Despite the partial government shutdown, the IRS on Dec. 31 issued interim guidance [PDF] on the 21 percent excise tax on tax-exempt executive compensation exceeding $1 million in any taxable year, enacted as part of the 2017 tax law.
ASAE has flagged the tax as concerning to the tax-exempt community, particularly because compensation subject to the new tax includes more than just base salary. It also includes the cash value of most benefits, including those that have vested but haven’t been received, retirement benefits, and certain retention payments contingent upon service. This means that many nonprofits could be affected, not just those with highly compensated CEOs.
ASAE is particularly concerned about the treatment of amounts payable under Section 457(f) deferred compensation plans in which benefits vest all at once after a period of years (i.e., a “cliff-vesting” provision).
ASAE submitted comments to the Treasury Department last month requesting that the administration establish a grandfather rule for tax-exempt entities that applies to amounts paid pursuant to a written binding contract that was in effect prior to November 3, 2017. This would mirror the grandfather clause included in the tax law for executive compensation contracts of publicly held corporations.
In its guidance, the IRS said there is “no indication in the legislative history” that Congress intended there to be a grandfather rule for tax-exempt organizations. The guidance does, however, confirm that Section 457(f) plan benefits that vested on or before December 31, 2017 (in other words, before the effective date of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the excise tax) are exempt from the excise tax, even if the benefits are paid on or after January 1, 2018.
The interim guidance is the first step in the regulatory process, and Treasury is expected to issue additional guidance going forward. ASAE will continue to make the case to Treasury for an allocation of the amounts in a 457f plan to each year in the vesting period. ASAE will also continue to weigh in with House and Senate leadership and members of the tax-writing committees to advocate for a grandfather for the tax-exempt sector.
Many recruiters and consultants have written about the importance of an executive transition plan to support a successful exit strategy for a departing CEO and a successful onboarding strategy for his or her successor. It’s a critical management challenge, but there aren’t a lot of real-life blueprints for well-executed outboarding and onboarding plans.
My recent retirement from the CEO role at Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) provided a wealth of lessons learned for other organizations facing an executive transition. A change at the top is a key moment for the organization’s staff and culture, and other staff leaders, working with the board, have critical roles to play.
In November 2015, I announced my plan to retire from AAMI on December 31, 2016. I provided the board with a written timeline for the search process, a plan for how I thought I could best support them and the organization during my final year, and a recommendation for developing a strong onboarding process for my successor. Meanwhile, the organization’s formal succession plan was an invaluable guide for setting up the search process. It included a list of agreed-upon search firms, a sample RFP for those firms, a sample search committee charter, and other helpful information.
The Outgoing CEO’s Role
Whether retiring or moving to a different organization, the outgoing leader plays a critical role during a planned executive transition—including, as I learned, these three tasks:
Staff members take their cues from the CEO during a leadership transition. If the CEO is confident, open and trusting, the staff knows they can be confident and trusting.
Controlling ego and fear. My belief is firm that a departing CEO should not be involved in the selection of his or her successor, and yet that belief was tested several times during the search for AAMI’s next chief executive. As its outgoing CEO, I naturally thought I knew the organization better than anyone else, and it was hard to give up control over the destiny of the organization that I so dearly loved. My executive coach was a helpful guide during those moments rooted in fear. Her steady message: Trust the process. I had done everything possible to help the executive committee set up a search process that would lead them to the right candidate, and the process itself would support the committee making the choice that was best for AAMI.
Leading the staff. As at all other times, staff members take their cues from the CEO during a leadership transition. If the CEO is confident, open and trusting, the staff knows they can be confident and trusting. If the CEO is fearful, angry, or secretive, the result among staff is fear, confusion, frustration, and flight. Communication is key. In AAMI’s case, the search committee chair sent several updates to the staff along the way. I provided an update at each monthly staff meeting, and I invited the staff to meet with me privately if they had questions or concerns about the search. We invited staff members to weigh in on the job description and made sure they were the first to receive the news of the new CEO before it was announced externally. Later, the staff was included in preparing for my successor’s arrival.
Preparing an onboarding guide. A thorough onboarding guide is the key to an easy landing for a new CEO. It should cover a wide range of topics:
calendar (an outline of the organization’s annual cycle of activity)
finances (where to find financial documents, budget process, revenue sources and cycle)
key operational topics (vendors and consultants, major technology platforms, lease, insurance, HR documents, disaster recovery plan, succession plan)
governance (bylaws, rosters, board role, policies, where to find board agenda books, election process and cycle)
strategic plan and related documents (dashboard, key performance indicators)
recommended reading (first 30, 60, and 90 days)
list of key external relationships
summary of programs
summary of current activities (existing big projects, issues requiring CEO attention, new projects)
Only the current (or interim) CEO can possibly write such a significant guide. The organization’s management team and other staff may contribute to certain sections, such as the recommended reading list, program summaries, and summary of current activities.
The Onboarding Process
Executive recruiters often say that a critical factor in ensuring success in a new CEO’s first year is a strong onboarding process. AAMI’s process included multiple steps and a team approach. The staff was invited to develop a checklist of actions they could take to help welcome the new CEO. It included a “tips for the newbie” sheet; a guide to jargon, acronyms, and their meaning; welcome signs; an all-staff breakfast on the new CEO’s first day; and departmental briefings.
More important than what was on the checklist was how it was developed: This was not a top-down document. Staff created it on their own during an all-staff meeting, and individuals volunteered to contribute to the tasks on the list. Some of the items have been added to AAMI’s onboarding process for all new employees because they were so helpful, especially the jargon list.
The AAMI executive committee hired an onboarding coach to support the new CEO in his first year. The first year can be overwhelming for any new CEO, and so having an onboarding coach six, nine, or even 12 months into the new position provides significant ongoing support, long after anyone still thinks of the new leader as new.
Finally, in many organizations, it may be appropriate to mark the transfer of leadership in a formal way. At my executive coach’s suggestion, I hosted a brief ceremony during the all-staff breakfast to turn over the keys to the office, with something celebratory, something fun, and something more serious: I presented a 12-inch, three-dimensional, glitter-coated cardboard cutout of a key, complete with AAMI’s logo, along with a bottle of champagne and three books that had helped me when I was new in the CEO role.
Letting Go
The final piece to a successful transition out of the role of CEO is the “out” part. Like onboarding, outboarding is often given short shrift. For me, the full year of preparing AAMI for a new CEO was also a full year of transition out of a long career as a fully engaged professional leader. Letting go of that role, and the self-image that goes along with it, does not just happen on the last day of work. It’s a transition process just as important as the search and onboarding of the new leader, and the outgoing executive can expect it to take some time.
As difficult as it can be, letting go is the last, crucial requirement of good leadership.
Mike Abrams knows how easy it is for a board to lose focus during its periodic in-person meetings. To keep his board on track, Abrams, CEO of the Ohio Hospital Association (OHA), uses a variation on the 80/20 rule, which famously says that 80 percent of a team’s results comes from 20 percent of its effort.
In a similar vein, “we say that 80 percent of our board’s time should be spent discussing issues of strategic importance to the membership,” he says. “That means [only] 20 percent of the time should be devoted to the organization’s financials and other association business items.”
Without such a guiding principle, board members risk running down “rabbit holes,” says Paul Preziotti, principal at Johnson Lambert, LLP. In his role as audit chair on a nonprofit board, he tailors financial reports that are easily digestible in five minutes or less.
“When you present a statement of activity with 30 line items, chances are someone will have a question,” he says. “Too much information and too many micro-level details can make board meetings go bad.”
Too much information and too many micro-level details can make board meetings go bad.— Paul Preziotti
Here are three ways Abrams gets his board ready for strategic thinking at their five four-hour meetings each year.
Homework. Between meetings, OHA board members are expected to complete homework assignments, which are spelled out in the board packet. “[Homework] might be: Discuss with your CFO this issue we’re bringing to the board that has a significant economic impact on Ohio hospitals,” Abrams says. “Or it might be: Check with your chief medical officer—the highest-ranking physician in your system—about the opioid issue and what’s going on in your ER department.” Each board member is expected to share their findings.
Discussion leaders. Before each meeting, Abrams appoints one to three board members to drive the discussion. “You want to make sure everyone feels comfortable with the discussion, and we don’t have that awkward moment, where everyone’s looking at each other saying, ‘OK, who’s first?’”
Agenda structure. OHA’s board has established three strategic initiatives: advocacy, economic sustainability, and healthcare quality/patient safety. Each meeting agenda lists those key initiatives as topic areas for discussion, and agenda items are organized accordingly. “It helps to bake in our strategic plan into our routine agenda,” Abram says. “Our board members are now used to seeing those three initiatives, which give shape to each agenda, and it helps us stay focused.”
If you’re not conscientious about managing how your board spends its meeting time, you risk volunteer churn, Abrams says: “You might lose people who might otherwise make a good contribution.”
“Every organization has a culture. It’s either by design or default, and too often it’s by default,” says American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) CEO Arlene Pietranton, PhD, CAE.
The case for intentionally building and managing culture is strong. A 2016 Deloitte study demonstrated the impact of culture on results. Studies across a variety of industries and types of organizations support that finding.
To learn whether your association is managing culture in a purposeful way, ask these six questions:
1. Are you managing your culture, or is it managing you? If you’re not doing the following, you may be too passive about culture.
You reward behaviors that reflect the best aspects of your culture.
You note and redirect behaviors that are counter to the cultural norms.
You consider cultural “fit” when making hiring and promotion decisions.
2. What is your current culture really like? Don’t guess. Start with a culture audit. Look for the presence of core values, such as trust and integrity, that form the basis of every strong culture, as well as others unique to your organization.
Culture is the sum total of how people behave in an organization, and therefore it is always changing as people change, act, and react. You are either moving closer to or farther away from your desired state.
3. How does your culture affect the members you serve? Look for ways that culture can be extended to members. Meetings are rich opportunities. Make sure that you promote a culture of respect for attendees, that your speakers reflect diversity and inclusion, and that your meeting is accessible.
4. Is your culture inclusive, and does it reflect the diversity of your workforce and the people you serve? Research shows that organizations with greater diversity perform better. Ask yourself whether building inclusion is intentional in your culture. At the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM), staff created an “I am” wall for members and other conference participants to express who they are. AAHPM also offers educational sessions on cultural awareness or unconscious bias and creates ways for people to connect based on interests instead of job function.
5. How do you change culture? Changing culture can be difficult, particularly in an organization with long-time leaders or employees and dearly held practices. Here are a few places to start:
Continually challenge the mindset that says, “We have always done it this way.”
Recognize that cultural change is both “bottom up and top down.” It must be informed by the diversity of people who work in the organization, and leaders need to model it and hold everyone accountable.
Focus on continuous, incremental improvement, and celebrate small wins.
Think carefully about “what you encourage and what you allow,” advises Karen Burgess, MBA, CAE, executive director at the Michigan Dental Association.
6. What are the special challenges for organizational culture posed by the governance structure of associations? Steve Smith, CAE, executive director and CEO at AAHPM, says his association thinks of culture as “how we work with each other—volunteers and staff—working together on the mission.”
One way to reinforce culture is to create a Code of Conduct for the organization, giving everyone the same set of expectations. (In 2011, ASAE adopted Standards of Conduct for members.) Less formally, encourage and remind employees to exhibit the desired cultural behaviors with volunteers and board members to help culture migrate from employees to members over time.
Finally, culture is not static. It is the sum total of how people behave in an organization, and therefore it is always changing as people change, act, and react. You are either moving closer to or farther away from your desired state.
“Culture trumps it all,” ASHA’s Pietranton notes. “You can have lots of really talented folks, a great strategic plan, and can be really well resourced, but the opportunity to undermine intentionally or unintentionally can derail your likelihood of success.”
In the end, she notes, “what you accomplish is certainly important, and how you go about it matters.”
Until recently, there was a voice missing in the boardroom at the Emergency Nurses Association. While almost a third of ENA members are young professionals, defined as having five years of experience or less, no one on the national board fell into this category.
Secretary and Treasurer Mike Hastings, MSN, RN, CEN, said the problem begged the question: “How do we make sure we don’t lose sight of our younger professionals?”
The answer was to create a new young leader liaison role. The first liaison began working with the board earlier this year. “Right now, it’s a two-year pilot, and each liaison serves a one-year term,” Hastings says. “We will call on them like a board member and say, ‘Hey, from your perspective, what do you think about this?’”
The key difference is that the young leader liaison is not an elected official and therefore does not have a board vote. But the liaison participates in board meetings and is responsible for completing common tasks between meetings, such as reviewing readings and recorded meeting minutes.
Already, the liaison has helped to change the ways in which ENA engages younger members. One new method is to create more opportunities for microvolunteering.
“When we work on national committees, the appointment process is for two- or three-year terms, and that is not what our younger generation typically likes,” Hasting says. “So, we are doing smaller, incremental projects this year.”
What we really want to make sure is [that] we help to support and give them the tools and resources they need to succeed.— Mike Hastings, MSN, RN, CEN
Hastings recommends three steps to recruit and engage a young leader liaison for your board:
Create a call for applicants. Once ENA’s board approved the liaison position, it was posted online and disseminated to local chapters. More than 40 members applied, and the board devised a scoring system to review and rate each candidate. “What we wanted to have was somebody that had a nice background and truly represented the voice of the emerging professional,” Hastings says.
Give the liaison full access. The liaison is invited to all ENA board meetings, including the board retreat. Full participation establishes trust and empowers the liaison to speak up, especially during board conversations on difficult issues.
Make the job mutually beneficial. The liaison brings a valuable viewpoint to the board but also benefits from working alongside national leaders who serve as career mentors. It can also help to break down any real or perceived divides between generations within the profession, Hastings says. “What we really want to make sure is [that] we help to support and give them the tools and resources they need to succeed.”
Our association lost our president and CEO after a domestic violence incident in 2016. He had been with our association for 16 years and had a larger-than-life personality.
Our senior staff members learned of the news the next morning and were in complete shock. Grief came later. Our first reaction was simply to ask ourselves, “Now what?”
He was the primary contact with the leaders of our institutional members and built personal relationships with each of them. In many respects, he was the face and voice of the association.
I can’t say that we got everything right, but thanks to the counsel of some friends of the association, and the fact that our president had built a strong, cohesive leadership team, we have some advice to share:
Refer to your succession plan. I had read numerous articles on succession plans. It always seemed like a good idea to have one in place, but it was not at the top of our list. Several years ago, we finally developed one, and I can say with confidence that this plan saved our association from itself. When the association head passes away suddenly, nothing is normal. Emotions are high, and even simple decisions can be difficult to make. Our executive committee reviewed the succession plan within a day of receiving the news and followed the steps that were clearly outlined in the plan. They conferred by conference call a day later and named a new acting president. Without this plan, there likely would have been questions about who makes the decisions, what the process should be, and how involved board members should be in the decision-making process. It would have taken much longer to make decisions, and there would likely have been some dissension about the best way to proceed.
Develop a quick and coordinated response. Our staff and association members deserved to know what happened right away. Senior staff members contacted our executive committee and staff at the same time. We asked them to keep the news quiet for a few hours until we could draft a message to send to all association members. We were under pressure because the local media had picked up the story, and word had started to spread. We managed to send an email blast to the leadership of our institutional members within a few hours, and by the end of the next day, we had sent a message to everyone affiliated with the association. I don’t know how we could have written a message that we were comfortable with any faster, but we were surprised how quickly word spread even before our messages were sent.
Focus on the details. All the while, we realized that those who were not on our communications radar were continuing to email and call the president about routine matters, awaiting a response. It became clear that the sooner we set an auto-reply message on his email and updated his outgoing voicemail message, the better. Composing this message and facing the finality of our loss was one of the hardest things our staff members ever had to do. Several staff members volunteered to take on this task, and we will be eternally grateful for their courage.
Figure out fiduciary responsibilities. We quickly conferred with our auditors to ensure we had alternate internal controls in place for financial and personnel matters. Our secretary and treasurer took on the role of reviewing our general ledger each month, and our senior staff members divided among themselves responsibilities such as time-sheet approvals, disbursement approvals, and contract signing. We reported these temporary changes to our board of directors and continually communicated with our auditors to ensure they were satisfied with the measures we put in place.
Seek out grief counseling. A few days later, we brought in a grief counselor to meet with staff. I am not sure how much it helped individuals, but it made a statement to them that their grief was real, and that the association would be supportive during this difficult time. The grief counselor spoke to us about the stages of grief and shared strategies that staff members could use to cope. We also encouraged staff to contact the employee assistance program offered through one of our insurance plans. Some staff members grieved openly and others less so, but we promised not to judge and be supportive. After the first week, we had received so many touching responses from our community that we started printing them out and taping them on the wall outside of our president’s office. This memorial stayed in place for several months. The emails were later collated and placed in a memory book for his family.
Empower staff. Despite the disruption, the work still had to get done. The first few days after the tragedy were emotional and incredibly difficult. Some staff members dove deep into their work, while others needed to talk about the tragedy. However, we had an association to run. We used the mantra “make him proud” to get through the times when the task at hand seemed futile. We knew how important our association was to our president, so we decided to do everything in our power to run it as well as we could. We often joked about how he would have approved when something positive was achieved, or how certain things would have driven him crazy. We didn’t necessarily make the same decisions he would have, but under such intensely trying circumstances, we had to do what was best for the association and forge our own path when necessary.
Don’t be a doormat. Although we accommodated a certain level of diminished performance during the grieving process, several staff members began performing poorly and lashed out at the association in public ways. We realized that grief could have driven this behavior, but the degree of hostility was unacceptable. Simply chalking up all behavior to grief, and more importantly allowing it, would have led the association down a difficult road. Because this behavior happened on the heels of the president’s death, we offered a one-time buyout to any staff member who felt the need to leave.
Share memories. We encouraged all staff members to attend the memorial service that was held a few weeks later, and many of our members attended as well. We hosted a lunch before the service, so people could share their grief. On the one-year anniversary of our president’s death, we gathered staff members for a moment of remembrance. Our staff members shared funny stories about their interactions with our president, and it ended up being a positive experience. The leadership team decided from the beginning not to avoid saying his name and to refer to him when appropriate. We didn’t want any mention of him to be taboo. Our board members also created an awards program in his honor, which stood for all that he worked for during his career.
Our late president will continue to be part of our lives, and his legacy of leadership at the association lives on. He had a tremendous influence on the organization and will always be remembered. Though it was hard at times, we are grateful that we had many safeguards and resources in place that allowed us to deal with the unexpected loss. If you are lucky, this scenario will never happen at your organization. If it does, however, be kind to yourselves, and know that you will get through it.
Any association that’s thinking about what leadership means for its organization should take a look at what the American Library Association is doing right now.
This may not seem like obvious advice, since what’s happening at ALA is relatively contentious. The association is searching for a new executive director, and its leadership has found itself in the midst of a debate over what qualifications the successful applicant for the position should have. Next month members will vote on a resolution stating that the executive director must possess an ALA-certified master’s degree or similar credential. The resolution was the result of member-led petition in response to an ALA Council decision last year to make such credentials preferred rather than required.
ALA is having this debate because its bylaws necessitate it, but the issues it’s considering are ones that every association ought to consider.
Such a seemingly minor shift has had a broad impact in terms of how many ALA members perceive their perception and its leadership—a boilerplate post on the matter by ALA president James Neal generated dozens of comments in response. “The Executive Director needs to be an exemplary association executive, which is its own profession with its own practices, competencies, and capabilities,” one person argued. “To allow the possibility of hiring a non-MLS executive director is tantamount to dismissing the value of the MLS degree,” argued another. “It would most certainly put the credibility of the association into question.”
Longtime association professionals have heard this song so often that it may hardly even register anymore—it’s that dusty classic called “Association or Industry Experience?,” and it’s been in regular rotation for years. Association executives come from all kinds of backgrounds, ASAE Foundation research shows, and experience in the association world or your association’s particular industry may ultimately matter less than having baseline administration and management skills. And different backgrounds offer different benefits: Executives with association experience, one study shows, do better at setting strategy with their boards, while industry pros have a better grasp of outside trends.
The debate seems to be a new one for some ALA members, with some arguing that there’s been a lack of transparency in the process. But at least in advance of the vote that put the new resolution on the table, ALA seems, if anything, overly conscientious about communicating the stakes to its members. It’s shared a mass of materials relating to the executive director search, including a full transcript of an ALA Council discussion of the matter. Sixteen pages of procedural discussion may be a bit much for the average member who just wants to know what the consequences of their decision are. For that, it’s produced a tidy three-page Word-doc overview of the pros and cons of making the degree a requirement for the executive director.
This is a good thing. Even if the correct answer to the association-versus-industry debate is “it depends,” the debate is an opportunity for the association’s leaders to hone its mission. Perhaps unintentionally, the column of the document listing the issues at play in the debate serve as a useful summary for the issues all associations consider—or ought to—when discussing their leadership: “Must have an understanding of the values of the profession”; “attract a good pool of people”; “Competencies needed to run this organization”; “Importance of diversity and inclusion in the search”; “Perception of how we value our own degree.”
How important are each of these matters to your organization? ALA is having this debate because its bylaws necessitate it, but the issues it’s considering are ones that every association ought to consider when it comes to their staff and volunteer leaders. What are the values of your profession? How do you know, and how do you identify the people who best serve it? Is D&I a key factor in your decision making when it comes to leadership, and what is your association missing if it’s not? These are all questions that come up in relation to an executive search, but you don’t have to wait until the CEO or board president leaves to start asking them.
ALA is having a debate over what its leadership should look like, but ultimately it’s having a conversation about what its identity is. And that’s one every association can and should be having. To not do it is to miss opportunities to find not just new leaders, but new ways to think about leadership.
What discussions does your association have about what the face of its leadership should look like? Share your experiences in the comments
If you’re on the hunt for a CEO job, it’s good to have some hard numbers to talk about—how much you’ve increased revenue, membership, attendance, and so on. But that’s not the only thing a recruiter and hiring committee are looking for.
Pamela Kaul, president and founder of the executive search firm Association Strategies, Inc., says she’s seen plenty of association executives fail because they’re lacking in so-called soft skills such as conflict resolution, relationship-building, and visionary thinking. Those things may seem relatively unimportant—that’s part of why they’re called “soft,” after all—but in Kaul’s experience, they’re why many CEOs get shown the door, or don’t make it into the office in the first place.
Boards these days really expect CEOs to have a global view.
“What I hear when I come into an organization is that boards might find an excuse about why they moved somebody out of an organization or invited a CEO to look at new opportunities, but the bottom line is that it was the behavioral style,” she says. “The person didn’t build relationships, perhaps destroyed relationships, and didn’t mend fences.”
And in the same way that matters of behavior style can spell the end of a CEO’s career, it can also eliminate potential executives from later interview rounds. The issue has become pronounced enough that it inspired a session at the ASAE Annual Meeting & Expo next month, “CEO Temperament and Leadership Success,” where Kaul will be joined by National Parent Teacher Association executive director Nathan Monell and Building Owners and Managers Association International president and CEO Henry Chamberlain.
So what are recruiters and hiring committees looking for? A capacity for addressing conflicts head-on, for one. “People tend to look the other way when there is a red ant or a problematic board member or other negative influence in a leadership role,” Kaul says. “Some execs think, ‘I’ll just wait it out and this issue will just go away at some point.’ But often people really don’t go away.”
A sense of the big picture helps too. “Boards these days really expect CEOs to have a global view,” she says. “What’s going on in the world that will somehow—not even related to our industry, profession, or cause—that might have some impact on our organization or industry, either as an opportunity, a threat, a potential collaboration, as a new product or business line? They really expect the CEO to be the eyes and ears on the global news.”
It can be hard to suss out that capacity in the interview process. Asking a candidate to list some of his or her weaknesses is likely a dead end paved with pat answers. (“I’ve heard all of them, and search committees see through them in a New York second,” she says.) But asking candidates to talk about moments when they faced conflicts and how they addressed them can be revealing on two levels: in terms of the specifics of what happened, and in how the answer reveals the candidate’s own level of self-awareness. How comfortable are you with expressing a professional shortcoming in a genuine way? And do you present yourself as somebody with the capacity to address it?
Self-awareness is a tricky business, as I discussed in last week’s post. Association executives (and those who wish to become them) do well to understand how they’re perceived by people around them. But doing so requires time, consistency, and a trust-building attitude. People resist all of that not just because it’s time-consuming, but because inevitably the process will reveal flaws. But candidates can take some reassurance in the fact that that hiring committees aren’t looking for perfection, just the appropriate fit. As leadership expert Ram Charan wrote in Harvard Business Review last December on the CEO selection process: “Every CEO has an open flank. The typical vetting process will bring candidates’ quirks and flaws to the surface, but wise selectors accept imperfection when they make their decision.”
In a pinch, though, Kaul suggests that there’s one way for you to get feedback about how you’re perceived. If you didn’t get offered the C-suite gig—and perhaps even if you did—get in touch with your references and have a candid conversation about what was discussed. The reference may not have delivered the glowing praise you’d expected. “I’m aware of situations where references have come forward about a candidate’s behavior….[and] isn’t moving forward in a job search because the reference’s information was not helpful to the cause of the CEO,” she says. “You have to find out from your references what was said.”
What has worked well for you as an executive when going through the hiring process, and how do you get comfortable expressing your shortcomings? Share your experiences in the comments.
Board diversity is a topic that receives a lot of lip service, but when it comes to putting words into action, nonprofits still have a long way to go. That’s according to some key data from BoardSource’s Leading with Intent report.
The survey of more than 1,700 nonprofit leaders identified that 90 percent of board chairs and 84 percent of board members were white. Meanwhile, 27 percent of boards were entirely white, and a majority of boards were either male or over age 50.
That doesn’t come as a surprise to Vicki Deal-Williams, FASAE, CAE, chief staff officer for multicultural affairs at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
We have a very diverse slate, but that doesn’t mean those are the individuals that get elected.
“Board leadership is probably one of the last places where we are going to see changes related to diversity and inclusion,” she says. “Some of that is a function of this concept of what is known as privilege and who has been given the opportunities to lead.”
While most executives surveyed agreed that a diverse board was important or very important for planning effectively for the future, Deal-Williams says board members must be proactive in ensuring a more diverse leadership pipeline.
“Those who are in situations and positions to lead have to be extremely cognizant about who’s not at the table and why,” she says. “As the steward of the association, board members have a responsibility to know [their] stakeholders, know what’s relevant to them, as well as their needs and desires.”
Member data can help dispel board members’ assumptions. In ASHA’s case, data helped its board rethink the appointment process for committee leaders.
“We were hearing complaints about young people not being considered, and people from diverse and ethnic backgrounds feeling overlooked,” Deal-Williams says.
To address this, she conducted an informal survey of incoming and outgoing board members about the importance of D+I and how they felt about recruiting and identifying leaders from diverse backgrounds.
“I showed them what they thought they were doing versus the same-old results they were getting,” Deal-Williams says.
Tackling board diversity also depends on governance structure. For associations with board appointments, it’s possible to work with the executive committee to address it. But, for groups like ASHA where positions are member-elected, it can be more complex.
“We have a very diverse slate, but that doesn’t mean those are the individuals that get elected,” Deal-Williams says. “What we’ve done instead is to focus on the cultural competency of our board. They come up with a set of guiding principles that establish the policies and practices, and we actively work with them to engage our staff and members.”
About two years ago, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) decided to change how it handled its high-level decision making. Too often, ideas rose up that hadn’t been fully vetted, which made for inefficiencies. “When something might have misfired, or someone was surprised and saying, ‘Gosh, where did that idea come from?’—those questions landed directly with our CEO,” says Jennifer M. Schlener, chief of staff at AAMC. “Our leadership team itself recognized the need for a different approach to both mitigate these surprises and make better decisions more quickly.”
What AAMC learned is that those misfires occurred either because the idea didn’t align well with the association’s strategic plan or because a critical department didn’t have an opportunity to weigh in on it. In response, AAMC launched a three-person executive committee that includes Schlener, the COO, and the executive vice president and is responsible for efficiently handling large strategic decisions and new product ideas.
That sounds counterintuitive: How does an association become more efficient by adding another layer to the org chart? “More than once I heard the term ‘bureaucracy,’” says William T. Mallon, senior director, strategy and innovation development at AAMC, of the early response to the executive committee proposal. But Mallon and Schlener say the system works speedily and well, prompting staff to be more deliberate about its actions.
It’s not easy to make clear decisions at an association: Rational thought often contends with risk-averse stakeholders, bad data, perfectionism, an itchiness to make any decision (even a bad one), and other roadblocks. Associations like AAMC, however, have learned that better awareness of irrationality and blind spots can help them better address them—and make better decisions in the process.
Gut Versus Data
Shelley Row, a consultant, speaker, and former executive at the Department of Transportation and Institute of Transportation Engineers, says there are a few warning signs when an organization is about to make a bad decision. Board members close up. Or they speak up, but in the name of delaying—can we get one more report? Another?
In those situations, Row says, it’s important for leaders to recognize the problem in the room for what it is—fear—and bring it out into the open. “Get those fears into the room without calling it fear,” she says. “When we’re trying to make a decision and it just isn’t gelling, try probing that discomfort. I might say, ‘What’s not sitting right? What’s making us uncomfortable about this decision?’ What that does is it forces them to put language around the discomfort. Once it’s articulated, it’s easier to work with and find solutions to move forward.”
A Matrix for Decisions
Former association and U.S. Department of Transportation executive Shelley Row uses this chart to show the continuum of thought and emotion that goes into decision-making. Problems with many variables that are addressed solely through data lead to over-thinking, Row argues; exclusively using intuition can lead to knee-jerk decisions. “Aha moments” reflect a balance of thought and feeling. “For particularly tough decisions, executives benefit from time away from the decision,” she says. “The brain continues to process the problem you’re working on, and it will combine the cognitive information with the subconscious information from your history and experience. That’s where you get the aha moment.”
Row is a strong advocate for data-driven decision making, but she also says that it inevitably is done “on a continuum between thinking and feeling,” as she writes in her book Think Less, Live More (see “A Matrix for Decisions” on page 53.)
For those who are skeptical, she recommends conducting postmortems on big decisions to consider how data influenced the decision. “If it turned out it wasn’t a good decision, ask, ‘What was going on that pushed us in that direction?’ Sometimes executives will say that they would listen to the data and not their gut.”
Dale West, CAE, vice president of healthcare and scientific industry practice at SmithBucklin and cofacilitator of SmithBucklin’s Leadership Institute, agrees that data can sometimes be used as a crutch for boards struggling with a strategic decision. Associations can avoid that paralysis by analysis by establishing ground rules for what metrics will matter early on.
But he adds that more often boards are waylaid by not taking enough time to discuss what problem needs fixing. “I think that that happens in a lot of decision-making situations,” he says. “People have a knee-jerk reaction and immediately think what’s right in front of them is the actual problem to be solved. And when we go deeper we realize that that is actually not the problem that has to be solved.”
For instance, in 2015 West was serving as the executive director for the Society for Gastroenterology Nurses and Associates (SGNA), which was pressed to respond to an outbreak of a “superbug” called CRE that was affecting GI patients. West scrapped the planned agenda for a board meeting to focus entirely on the outbreak. From West’s perspective, there were two decisions to make: what to do right away, and what to do in the long term.
“Obviously, the overarching problem is easy to see, but we had to decide as an organization, what’s our role?” he says. “And when we look at our role, how quickly do we need to act?” In the short term, SGNA served as a liaison for members, gathering and disseminating information from the FDA and CDC for the GI unit managers that were under pressure to respond to the outbreak. But it also planned for how to respond after the outbreak subsided, developing new education and training programs and establishing a new clinical guideline for responding to similar events in the future. “That takes time, because you do have to have the right data to make those changes,” he says.
Establishing a clear idea of what the short- and long-term problems are, West says, helped the board move quickly but deliberatively. “Most of the time if we step back and think about what the problem is, and the process that we’ll go through, it will make the decision-making process so much easier, and the outcome of that process much more successful,” he says.
Benchmarks and Gates
But even once a board deliberately identifies a problem and proposes a solution, it can still hesitate. West recommends establishing benchmarks for monitoring the decision, along with reminding the board that it can always course-correct. “Sometimes people believe that once a decision happens with the board, that’s it, that’s the decision,” he says. “But every decision is not going to be 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong. Your ability to keep an eye on the metrics and change course is what’s really important.”
So much of effective decision making involves heading off potential problems before they begin to drain an association’s resources. AAMC surfaces those problems quickly via process. Under its framework, each new idea passes through multiple “gates,” where different stakeholders consider whether it’s met established criteria before moving on.
Every decision is not going to be 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong. Your ability to keep an eye on the metrics and change course is what’s really important.
Dale West, CAE
While the idea of multiple gates sounds forbidding and slow, Mallon says the process moves quickly. When the executive committee process was put in place, it came with a goal that every idea submitted for consideration for the first stage would get a response within eight days. “It was really important to give a clear signal that this was not going to be a process where things get bogged down for weeks and months, where people are sitting around waiting for an answer,” he says. Thus far, Mallon says, the committee has always met its eight-day deadline.
And even though the answer is sometimes no, it’s a quick no, and one rooted in a requirement that people with ideas square them with AAMC’s strategy and recognize who needs to be involved. “Nobody wants to be doing work that ultimately won’t be deemed strategically important by the organization,” Mallon says.
He points to one recent success story involving a learning tool that members had been requesting. The multistage process revealed a need for market research and technical integration. “In the past, we probably would have gone with it at 60 miles an hour and realized right before launch, ‘Oh, guess what, we can’t actually register people for this,’” he says. “Or we design the whole thing without really understanding the best method for delivery.” But, because of the process, they were able to identify those concerns early on and get them addressed.
“I definitely see us making better decisions and being more nimble” says AAMC’s Schlener. “There’s more significant and meaningful collaboration. … Not sending an email to three colleagues saying, ‘Hey, here’s a new idea that I’m running with,’ but rather trying to encourage people to sit down and co-create things. That has been a significant change.”
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