When will things return to normal?" My answer? "Maybe normal isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Maybe we lost our way when we became so professional that we lost touch with the passion of those who founded our associations."

That rant was the cover story in December 2003, Recalibrating Normal, challenging association professionals to return to what really matters by starting with the right questions.

"What if your association could attract the next generation of volunteers with a mission that matters and activities that also deliver personal and professional growth--financial success as well as a more equitable society?" 

• What if we were a movement, not an industry?
• What if values created value?
• What if members were our products, not our customers?
• What if work was a calling, not a career?

If you're an ASAE and Center for Association Leadership member, you can find the original article online here.   You can also download it at amazon.com. 

In this post-abundance era, maybe these questions will provoke another round of responses. Over the next few weeks, I will pick up and examine these questions again in this space.

What Color Is Your Parachute?

If your parachute isn't golden, you might be looking for some help finding your way to your calling, your next career move or your legacy.   So here's an exercise that not only helps you look in a mirror, but to see yourself as others do.

Try this at a meeting to create greater self-awareness and groupsourced career counseling in less than 30 minutes. Alchemist Chris Grant designed this exercise for The Vine and called it resume unbound. 

Giving us five minutes, Chris had each of us write out two or three phrases under three headings on a single piece of paper:

• my values at work
• the value I add
• skills, characteristics and qualities.

Then, you and the person sitting next to you take five minutes to exchange resumes, explaining what you have written before standing up and wandering the room holding your partner's resume.  In the next five minutes, you must talk to at least three people, pairing up to ask what they would do if they could borrow the person you represent for a year.   With surprising answers in hand, you return to your original partner to download life-altering career suggestions.

My partner was the ultimate blend of Jim Collins and Deprok Chopra.  He came back with three suggestions for me:  run a think tank; be a facilitator and consensus builder; or become a community organizer.   Works for me and it makes a much better elevator speech!

Sweat Equity

News Flash:  An association is the means to achieving an end--it's not an end in itself. 

Far too many association professionals are losing sight of that fact, at their peril. As I talk to private enterprise CEOs about getting involved in their industries' associations, all signal their distaste, citing dissatisfaction with either the association staff or its exec. 

"No one on the staff knows what we really do,"  one disgruntled player said.  "The guy who runs that association thinks he's king," another noted.

Odds are if you think you have all the answers, you are not asking the right questions.  Are you neutering member engagement to save time, replacing your judgment for their's on what's best? 

Keep your eyes on the prize--the mission that holds everyone together.  How decisions are made is much more important than what you ultimately decide to do.