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Leadership runs on at least two tracks: It involves not just gathering the skills to become a better leader yourself, but helping others lead as well.

That’s especially true when it comes to association volunteering, I think: because serving on committees and boards doesn’t involve financial compensation (usually), the need to be a leader and to help others lead is all the more pressing. That’s one of the conclusions I came to while reporting “Step by Step,” my feature story in the Associations Now Volunteer Leadership Issue. As the people I spoke with explained, there’s a constant effort to identify, train, and support volunteers, and for volunteers to develop those abilities themselves. As consultant and former association executive Donna French Dunn, CAE, points out of successful volunteers, “Board leaders, not just the board chair, have a great sense of what’s also going on in the world around them.”

There’s an interesting postscript to this story: Shortly after the article was wrapped up, one of the people I spoke with, Cecilia Sepp, CAE, became an association executive. I spoke with Sepp in her capacity as a longtime association volunteer and expert in volunteer management. But now that she’s running the show at an association—she’s president and CEO of the American College of Health Care Administrators—how has she helped support volunteers?

You don’t know enough in the first 90 days to make sweeping changes.

It’s early days yet—Sepp began at ACHCA at the start of 2016. But she made sure to come in with a supportive attitude toward the variety of volunteer roles at the association, from the board to committees to chapter leaders. “I’ve worked at a couple of organizations where the chief staff executive did not really like having chapters, and would say things like ‘this chapter just causes me problems,’” she says. “I was between the chief staff executive and the volunteer liaison, and that not a comfortable place to be sometimes if you don’t have an executive who’s supportive.”

At ACHCA, she’s found enthusiastic volunteers, but also work to be done, especially when it comes to limiting the bureaucratic aspects of running chapters. “Like other associations we struggle to make sure that chapters are getting the support they need,” she says. “There are responsibilities that all chapters have, but what we’re trying to do for them is relieve some of the administrative burden that has been created over the years, and make that easier for them, so they can spend their time doing things like planning networking events, having webinars and writing newsletters.”

To highlight the priority she’s given to volunteering, she’s made a bit of an org-chart change, having ACHCA’s volunteer relations staffer report directly to her. “I think that sends a message to the chapters of how important they are, because the CEO is getting directly involved,” she says. However, she’s made a point of approaching changes with care. ACHCA is a relatively small association, with 2,300 members and six staff members, and though its staff doesn’t have deep volunteer experience outside ACHCA itself, early on Sepp is more interested in talking about its process than rushing to retool them. “A lot of CEOs feel they need to come in and change everything and put their imprint on them immediately,” she says. “You don’t know enough in the first 90 days to make those sweeping changes.”

But in addition to hearing out the processes the association already has in place, she’s been working to impart the importance of guiding volunteers on their own path, even if she has plenty of competing priorities on top of volunteer management. “I am already working with my staff to talk about some of these things,” she says. “What are we doing in this organization for our volunteers? Are there things we want to do differently? Are there things we should do differently? Can we make it more interesting and engaging for them? What I’ve started telling my staff is, they’re doing this to get something out of it. We have to make sure they have a meaningful experience.”

What do you do as an executive to guide volunteers on their paths, and how do you balance that job along with your other responsibilities? Share your experiences in the comments.

Nearly 1,000 attendees clutch their plastic clappers and file enthusiastically into the ballroom for one of the American Physical Therapy Association’s signature events: its annual Oxford debate. The topic: Should residency be a requirement for licensing physical therapists? The speakers: two teams of three professionals presenting or giving counterpoints for seven to 10 minutes each, one affable moderator and chair of the planning committee. The costumes: Wait, there are costumes? And music?

So much for stuffiness. Eight years ago APTA sought a way to creatively air perspectives around hot professional topics at its annual meeting and decided to try an Oxford debate—a format of timed argumentation with strict rules and a framework designed to keep the focus on an issue, not those discussing it.

“It’s been a big success for us,” says Mary Lynn Billitteri, APTA conference programming manager. “It’s a very entertaining but important part of the conference each year. … It’s not that people are going to walk out of the room and say, ‘I’m convinced I’m going to vote for X.’ It’s more for opening minds. The debate sparks a lot of great conversation,” and consensus often emerges.

The debate does not produce an official APTA policy stand—Billitteri estimates that a quarter of presenters advocate a position they personally oppose. But the event, which is part serious presentation, part dinner theater, can make arguing the pro-con elements of a strategic discussion or the pitching of conflicting perspectives a bit more palatable.

In an era of information overload, rapid decision making, and growing diversity and inclusiveness, formal argumentation with its civility and respectful frameworks can be an efficient, effective leadership tool in the workplace and boardroom, too.

Debate Rediscovered

Debate suffers from a bad rep. Popular depictions often illustrate word wars in which ideas and questionable facts are slung back and forth by people who don’t hesitate to speak over one another. On the academic front, debate competitors speak a complex, jargony language of rules and acronyms.

The art of argumentation requires superior listening skills, strengthens critical thinking and communication skills, and builds good writing, interpersonal, and presentation skills. On a less personal level, formal argumentation can raise a group’s self-awareness, ensure that all ideas and opinions are considered fairly and thoroughly, and reveal consensus points, as well as the crux of disagreement.

Debate also builds grit, resilience, and deep empathy, since debaters and their audience must understand opposing views alongside their own, according to Jullian Plaza, professor of forensics and debate coach at Colorado College. Debate done well “provides the deeper reasons why you’d want to go with certain plans or ideas,” he says.

“I would hope association boards have considered debate [as a tool] because it creates constructed conflict,” which is “inevitable” in a diverse society striving to be more inclusive, says Plaza. “Not everyone grew up in DC with exposure to different groups, so they have various levels of perspective and comfort, and yet everyone in a workplace is expected to understand people they have no idea about or understanding of. The only way to deal with this well is to depersonalize the conversations. … Effective relationships don’t magically occur.”

But there is a reason why debate is primarily offered in Toastmasters’ “advanced” chapters and with the help of a members-only guide: It takes genuine trust, collaboration, and commitment.

“If you don’t trust that everyone is there on equal footing and debating on the weight of the criteria and outcome goal you’ve all agreed to beforehand, it’s not real debate,” says Plaza, who will train attendees at the 2016 ASAE Great Ideas Conference, March 13–15, about the merits and tactics of debate for vetting ideas.

Toward that end, a lot of “soft work” must be done before an argument because “in a business, you’re a team, not a winner or loser,” he says. “You live or die by how well you work together. What people don’t understand is that … debate is a tool for mutual growth, to solve problems together, in large part because you’ve all already agreed on objective criteria against which to match and judge each argument.”

For debates to be effective, the issues need to be clearly defined and narrowed.

Better Decision Making

The components of effective debate also have applications for high-performing association boards, according to researchers who conducted a three-year study of how strategic conflict helps boards make better decisions. The study recommends that boards devote 40 percent of their time to “seeking decisions and action items,” some of which “may be contentious” or crisis-oriented.

Mark Engle, FASAE, CAE, principal of Association Management Center, and co-researcher Paul Salipante, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University, found that to manage conflict-heavy issues, the best boards often hire third-party consultants to add perspective and information while simultaneously delegating debate and consensus identification to task forces before full-board consideration and further debate.

Engle and Salipante also discovered a difference between association boards and their corporate counterparts in terms of debate: In associations, getting personal can produce better results. “Debating the objective merits of the issue during [association] board meetings leads to lower-quality decision making. But allowing personal elements into deliberations at the board level drives consensus among peers and improves decision quality when members have a personal interest and perceive a fair process in making a decision,” Engle wrote in the January 2012 issue of Associations Now.

This is less surprising when you consider the personal investment and attachment many association board members have to the work those organizations do, noted one association executive.

Clearing the Air

Debate can also be used as an information tool, a way to ensure that board members know all the facts and arguments prior to a separate robust discussion.

In addition, different formats can engage groups of various sizes. For example, many business schools routinely use classroom or campuswide debates not to have winners or losers but to boost learning engagement, recall, and critical thinking in tomorrow’s leaders.

“For debates to be effective, the issues need to be clearly defined and narrowed,” says consultant and frequent interim CEO Douglas Kleine, CAE, who placed third at Ohio’s high school debate championships. “Take one idea or strategy at a time.”

Kleine used a parliamentary debate format to energize critical conversations at the Community Associations Institute’s annual meetings years ago, choosing—like APTA—serious topics but bedecking speakers in wigs and allowing hecklers.

He believes a formal back-and-forth at board meetings “can help air something that’s grumbling around in the dirt. … Debate can bring the issue forward and air it out. Maybe the differences are intractable, but maybe they’re not.”

Is your board capable of using debate strategically? Maybe that’s your next argument.

You’re a new association executive, talking to your new board chair. “I’ve waited a long time to be in this position, and I intend to make the most of it,” the chair says. “I think it’s time to tear up the old strategic plan and put a new one in place.” In private, you sigh, roll your eyes. But then what?

It’s unlikely that a board chair will want to wield power in quite so authoritarian a manner. But for a new CEO, the recognition that you need to assert control—and quickly—can be one of those sweat-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments. And it’s all the more complicated because leadership isn’t simple in associations; you’re in charge, but so is the board.

There’s some good straight talk and advice in a recent series of blog posts published by the consultancy Ideas for Action. In “Seven Ways New Nonprofit Leaders Succeed the First Year on the Job,” Alan Davis, Jolene Knapp, CAE, and Deb Nystrom highlight the soft skills (listening and communication) and hard skills (training and strategy-setting) that can help new execs get through their first 12 months relatively unscathed. (A third post covers work-life balance.)

If they’re not excited, they shouldn’t be board members.

The posts are useful guides for newbies and perhaps helpful refreshers for long-tenured execs. But in terms of both groups, I was struck by one line in particular about board communication. “The board should be vitally interested in progress toward strategic goals,” they write. “Find a way to check on this.”

Easier said than done, of course. So I asked Knapp, who before joining Ideas for Action was for 20 years the executive director of the Society for College and University Planning, what keeps boards’ eyes off the ball. Why does their attention stray from strategy?

“Frankly, it’s human nature,” she says. “I think for many board members, at least in my experience, in their day jobs they’re not necessarily used to being in roles that require them to think or act or work strategically. When they’re faced with a situation that feels more comfortable to them, they’re going to migrate toward that. ‘What kind of box lunches should we have at next year’s conference?’ That kind of stuff is easy and fun.”

So the first step for the executive is to steer the conversation—not necessarily in terms of what the specific strategy should be, but certainly in terms of having a strategic discussion. “People will talk about and pay attention to what you put in front of them,” she says. “So my contention is that you need to be darned careful about what you put in front of them.”

There are practical ways for a CEO to move a board in that direction—Knapp recommends getting consent-agenda-type items out of the way in a phone call before the face-to-face meeting, for instance. But more importantly, the CEO can also manage the board (without explicitly steering it) by establishing a common agreement on those strategic goals.

“How many strategic priorities do you have, and are you sharp and crystal-clear about a shared understanding of what those priorities are and what does it mean to constitute success?” she says. “If the board is clearly focused in a way that provides a genuine filter for making choices about what to do and what not to do and how to allocate resources, there will be excitement about that. If they’re not excited about that, they shouldn’t be board members.”

Of course, board members may not always agree on those strategic priorities. And a CEO may wind up with a board chair who wants a tighter grip on the rudder. “If you have an incoming board chair who is kind of dead set on a more stale model of ‘We’re the board and you’re the staff and you’re here to support us,’ that’s a pretty hard thing to overcome,” Knapp says. Constant conversation with the board can help, but in the case of a particularly tough chair, it may help to start thinking long-term—what kind of power can you as a CEO use to encourage the inclusion of the kind of board leaders that can fulfill the organization’s vision?

This is a case, Knapp says, where the particular experience of the CEO can be an asset, because he or she has interactions with the talent pool within membership that the board may not. “I think the CEO and staff members tend to have a very different view of members’ contributions and membership’s leadership ability and commitment than, say, board members do,” she says. “I think there’s an insight to the kinds of people who are in the pool.” In the long run, CEOs can encourage board leaders with an enthusiastic and strategic mindset that can help feel good talent to volunteer down the line. It can be a problem that solves itself, so long as the CEO starts the process.

“I think The CEO has to have a really strong role [in identifying potential board members],” she says. “How visible that role is, I think is a different question.”

How do you handle the balance of power within your association’s board? Share your experiences in the comments.

Nearly 1,000 attendees clutch their plastic clappers and file enthusiastically into the ballroom for one of the American Physical Therapy Association’s signature events: its annual Oxford debate. The topic: Should residency be a requirement for licensing physical therapists? The speakers: two teams of three professionals presenting or giving counterpoints for seven to 10 minutes each, one affable moderator and chair of the planning committee. The costumes: Wait, there are costumes? And music?

So much for stuffiness. Eight years ago APTA sought a way to creatively air perspectives around hot professional topics at its annual meeting and decided to try an Oxford debate—a format of timed argumentation with strict rules and a framework designed to keep the focus on an issue, not those discussing it.

“It’s been a big success for us,” says Mary Lynn Billitteri, APTA conference programming manager. “It’s a very entertaining but important part of the conference each year. … It’s not that people are going to walk out of the room and say, ‘I’m convinced I’m going to vote for X.’ It’s more for opening minds. The debate sparks a lot of great conversation,” and consensus often emerges.

For debates to be effective, the issues need to be clearly defined and narrowed.Douglas Kleine, CAE

The debate does not produce an official APTA policy stand—Billitteri estimates that a quarter of presenters advocate a position they personally oppose. But the event, which is part serious presentation, part dinner theater, can make arguing the pro-con elements of a strategic discussion or the pitching of conflicting perspectives a bit more palatable.

In an era of information overload, rapid decision making, and growing diversity and inclusiveness, formal argumentation with its civility and respectful frameworks can be an efficient, effective leadership tool in the workplace and boardroom, too.

Debate Rediscovered

Debate suffers from a bad rep. Popular depictions often illustrate word wars in which ideas and questionable facts are slung back and forth by people who don’t hesitate to speak over one another. On the academic front, debate competitors speak a complex, jargony language of rules and acronyms.

Dial Down the Fear Factor

Robert Moore, CAE, chief operating officer at the American Dental Hygienists’ Association, understands concerns that formal debate may seem too divisive for certain boards. However, as a debate tournament judge and collegiate national champion in informative speaking, Moore knows ways to make argumentation feel safer while still enabling robust debate.

1. Set clear expectations. These include ground rules that reflect attributes important to the association’s culture, such as respecting diverse viewpoints.
2. Empower the board chair. He or she should keep time, call on questioners, and point to the rules if someone goes out of bounds.
3. Consider inviting an outside professional to debate an alternative position or serve as provocateur. This allows an association leader or team to argue with a perceived expert, likely diminishing potential “interpersonal awkwardness,” Moore says.
4. Assign some speakers the view opposite their own. Academic research has found that when students are assigned to argue against their own opinion, more than half change their mind to that new position. Few people switch sides if assigned a position they already held.
5. Ensure good facilitation. Extreme politeness in associations can hinder open conversation, so even when members vigorously debate in online forums and virtual board groups, they often ratchet down commentary dramatically when face to face. “That’s where good facilitation techniques can help force that board conversation in ways that don’t re-create an adversarial relationship,” says Moore.

The art of argumentation requires superior listening skills, strengthens critical thinking and communication skills, and builds good writing, interpersonal, and presentation skills. On a less personal level, formal argumentation can raise a group’s self-awareness, ensure that all ideas and opinions are considered fairly and thoroughly, and reveal consensus points, as well as the crux of disagreement.

Debate also builds grit, resilience, and deep empathy, since debaters and their audience must understand opposing views alongside their own, according to Jullian Plaza, professor of forensics and debate coach at Colorado College. Debate done well “provides the deeper reasons why you’d want to go with certain plans or ideas,” he says.

“I would hope association boards have considered debate [as a tool] because it creates constructed conflict,” which is “inevitable” in a diverse society striving to be more inclusive, says Plaza. “Not everyone grew up in DC with exposure to different groups, so they have various levels of perspective and comfort, and yet everyone in a workplace is expected to understand people they have no idea about or understanding of. The only way to deal with this well is to depersonalize the conversations. … Effective relationships don’t magically occur.”

But there is a reason why debate is primarily offered in Toastmasters’ “advanced” chapters and with the help of a members-only guide: It takes genuine trust, collaboration, and commitment.

“If you don’t trust that everyone is there on equal footing and debating on the weight of the criteria and outcome goal you’ve all agreed to beforehand, it’s not real debate,” says Plaza, who will train attendees at the 2016 ASAE Great Ideas Conference, March 13–15, about the merits and tactics of debate for vetting ideas.

Toward that end, a lot of “soft work” must be done before an argument because “in a business, you’re a team, not a winner or loser,” he says. “You live or die by how well you work together. What people don’t understand is that … debate is a tool for mutual growth, to solve problems together, in large part because you’ve all already agreed on objective criteria against which to match and judge each argument.”

Better Decision Making

The components of effective debate also have applications for high-performing association boards, according to researchers who conducted a three-year study of how strategic conflict helps boards make better decisions. The study recommends that boards devote 40 percent of their time to “seeking decisions and action items,” some of which “may be contentious” or crisis-oriented.

Mark Engle, FASAE, CAE, principal of Association Management Center, and co-researcher Paul Salipante, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University, found that to manage conflict-heavy issues, the best boards often hire third-party consultants to add perspective and information while simultaneously delegating debate and consensus identification to task forces before full-board consideration and further debate.

Engle and Salipante also discovered a difference between association boards and their corporate counterparts in terms of debate: In associations, getting personal can produce better results. “Debating the objective merits of the issue during [association] board meetings leads to lower-quality decision making. But allowing personal elements into deliberations at the board level drives consensus among peers and improves decision quality when members have a personal interest and perceive a fair process in making a decision,” Engle wrote in the January 2012 issue of Associations Now.

This is less surprising when you consider the personal investment and attachment many association board members have to the work those organizations do, noted one association executive.

Clearing the Air

Debate can also be used as an information tool, a way to ensure that board members know all the facts and arguments prior to a separate robust discussion.

In addition, different formats can engage groups of various sizes. For example, many business schools routinely use classroom or campuswide debates not to have winners or losers but to boost learning engagement, recall, and critical thinking in tomorrow’s leaders.

“For debates to be effective, the issues need to be clearly defined and narrowed,” says consultant and frequent interim CEO Douglas Kleine, CAE, who placed third at Ohio’s high school debate championships. “Take one idea or strategy at a time.”

Kleine used a parliamentary debate format to energize critical conversations at the Community Associations Institute’s annual meetings years ago, choosing—like APTA—serious topics but bedecking speakers in wigs and allowing hecklers.

He believes a formal back-and-forth at board meetings “can help air something that’s grumbling around in the dirt. … Debate can bring the issue forward and air it out. Maybe the differences are intractable, but maybe they’re not.”

Is your board capable of using debate strategically? Maybe that’s your next argument.

anaging volunteer leaders is a little like being a guide for a mountain climb. You begin with a group that arrives with plenty of enthusiasm—committee chairs, new board members—and you make a difficult trek upward. There are mistakes, people exchange short words at times, and raw personalities get exposed. But, thanks to your leadership, you get everybody to the top of the mountain.

At which point you realize you’re not sure how you’re going to get everybody back down.

It can be notoriously difficult to get members to get involved in volunteer service. For one thing, the climb can look like it will take much too long. But it can be equally challenging to find ways to help volunteer leaders end their term and stay engaged with the association.

I’ve never had anybody intervene or say, ‘Why are you doing this? We didn’t do that when I was president.’

That’s an experience Steve R. Smith, CAE, has had at executive director of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. As he explained in the latest issue of Associations Now, he’d received a tart message from a former board member who’d felt neglected after his term was over. Smith was struck by the irony of being head of an association focused on end-of-life care but not doing right by leaders at the end of their tenure. He recalls thinking, “Maybe we need to be a little more intentional with how we transition people at the end of their service.”

Smith’s solution is simple: Keep them in the loop. Every other year he invites AAHPM past presidents to take part in a phone call about the association’s activities, and he sends former board members the same email he delivers to current board members about its activities. This idea might strike fear in the heart of many association CEOs, dreading a reply-all-pocalypse of input from people with no real decisionmaking role. (And let’s not pretend that there aren’t some board members who CEOs are perfectly happy to see ride off into the sunset.) But Smith says the experience has only been positive. “I’ve never had anybody intervene or say, ‘Why are you doing this? We didn’t do that when I was president.’”

That, along with other traditional past-president roles such as heading up nominating committees, can help give a meaningful and positive image to the tail end of volunteer leadership. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring that kind of candor to the beginning of the volunteer experience as well, as everybody begins to arrive at base camp. In a recent interview at Twenty Hats, Fairfax CASA volunteer supervisor MaryAnn Wohlford points out that clarifying what the volunteer experience will be like on the front end better equips leaders to provide support when those volunteers get frustrated or burn out.

After all, many volunteers check out, either literally or mentally, if they feel ill-equipped or unheard: “Some volunteers drop the ball because they think no one is looking — or they think what they are supposed to do is unimportant because no one is asking about it,” she says. And, she adds, when you’ve clarified what the expectations are, it’s easier to start a conversation when you see their engagement has begun to slip.

This process of candor and clarity needn’t be stressful, dutiful, or dull. Recently, Association Headquarters’ Jodi Araujo posted a video of a handful of basic tools to get new board members acclimated to their roles. The brief video (see below) is worth watching, but the lessons are straightforward: know their interests, know how they prefer to be managed, keep them focused on mission, help them forward their agenda.

As with the beginning of leadership terms, so with their ends. If you’ve done your vetting right, your board members aren’t there just because they want the status of a board seat. So, ending their tenures without taking advantage of their concern for the association’s mission squanders talent. “We recycle [former board members] onto some other board or they go away,” Smith says. “And there are so many other things that people might want to do.”

What have you done to keep volunteers engaged after their tenures have ended, and how do you prepare them for their leadership roles? Share your experiences in the comments.

One lament among association executives might go something like this: “If only [board member] weren’t standing in the way of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

A less common lament, but one also worth attending to: “If only the board-relationship structure we’ve created weren’t supporting unconscious biases that erode board unity.”

The latter statement is a little convoluted, but it speaks to the idea that complaints about the behavior of particular stakeholders may miss the point: The core issue may be the environment that those stakeholders were invited or elected into. That’s one of the themes of “Nonprofit Governance and the Power of Things,” a Nonprofit Quarterly article by Fredrik O. Andersson and Avery Edenfield, scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

So much of the success of the board-CEO relationship has to do with how discussions are framed.

Andersson and Edenfield’s study covers a lot of ground relating to the things besides the people in the boardroom that influence board dynamics. Some of them are the documents that drive the board’s work. As an example, they discuss the removal of a nonprofit leader from an organization, and how to some degree it was a function of leaders having a different relationship to the documents that shape the organization. New leaders, they write, “did not share the relationship to the texts that the original founders had. For example, the employee handbook was a relatively new document that came about because of tension over expectations of employees. Practices and agreements were inscribed in this handbook, which was then enrolled into the new network through multiple connections and with a variety of rhetorical consequences.”

The academese in that quote doesn’t make my heart sing either. But put more simply, the point is valid: Because how a board leads can often be a matter of interpretation, you can’t assume your guiding policies and practices alone will keep order. Which is where the CEO comes in.

That point was articulated in a similar, more association-specific way at “Executive Committees: Do’s, Don’ts and Damage Controls,” a Learning Lab at last week’s ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition in Detroit. Opening the session, Glenn Tecker, chairman and co-CEO of Tecker International, said that management of executive committees is an area “where there are no best practices”—it’s up to each individual organization to determine what works. But so much of the success of the board-CEO relationship has to do with how discussions are framed.

Typically a CEO or executive committee may come to the full board with proposals for actions, which is fully within the guidelines that structure decision making. But there is a difference between a proposal for action that is presented as an opportunity for discussion, and one where decision has already been made and the larger board is invited only to rubber-stamp it. A rogue individual pushing an agenda in the former manner can complicate the life of an organization, even if he or she is working within legal bounds.

Tecker presented three scenarios from anonymous associations to show a few of the ways this problem manifests itself: The president-elect who wants to bully through a bylaws change, the president who pursued merger discussions with another association without consulting with the rest of the board, the president who busily engaged in management activities better left to staff. Nightmares all, but all cases where leaders were given a lot of leeway to interpret an association’s goals, without recognizing that interpreting an association’s goals is a fundamentally collaborative act.

One path toward a solution isn’t setting down more policies and rules, but thinking realistically about behavior and talking openly about the behaviors expected out of leaders. The handout for the Annual Meeting session includes a sample list of “board norms,” articulating collective expectations for relationships, conflict-management, communication, meeting preparation, and decisionmaking. The overall sensibility of these norms is such that it could easily be retitled Everything I Needed to Know About Association Governance I Learned in Kindergarten: Contribute ideas, respect differences, don’t interrupt, ask questions, plan ahead, show up on time, let everybody speak.

And yet, how many critical decisions get undone in the board room precisely because those simple norms get forgotten? Following those simple guidelines may not, in itself, make your organization the decisive and forward-thinking organization it wants to be. But it’s worth remembering that not being on the same page leads to the power imbalances that allow for rash decisions that make otherwise responsible board members disengage.

What do you do to establish engagement and avoid power struggles in your board? Share your experiences in the comments.