Ann Oliveri

Welcome

What if for every hour you worked or volunteered, you could earn more, learn more, connect with peers, improve as a leader and change the world for the better? 

That's the Zen of Associations. This blog is for those of us who believe that a life of purpose is the ultimate member benefit and leadership development our true mission.

Ann Oliveri is a leadership coach with 30 years experience moving people forward, attracting support, and removing obstacles to action. Ann is a certified association executive and a fellow of ASAE, the Center for Association Leadership.

Why You Need a Leadership Coach

"Your reports are not your friends. To get the truth about how you're running your company, you'll need someone with an outside perspective." 

Writing for Inc., John Baldoni reports that a recent survey of executive coaches confirmed his own assessment. Two thirds of coaches he surveyed say their engagements involved being a trusted advisor able to provide much needed objectivity.

A coach is both a thinking partner and confidential adviser, someone you can count on to give it to you straight.  With just the right balance of challenge and support, you can assure your continued development as a leader and as a human being.

That's why I have a coach and hope you do too.

Form Follows Funding

Clay Shirky neatly summarizes the state of the newspaper business and offers a succinct analysis of the economic future of content in "Newspapers, Paywalls and Core Users." 

"There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.

"In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

"It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."

Reminds me of the dilemma created by those who continue to view association members as customers, board members as owners, and  staff as hired guns.

Aren't Shirky's "politically engaged readers" the same as actively involved members?  The 15% who show up? What if we too could finally forego "mass in favor of passion" and reward the people most committed to (our) long-term survival?"

 

The Joy of Quiet

Pico Iyer gives us the latest marketing trend: silence.  

"ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness."

His New York Times op-ed, The Joy of Quiet, summarizes all my wishes for you.

 

I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying

No one rants like Dan Pallotta.  His latest blog post is a classic:I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review.

The Warning Signs of Defending the Status Quo

Seth Godin nails the defenders of the status quo today and provides a list of warning signs that you are falling into that camp.  See Seth's blog for the complete list, but here are three that leapt out at me.

"When confronted with a new idea, do you:

• Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right?
• Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short-term is more vivid for you?
• Fight to retain benefits and status earned only through tenure and longevity?"

If you're finding yourself trapped into this way of thinking, apply Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats discipline with your team and expand beyond your default "black hat" thinking.

Bears in the Boardroom

Reminders of childhood--teddy bears, crayons, children's drawings--support ethical behavior at work.  So says Sreedhari Desai in the September Harvard Business Review.

 

 

The finding: Adults are less likely to cheat and more likely to engage in “pro-social” behaviors when reminders of children, such as teddy bears and crayons, are present.

The research: Sreedhari Desai and her research partner Francesca Gino had people play classic psychology games in which the subjects controlled how much money other people earned and could earn more themselves if they lied. Half the participants were either in a room with children’s toys or engaged in children’s activities. Across the board, those participants lied less and were more generous than the control subjects.

Observations in a pysch lab aren't the real world, so the researchers cross-referenced corporate and geographical data to uncover the fact that "if companies have five or more day-care centers, nurseries, or kindergartens within a two-mile radius of their headquarters, their charitable giving increases significantly."

Huh.

I have always relied on my bear as my standard for ethical behavior or at least a stern reminder to be a better person.  Nice to know he could do the same for your association. Better yet, why not ask everyone to bring their bears to work this week?

Permission to Innovate

What drives innovation at nonprofits? Kristina Jaskyte who studies nonprofits says: "It's more about who works for an organization." The human factor is critcal, and "almost as important as the resources an organization has."

Transformational leaders capitalize on employees' creativity, Jaskyte says, "challenging the process, inspiring shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the heart."

How Leaders Encourage Innovation in the fall issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review summarizes her research and findings. The Georgia Center for Nonprofits interviewed Jaskyte on her work and you can read the pdf of that interview thanks to Google!

Are You A Curator?

Just as a modern art museum is clearly a modern art museum, so should a business--or your association--be clear about what it does and doesn't offer.

That's Ray Weaver's idea as vetted on Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge this week. Weaver is an HBS assistant professor in marketing and is looking for comments on his concept.

"Occasionally an organization does a great job of articulating what it does and whom it's good for, and has the courage to acknowledge explicitly the kinds of customers who might genuinely be better off elsewhere," he says. "This combination is rare but very powerful: an acknowledgment that we can't be all things to all people; a clear and unapologetic vision for and articulation of what we do stand for that dictates business practices throughout the organization; and a genuine interest in helping potential customers figure out if what we're selling is right for them."

Are you a curator?  Do you offer members a limited amount of choices with a brief, engaging description of each choice, and easily classified?

The People Skills Test

How do you vet candidates for key positions? 

The New York Times reported this week on a method being deployed in medical school admissions processes that test for people skills, the multiple mini interview or MMI.

It's "the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical."  Each round is eight minutes and features a different ethical dilemma.

"The most important part of the interviews are not a candidate's initial responses--there are no right or wrong answers--but how well they respond when someone disagrees with them... Candidates who jump to improper conclusions, fail to listen or are overly opinionated fare poorly because such behavior undermines teams. Those who respond appropriately to the emotional tenor of the interviewer or ask for more information do well..."

"When I entered medical school, it was all about being an individual expert," Dr. Darrell Kirch, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said when interviewed for the story.  "Now it's all about applying that expertise to team-based patient care."

The goal is to find those with the ability to work collaboratively with colleagues and establish trust with patients. And, "candidate scores on multiple mini interviews have proved highly predictive of scores on medical licensing exams three to five years later that test doctors' decision-making, patient interactions and cultural competency."

How could you deploy multi mini interviews as an assessment and learning tool?

Google Yourself and Only Get You

I can't complain.  When I Google me, results link mostly to me with a few references to nice women in New Jersey and Australia.  Pretty clear who's who.  But if your name is more popular, it can get pretty confusing or embarassing. 

Visibility.com provides a way to filter a Google search to produce only the results you want.   You get a link to your profile--http://vizibility.com/annoliveri-- and a QR signature, shown in this post.

The promise?  "Create the most accurate search for yourself, your company, or your products in minutes. Track interest with alerts whenever you’re Googled."

I'm still cleaning up my results, so you'll still see a few references to Ms. Oliveri-Fusco and Annie Oliveri down under.  The popularity of the site, especially mid-day, means I get kicked out before I can save the changes.  But, hey, free is free.