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?

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.   

A Future By Design

Strategic planning is under attack by those either frustrated by its misuse or incapable of harnessing its power.  Just look at the litany of failures summarized in a sad commentary by Jim Hallon, CAE, in the current issue of Associations Now. 

Luckily, for those who see strategic planning as the means to engage members in a conversation about their own future and their association as the means to change it, there is a new edition of ASAE and the Center's environmental scan by Rohit Talwar of Fast Future Research, due to be released later this month. 

Compared to other so-called strategic exercises of the recent past that were little more than painful recitations of the obvious, the new environmental scan, Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders, is an extraordinary achievement. 

Reading it, I am reminded of Lester Thurow, my all time favorite economist on the speaker circuit, who in 45 minutes can reduce terrifying geopolitical and economic forces to a virtual adventure game, drop you in the center of the action, and arm you with the weapons to fight your way out.

Designing Your Future confronts some extremely unpleasant realities, reduces the most significant to sets of patterns, and offers up alternative responses, each of which produces a bubble of hope.  The case studies make it tangible, the methodology is persuasive.  And a failure of imagination will render it completely useless, protecting you from less adept competitors.

Use tools like Designing Your Future and strategic planning to create a shared dream, mobilizing the people who can achieve it together.  Otherwise, like Jim, you will have to learn to live with disappointment.

CMO--Chief Marketing Officer

Working for associations, I long ago realized that my member is my product, not my customer.  Think about it. 

What does your association do?  If you represent your members, promote what they do or advance their interests, members are your product.  Sure they must access your services and you need to spell their names right, but if you want to be the Chief Marketing Officer, not brochure girl or sales guy, you need to be clear about the gameboard.

Ideally, the very fact of joining sets your members apart from nonmember competitors. How?  It might be adherence to a code of ethics, a guarantee, or a promise to uphold voluntary standards.  In some cases it is merely identifying with your mission, your purpose.  If you are an 'honest broker,' members align with your reputation.

So are you promoting that difference to those whom members serve or just selling stuff to members?  Are you setting the agenda for internal budget meetings or are you defending promotion budgets, hiding behind net revenue projections? 

If you are a true CMO, not brochure girl or sales guy, you know that your member is your product and that distinction affects how you approach pricing, where you invest your promotion dollars, and how you design your website.

For example, if members are your product, continuing education must be product enhancement. By definition, your members are Release 3.0 when nonmembers are in Beta.  As anyone can buy education workshops, though, what sets your members apart? Mandatory continuing education, not mandatory purchase of your continuing education offerings, could be the difference and send a powerful signal to members' potential customers, clients or employers, as well as regulators and industry watchdogs. 

Government affairs staff argue that if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.  True CMOs own the table. 

Megacommunities for Megaproblems

This week our field staff and local volunteer leaders are in town to regroup, recharge, and restore each other before jumping back into the fray next month.  Hearing their plans for next year, I can only admire how they are widening their influence. We are now being sought out by elected officials, environmental groups, community activists, even Wall Street investment bankers as the people who know how to get things done.

After 15 years at ULI, I am delighted with our 'overnight' success.  Just as climate change and failing infrastructure are becoming popular causes, we are in a position to do something about both, bringing together megacommunities to take on megaproblems. 

"The megacommunity concept goes far beyond such well-meaning single-sector approaches as sustainable development or corporate social responsibility, both of which often represent an ongoing obligation or duty rather than a collective movement toward a mutual aim," according to the authors of The Defining Features of a Megacommunity published in Strategy + Business (6/12/07).

"Unlike public–private partnerships, which typically focus on relatively narrow purposes... megacommunities take on much larger goals...A megacommunity initiative combines focused conversation, deliberate development of leadership capabilities, and results-oriented action in an open-ended network of leaders from multiple organizations." 

That's exactly what we are doing.  Now that some smart guys at Booz Allen Hamilton have defined it, maybe others will take a closer look at what our District Councils in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., are doing.  Their ongoing work is producing megacommunities in these metropolitan areas to take on megaproblems. Stay tuned.

  Download leading_ideas-20070612.pdf

What I have learned

Last month, Jeff  De Cagna and Lisa Junker posted some simple truths about what each had learned, and I have been stewing on how best to add to the dialog.  So here are my top five.

It’s not about you.  Really. Attract people to something larger. Find your calling.  Make it your day job.   

Generate energy. Don’t waste it. Create more heat, and light, than you expend. Change the rules. Reframe the dialog so you own the space.

Know less. Get answers to questions you are not asking. Hire to your weakness. Stop getting in your own way.

Learn one. Do one. Teach one. Repeat.  Learn from others. Learn from experience. Learn from those you teach.  Professionals practice.

People are the whole point.  It really doesn’t matter what this year’s issue is, or what we do about it.  It’s how we engage people, grow and change, personally and professionally,  and leave us all the better for it.

Golf Lessons

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a special report on golf, no doubt due to the upcoming Masters and advertising from FedEx with a golf tie-in.  The lead article, How Golf Went Off Course, examined recent efforts to increase the number of golfers, and revealed a number of lessons for associations looking for ways to grow membership.

For although golf recruited three million new players in recent years, an equal number abandoned the game. 

Consider the obstacles.  New golfers do not have much fun.  Until you master the grip and gain a consistent swing, golf is misery—a nice walk ruined.  And, then, there’s the amount of time it take to play golf, much less get good at it.  A round of golf shoots a day.  In a time-starved, instant-gratification world, golf would appear to be doomed. 

Some advocate dual standards to loosen up the rules on equipment, allowing technology to give novices the ability to make a decent drive, and have more fun.  Others advocate playing just six holes, to reduce the time commitment. But how do you improve without playing?

To grow your association, do you have to lower standards, sacrifice integrity and abandon time-honored traditions? Ski resorts adapted, carving out a place for skiboarders, and bolstering sagging profits from a shrinking population of downhill purists.  Baseball lives on due to softball leagues, T-ball, and television.  Is golf next?

According to the Journal story, more than 28 million Americans now play golf, half of whom play at least eight rounds a year and are considered ‘core golfers.’  Given that only one-fourth of golfers account for two-thirds of all sales, can’t growth also come from increasing the number of rounds played by those other 14 million people?

My husband Bill played golf in high school, but never more than a round or two a year for the last thirty years. Now that he is retired, he plays at least three times a week.  In eighteen months, he has dropped his score to the low 80s and I can guarantee that he is having fun.  Yesterday, he shot a 78.  Today, he won’t, but the hunt is on.

Bill is proof that golf will grow.  That’s right! It’s demographics.  Boomers are retiring, they have money, and they intend to live forever by staying active.

For associations, it is not a question of growing or not growing, it is a question of how we grow. Beyond the stats, it’s how we grow people—strengthening the resolve of the most recent recruits to achieve mastery, and strengthening the involvement of passive members lurking in the wings.

Mentor for Life

At the Shackleton workshop, we were asked to tell the group about our favorite leader, someone we knew personally and who served as our role model of leadership. After a dozen stories about past bosses and heroes, I was compelled to say that my mentor is my mother.  I can hear her laughing now, but the more I have thought about it this week, the more I know it is true.

Even in prosaic roles, as a manager doing performance reviews or organizing a project or speaking up at work when something needs to be said, it's my mother who has shaped my behavior, not B-school.  Her mother lived by the golden rule, and it still seems like the right standard for business and life. 

Fortunately, I had the good sense to write my mother a letter at the end of my first semester in college and tell her how just much of what she had been trying to impart to me for 18 years actually stuck.  Faced with a series of choices those first few months away from home, my test was to bounce it against the admonition I heard every morning when I set out the door:  Make your mother proud of you and be careful crossing the street.  That made most choices pretty simple.

And, it was 18 years after that when the letter was returned to me that I discovered just how important it is to tell people not just that you love them, but how they change your life.  My mother died in an automobile accident, and the letter was in her purse when she died.  Her friends told me later that she would take the letter out and show people what I had written years earlier.

My mother was funny, generous and kind.  She was no fool, but never made you feel like one.  She had a hard life, but never complained or regretted her choices.  She worked hard, laughed a lot, and had dozens and dozens of friends she maintained over many years. She was my cousins' favorite aunt and her bosses' most reliable colleague.  She worked full time and raised three children. She believed in buying quality shoes for growing feet, and always found the money for a book one couldn't live without.  But more than that, she believed in you.   She just knew you were doing your best, and that was more than enough.

So, yes, my model for leadership is my mother, and I think she would be proud of me--well, most of the time, anyway.  (And come to think of it, her example of who to be led me to my husband, who is like her in all the ways that matter--and it's no coincidence that he has a great mother, too.)

Like Sir Ernest, my mother could turn her back on the past and step into the future. She stepped up to deal directly with adversity, and stepped back to let others do their part.  Like Shackleton, she was a realistic optimist and a leader.

Realistic Optimism

Like pornography, most of us know leadership when we see it.  Experts list dozens of attributes, traits, and behaviors that when mixed in proper proportions magically produce great leaders.  Others observe followers and reduce the equation to trust, followers' belief in the competence of the leader to get them to the goal.  A few have abandoned the 'great man' theory, and find that leadership emerges when and where it is needed and that leadership is organic.

Extreme conditions test any theory, and few tests can approximate the experience of the crew of the Endurance and their leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton.  The goal was to cross the continent.  The achievement was survival.  In 1918, the entire team was rescued after being stranded in the Antarctic for two years.  All attributed their success to one factor, their leader and his optimism in the face of impossible odds.

Yesterday, I was fortunate to be one of 18 people--a mix of land use and association professionals--to sign on to a one-day adventure, guided by the author of Shackleton's Way, Margot Morrell, and Linkage facilitator and executive coach Dick Gauthier.  One of the exercises in the workshop included the use of an assessment tool, the results of which arrayed participant's scores in the four quadrant box all consultants adore.  One scale was realism, the other optimism.  The assessment brought home Shackleton's secret, his extreme realistic optimism, best illustrated by his reaction to watching his ship succumb to the pressure of the ice pack.  He gathered his crew, turned his back on the sinking ship, and said, "So now we will go home." 

Contrarian that I am, I couldn't help thinking of Abraham Lincoln.  Isn't he the opposite of Shackleton yet also one of the greatest leaders the world has known?  Does realistic optimism hold up?  I think so because Lincoln was not a pessimist. (See my January 11 post on  Lincoln's Melancholy.)  He was what Victor Frankl called a 'tragic optimist,' all too aware of the danger of the future but deeply secure in his belief in the group, the promise inherent in "the abundance of man's heart."

In the workshop, I also noticed that the developers--members working in both the public and private sectors--live in the same space as Sir Ernest, realistic optimists all. Association professionals, on the other hand, appeared to be aspiring to the median score. And there lies the opportunity. Rather than worry about what's missing, be realistic, but turn your back on setbacks and don't hold back.

In boldness, there is magic, as Goethe said.  Leadership is about stepping up, committing, knowing what really matters, and trusting our ability to find a way. 

In the extremes, there is greatness and in members' hearts there is promise.  Go for it!