Three Reasons Your Chapters and Volunteers May Not Trust You

Are you trustworthy? Do your volunteers and chapters see you as sincere, reliable and involved with them?  “Of course!” you respond. “The staff at HQ strives for professionalism and to earn the trust of volunteers and chapters each time we interact with them.”

Let us now ask this in a slightly different way: Given the context of their daily life experiences, what might create the perception, in the mind of a volunteer or chapter executive, that you, or another staff at HQ, are not trustworthy?

To answer this, I will present three examples, utilizing snippets from a day-in-the-life of a volunteer or chapter executive, to illustrate how trust can be unintentionally undermined.

Why Jane doubts your sincerity

Jane is the chapter executive for the Terabitha Chapter (which is famous for its annual bridge building contest). On Tuesday morning, she called customer support about a software issue.  After numerous rings, her call was put on hold with a message that began, “Due to high call volume…” and concluded with, “…your call is very important to us.”

“My call is important? Do you sincerely expect me to believe that?” Jane muttered to herself.

That afternoon, she called to find out about a major policy change under consideration by the national Board.  Local members were concerned and she had been trying, for the past week, via email and unanswered calls, to get more information. Finally, she gets you on the phone and you tell her, “I sincerely apologize for not getting back sooner, we’ve had a zillion calls about this policy issue…”  Jane mutters under her breath, “yeah, due to high call volume.”

You hear the agitation in Jane’s voice so you try to reassure her, “Jane, I value your opinion as I do all the chapter executives.” At that moment, Jane is having a wicked bad flashback to her earlier call: all she hears is, “your call is very important to us.”

Jane, for easily understandable reasons, begins to doubt if anyone at HQ sincerely cares about her opinion.

Why Hank thinks you are not reliable

 

Hank is a volunteer with the Hyboria Chapter and serves as the Chair of the National Membership Committee. Wednesday morning, he has a doctor’s appointment scheduled for 11:30. He knows, from prior experiences, the doctor won’t actually see him at 11:30. It will be more like 11:54 or sometime after noon. As he sits in the waiting room, rereading the July/1995 edition of Sports Illustrated for the 37^th time, he recalls how, last week, the cable guy showed up 90 minutes late. “People aren’t reliable,” he thinks to himself.

That afternoon, he checks his email. You had promised him the agenda and support documents for the upcoming committee meeting by COB of that day. He calls and you apologize. You go on to explain, “The materials are almost ready. Unfortunately, there was an urgent request from a Board member yesterday – high priority – so I was pulled in to work on that. I will have your materials to you no later than tomorrow afternoon.”  That night, you work late so you can deliver the materials first thing in the morning.  It was delivered late, but heck, it was just a little bit late. Under the circumstances, you feel okay about that.

Hank, meanwhile, has mentally put you into the same category as his doctor and the cable guy. “HQ staff aren’t reliable,” he thinks to himself.

Why Harmon thinks you are not involved with him

Harmon is the new staff exec at the Narnia chapter. It is his first job in associations, a lot of issues and problems are brand new to him.

Friday morning, he drops his car off for repairs. He has a new mechanic, Sal, who was recommended by a neighbor who said, “I totally trust him.” Sal greets Harmon and says, “tell me everything you can think of about the problem.” He listens without interrupting. Then he starts asking questions,  lot of questions. Finally, he says, “Chances are it is one of two issues. The only way I can be sure is if…”

That afternoon, Harmon picks up his car – it runs perfectly. He reflects on Sal’s ability to listen, and realizes it is the ability to ask lots of questions, the process of getting involved,  that makes Sal a good mechanic. That’s why his neighbor trusts him completely.

Meanwhile, Harmon has been struggling to get up to speed on association type issues. He calls you for advice and begins the conversation by unloading all the background details. You realize his questions can be easily answered with a series of FAQs you have written. Besides, your schedule is packed and you conclude that a long conversation with Harmon is not the most efficient use of your time. You politely cut the conversation short, directing Harmon to the FAQs. You  hang up, rush to your meeting, thinking, “It would have been nice to chat, but that’s why we have FAQs…”

Harmon, meanwhile, is comparing his experience with you to the conversation he had with Sal the Mechanic. Unlike Sal, you didn’t bother to ask a lot questions, you didn’t take the time to get involved.  Harmon shakes his head and realizes he’d rather talk to his mechanic than to you. He picks up the phone, makes a call and says, “Hey Sal, what do you know about associations?”

The Bottom Line: To build trust with another human being, you need to consider the context of that person’s daily life. Everyday, your volunteers and chapter executives encounter and assess the trustworthy of a variety of people. Those experiences create a filter through which they learn to trust, or distrust, others…and that includes you. The more you understand their context for assessing trust, the more success you will have.

Nine Questions to Measure the Strength of the HQ - Chapter Relationship

What does it take to have a strong, vibrant relationship between HQ and Chapters? What questions might you ask of chapter staff and volunteers to measure the strength of that relationship?

To answer that, I began with a set of questions from the book, First, Break All theRules (it outlines a study by the Gallup Organization that studied 80,000 managers in 400 companies to identify the characteristics of a great manager). Gallup discovered these twelve questions give an organization the most important information it needs to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. They are:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Nine Core Questions

This is a powerful set of questions; using them as a foundation, I have created a set of nine questions that can help you measure the strength of the HQ – Chapter relationship. If your chapter staff and volunteers are able to answer “yes” for most or all of these questions, then congratulations, you have a healthy HQ – Chapter partnership!  

1. Do I know what is expected of me at the chapter level? Are we in agreement about:  a) which activities and functions should be done only by the chapter; and  b) those activities and functions that should be done only by HQ?
2. Does HQ provide me with the materials and support I need to do my work right?
3. Does HQ understand and appreciate the priorities of my chapter? 
4.  In the past three or four months, have I received recognition or praise, from HQ, for doing good work? 
5.  Does the staff at HQ seem to care about me as a person?  Even better, do I have a friend at HQ? 
6.  Is there someone at HQ who encourages me, either to take on a new challenge or to learn from a failure? 
7.  Do my opinions count at HQ? 
8.  Does the staff at HQ feel the work of the chapters is important? Do they make me feel important? 
9.  In the last six months, has someone at HQ called to check in and see how we are doing and whether the chapter is meeting its goals?

 

A final word of advice

Remember to give your chapters a pat on the back - free of charge!

See also:

Is a Trust-Based Partnership Possible with Your Chapter? 
Three Reasons Your Chapters and Volunteers May Not Trust You
Why Chapter Relations Professionals Should be More Like Kojak
Help Your Chapters Solve the Right Problem!

What Do the Best Boards Believe?

What do the best boards of directors have in common? What common beliefs might they share? I was thinking of this as I read 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Bob Sutton. He lists the following as key beliefs "that are held by the best bosses — and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses." 

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods. 
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day. 
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough. 
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well. 
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too. 
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do. 
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Which beliefs do the best boards embrace?

Think about what makes for a great board, then look over the above list and ask yourself, "Which of these twelve beliefs are most likely to be embraced by the best boards?"   I contend items # 8, 10 and 12 deserve to be at the top of the list because the best boards:

• Are able to respond, in a mature, non-scapegoating fashion, when mistakes occur.
• Realize their ability to do bad is greater than their ability to do good.
• Are cognizant of how much power they wield and realize, accordingly, that might doesn't make for right decisions.

What do you think?

A Fun Survey about Mission Statements

Today, this consultant will make a startling confession: I often wonder if Mission Statements are really worth the effort. Do they make a difference? Does anyone really care?

There, I said it! What do you think? Let's have a little fun at the expense of the Mission Statement with the following survey. Enjoy!

When was the last time someone actually invoked your Mission Statement?

Which best describes you feelings about Mission Statements?

What will do the next time you are asked to help write a Mission Statement?

For more insights and wisdom on this topic, check out the article: Mission statements: Lofty inspiration, or contrived claptrap?

Could a Five-Minute Interaction with Members Boost Staff Productivity?

An intriguing question, eh? It came to mind after reading, Putting a Face to a Name: The Art of Motivating Employees. 

The article discusses a study involving paid employees at a call center for a public university; their duties included phoning potential donors to the school. As the authors note, "Employees...suffer frequent rejections from people unhappy about getting calls during dinner. Turnover is high and morale is often low. So how do you motivate workers to stay on the phone and bring in the donations? One relatively easy answer: Introduce them to someone who is aided by those dollars."

The study arranged for a five-minute session, where the employees could meet and interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school's fundraising efforts. The results were impressive: employees who had interacted with the scholarship students brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.

And this raises the question: should associations use a similar tactic? What if your association arranged, on a regular basis, for every employee to have a five-minute interaction, in-person or by phone, with a member who has benefited in a significant way from their membership (i.e., a member who has a positive and powerful story to tell)? 

What might be the pay-off in terms of morale and productivity?  

Lexus Innovates by Borrowing a Lesson from Henry Ford

An earlier post, Learning to Create the Future, discussed what Henry Ford called the forced method of investigation. This philosophy is what led Ford to imagine the Model T (a car that would sell for the previously unheard of price of $500) and then figure out a way to manufacture it. In other words, Ford and his colleagues defined the challenge (a low-cost, affordable car) in a way that forced them to develop assembly line automobile production.

As the video shows, Lexus has just used a similar approach. They began by imagining a new kind of chassis that would be lighter and stronger than conventional chasses, one that would require the use of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP). That in turn, forced them to invent a new kind of loom that could weave the carbon fiber directly into the chassis.

Pretty neat, eh?

Two Common Pitfalls of Strategic Planning

 

What ails your strategy? After all the time and effort - not to mention the costs associated with the ordeal - you end up with a strategic plan that that seems to have little or no impact. What to do? Here are two common pitfalls to avoid that will help you put your strategic plan to work.

Pitfall: Losing Sight of the Member

Because strategy creation is a complex, drawn-out affair, it is distressingly easy to lose sight of what matters most: the member. Discussions about factors such as competition, demographic or social trends, and technology are essential to the process. Unfortunately, many associations fail to link this discussion to the factors that will impact the lives of their members.

The result is often a nice sounding but rather meaningless statement such as, "Our association will be a leader in utilizing Social Media to connect and empower members."  Compare that to a statement such as, "Within the next three years we will connect at least two-thirds of our members via Social Media applications. With this platform in place, we will be able to deliver a greater variety of higher quality education programs at a lower cost. It will also make it possible for prospective members to "test drive" the membership experience (which will directly support our goal of increasing membership levels by 15% in the next four years)..."

The first statement promises nothing of value. The second statement, in contrast, makes a simple, direct, and compelling link to the how and why of getting and keeping members.

Pitfall: Losing Sight of Goals Deserving of One's Time and Commitment

Strategic plans are often greeted with little enthusiasm by staff and volunteers because the long-term benefits are not obvious; it is difficult to see any direct relevance to the day-to-day activities of the organization. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the following scenario is played out in countless associations across the nation? During a meeting someone asks, "How does that relate to the long-range plan? And by the way, what are the main goals of the plan?" Suddenly, everyone else in the room is uncomfortable as they frantically search for a copy of the plan.

The moral? The strategic plan has become an irrelevant, benign document. It has little, if any, impact on  how the staff or the board behaves and ultimately no impact on the lives of the members. The challenge, therefore, is not only to create strategy but to make sure it "sticks" to the organization. Toward that end, a successful strategy must, as noted by the likes of Theodore Levitt and others:

• express itself simply and clearly in only a few written lines;
• establish truly worthwhile goals so that people will march to its tune; and
• set short-term targets that deserve the time and commitment of staff and volunteers.

The "I Need..." Statement: An Engaging Technique for Stating Member Benefits

An earlier post, An Engaging Member Conversation, discussed the challenge of engaging new members and helping them find satisfying ways to participate in the association. 

With that in mind, let's take a look at the "I Need..." statement. Because it expresses, in the first person, what a potential member is seeking, it is a powerful communication technique. Consider the following presentation of member benefits, from the The Entrepreneurs' Organization:

Click on picture for full sized image

Three Simple Sentences!

The beauty of this approach is that, with three simple sentences, EO is able to sum up the value of its many programs and services:

• I need to find other people like me; those who understand what it's like to own a business.
• I need to solve business or personal challenges I haven't faced before. I'm walking in the dark here.
• I need to expand my network, get out there and meet people who can help me grow.

 From a communications standpoint, this is one elegant solution!

The Power of the First-Person

Using the first-person voice echoes what goes on inside a prospective member's mind and engages on two levels. First, it offers the promise of a tangible benefit or solution. Second, it invokes a feeling of belonging, the prospective member is likely to think, "if other people with the same need have joined EO, this is probably the place for me!"

The Bottom-Line: There's an art to communication that engages members and prospects. The next time you examine your member benefits statement, try to boil it down to three simple sentences that begin with "I need..."