Category: leadership

Letter to John Graham and Scott Wiley

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Letter to John Graham and Scott Wiley

Monday, November 21, 2016

John Graham, President & CEO, ASAE

Scott Wiley, Chairman, ASAE

Dear John and Scott:

This letter is a call for meaningful community-wide dialogue and action on behalf of a nation at risk.

One week ago, Associations Now Daily announced that ASAE signed a National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) letter “to the president-elect” expressing a desire to “work productively” with the incoming administration. While we recognize this same letter would have been sent to Secretary Clinton had she prevailed in the Electoral College, many of us read it as an attempt to normalize a candidate who displayed a level of ignorance, intolerance, and indecency unprecedented among modern major party presidential nominees. Mr. Trump ran an intentionally divisive campaign that included:

  • Proposing a religious test for entry to the United States, which is a violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Since the election, Mr. Trump’s advisors have publicly discussed the implementation of a registry for Muslims, which many see as the precursor to internment.)
  • Indicating that he would require U.S. troops to torture enemy combatants and bomb their non-combatant families, both of which are violations of the Geneva Convention.
  • Bragging about engaging in sexually predatory behaviors without consequence because of his celebrity status, boasts which have since been corroborated by more than a dozen victims.
  • Promising to deport nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants, which would cause great economic cost to the United States and its businesses, and untold human suffering.
  • Openly mocking physical mannerisms of a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who suffers from arthrogryposis, and then denying the incident occurred despite clear-cut video evidence.
  • Threatening to jail his opponent, despite the fact that she has never been convicted of any crime, which is a violation of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

There is no need to elaborate further. The challenge before us is clear.

 For those of us signing this letter, the most important question is what happens next. On January 20, 2017, a new administration will take office, led by an individual whose character, rhetoric, and policy positions place our country’s most vulnerable populations at even greater risk. These diverse communities include association members, volunteers, and staff who are expecting ASAE to hear their voices at this perilous time. The question is whether ASAE, and by the extension the association community it serves, will choose to listen to those voices and take steps to help protect people who are now under direct threat.

Through this letter, we are asking you and the ASAE Board of Directors to recognize the uniquely dangerous moment at which our country finds itself, and answer our call for community-wide dialogue and action on behalf of a nation at risk. We recommend that ASAE take the following steps:

  • Issue a second letter calling on Mr. Trump to publicly repudiate his divisive rhetoric and policy proposals before Inauguration Day. Consistent with the described process of preparing the NAM letter, we would ask ASAE to seek support for this letter from philanthropic, professional, and trade associations; non-profits; and other organizations across the country.
  • Call on Mr. Trump to forcefully denounce the hateful attacks against women, racial, ethnic, religious, and other minorities that have been made in his name since Election Day as fundamentally wrong and incompatible with our shared American values.
  • Communicate both publicly and privately to elected officials at all levels of government that ASAE and the association community will oppose divisive rhetoric and policies that place the lives of Americans at risk, and create a communications toolkit for individual association members, volunteers, and staff to use as part of their own advocacy outreach.
  • Develop a more transparent and inclusive process of organizational decision-making around ASAE’s advocacy and public policy activities.
  • Appoint an independent ombudsman from outside of the current ASAE organizational structure to whom any association member, volunteer, or staff person can raise concerns, pose questions, or seek advice on how to address the personal or professional issues that may arise from Mr. Trump’s (and his followers’) divisive rhetoric and policies.
  • Work with societies of association executives (SAEs) at the local, state, and regional levels to organize a series of town hall meetings to nurture an open and honest dialogue about the future of our country, with the intention of bringing people from across the political spectrum together as Americans.
  • Integrate into the Power of A campaign and ASAE’s Public Policy efforts a much stronger focus on issues affecting vulnerable populations, and gather and share more information on diversity and inclusion, equity, and social justice concerns.

While none of these measures can fully protect our country’s most vulnerable populations from the power of the Federal government under Mr. Trump’s direction, we believe they will build confidence across the association community in ASAE’s commitment to tolerance, fairness, and decency in our national life, and create new mechanisms for resisting the codification of Mr. Trump’s bigoted belief system into dangerous policies with potentially dire consequences for millions of Americans.

Now is an excellent time to show why associations have always advanced America.

We agree with both the substance and spirit of ASAE’s statement of commitment to diversity and inclusion, which begins with the sentence, “[i]n principle and in practice, ASAE values and seeks diversity and inclusive practices within the association management industry.” In this instance, we ask our association to recognize the urgent need for our profession to work together to take constructive steps on behalf of the entire nation and its people.

There is much discussion today about the long-term relevance of associations. At this uncertain moment in our country’s history, ASAE can demonstrate the significant impact associations can make by taking an unambiguous and just stance to preserve the integrity of the democratic process, protect vulnerable Americans, and defend the future of the American experiment. We hope you will concur and will act decisively for what is right.

Signed:

Elizabeth Weaver Engel, M.A., CAE, CEO & Chief Strategist, Spark Consulting

Sherry A. Marts, Ph.D., President and CEO, S*Marts Consulting LLC

Joan L. Eisenstodt, Chief Strategist, Eisenstodt Associates, LLC, and Past Chair, ASAE Ethics Committee

Jeff De Cagna FASAE, Chief Strategist and Founder, Principled Innovation LLC

Shelly Alcorn, CAE, Principal, Alcorn Associates Management Consulting

Dina Lewis, CAE, President, Distilled Logic, LLC

Mark Alcorn, J.D., M.B.A., Attorney, Alcorn Law Corporation

See who else signed.

Edited: A printed copy of the letter and list of all signatories was mailed to ASAE on Monday, December 12.

What REALLY Drives Success for Your Association?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on What REALLY Drives Success for Your Association?

Information overload – we all experience it personally, every day, with our emails and social media feeds and online media and print media and broadcast media, and that’s hard enough to manage. But in 2016, our associations ALSO struggle with information overload. We have many rich sources of data about our members, our other audiences, and our operations that we can mine in a dizzying variety of ways, so many, in fact, that it can be almost impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

On July 19, Trevor Mitchell (American MENSA) and I had the opportunity to address this topic for DMAW’s Lunch and Learn series, presenting “Defining and Using KPIs for Measurability and Success.”

We started the hour-long webinar by talking about the importance of discovering what REALLY drives success for your association. It’s not always the most obvious thing. For instance, in associations, we often focus on member count, and up is always good, right? But if you have a limited universe of potential members, or you’re recruiting marginal members that lead to a lot of churn, maybe constantly increasing membership isn’t actually a KPI for your association – maybe something like market share (that is, what percentage of your overall universe is involved) or member share (that is, how involved are your existing members) would be a better choice.

We also covered the four key categories of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), the siren song of vanity metrics (and how to avoid it), and the importance of measuring what really counts, all illustrated by Trevor’s stories of MENSA’s journey toward identifying their KPIs and using them to drive decisions and create change.

 

 

The Lean Startup Changes Everthing

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on The Lean Startup Changes Everthing

I’m excited to share the launch of the seventh whitepaper in the ongoing Spark whitepaper series, Innovate the Lean Way: Applying Lean Startup Methodology in the Association Environment.

The whitepaper addresses a simple (but not necessarily easy) concept. To quote my co-author, Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate, Director of Information Services for the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards:

“There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing.”

Given associations’ tight resources, that type of waste is the last thing we can afford. Lean startup methodology, which moves beyond lean six-sigma process innovation to address the challenge of innovation, has taken the business world by storm in the last several years, with businesses of all sizes and life stages using it to experience greater success. Our contention is that associations can benefit from applying this methodology as well.

Innovate the Lean Way shares the basics of lean startup principles:

  • Business model canvas
  • The build-measure-learn cycle
  • Minimum Viable Product
  • The pivot

And the stories of four associations that are using lean startup methodology effectively to improve their innovation efforts:

  • The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: Pivoting from Lean Process Improvement to Lean Startup
  • IEEE: The Power of the Pilot
  • NAFSA – Association of International Educators: Combining Design Thinking and Lean Startup
  • NCARB (Guillermo’s organization): Learning with Lean

Our goal is to help association leaders understand the benefits of applying this technique in your own organizations to eliminate waste, validate your learning, and innovate faster and more successfully.

I’ll be blogging more about the whitepaper in the coming days, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/1NJJzkJ, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark whitepapers, too:

Innovate the Lean Way

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

“There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing.”

Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate, Director, Information Systems, National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB)

Given associations’ tight resources, we can’t afford to waste time pursuing the wrong thing. Lean startup methodology (as opposed to lean six-sigma) has taken the business world by storm in the last several years, with businesses of all sizes and life stages experiencing success following its principles of building the minimum viable product, measuring what happens, and learning whether to proceed, stop, or pivot.

I’m excited to share that the newest Spark whitepaper is launching NEXT week. It’s co-authored with Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate and it applies lean startup methodology in the association sphere. Our position is that the keys to lean startup methodology – the Business Model Canvas, the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and the Pivot – are just as valuable and useful to associations as to the tech startups where the concepts originated. We think this same process can be used successfully by associations, and we have the case studies to back it up!

We’ll be launching the whitepaper with a FREE webinar Wednesday, October 21 at noon ET as part of the YourMemebrship.com Thought Leader Series. Join us to learn how you can apply this technique in your own organization to eliminate waste, validate your learning, and innovate faster and more successfully.

Oh – and check back here next week to download the actual whitepaper (also free).

Recapping the Outside-In Engagement #Assnchat

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Recapping the Outside-In Engagement #Assnchat

Anna Caraveli (The Demand Networks) and I had the opportunity to guest moderate #assnchat on Tuesday, July 14, with discussion focused around the issues we raise in our new whitepaper, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In (download your free copy at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6).

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the high points of the conversation.

Q1 How do you currently learn about your audiences? How do you share that knowledge internally?

People up brought up a lot of the usual suspects: demographic data collection, emails, calls, surveys, focus groups, online profiles/subscriptions, and event evaluations.

Partners in Association Management had a great response:

Q2 How are you capturing and sharing learning from less formal interactions?

Brandon Robinson asked:

We all agreed that it did, and Lowell Apelbaum added:

Partners in Association Management also keeps something they call “back pocket lists”: good ideas that couldn’t be implemented at the time someone came up with them that they reserve for a more suitable time.

Q3 What do you know about the outcomes your audiences seek? How are you helping them achieve those outcomes?

This question launched some observations about different generations in the workforce and the association having different goals, with Karen Hansen also pointing out:

We also talked about the whole “what keeps you up at night?” question (which is one of Anna’s favorites), and Lowell Apelbaum observed:

Q4 How do you discover what your audiences really value? How do you use that information?

People had lots of good suggestions here, ranging from pilot programs to trial and error, asking them, tracking behavior, observing what they spread/share/talk about/promote, and Ewald Consulting went kind of Zen Master on us:

That’s deep, man.

 

Q5 How do you facilitate building authentic relationships w your audiences? Between members?

 

Lots of great chatter here, too, but Karen Hansen had a simple, powerful response:

Treat members like human beings?!?! Radical concept!

Q6 How do you develop new products/programs/services? How do you collaborate with members on this?

Lowell (who was really on a roll today) had another great response for this one:

When we got to question 7, we kind of heard crickets:

 

Q7 How do you encourage collaboration between audiences and association? Among members?

 

Opinion was pretty much universal that this is a big struggle for associations. Kait Solomon pointed out:

Q8 How do you currently define engagement? Is your definition adequate/satisfactory?

Where Kait also observed that “engagement” has become a buzzword, and I quoted Ed Bennett, who recently pointed out that if there’s no ring involved, we probably need to stop talking about engagement and focus on what we really mean: conversation, talking, listening, relationship.

Q9 What do you do with members once you engage them? What’s the next step/goal?

I’m going back to Lowell again:

Our final question, which is the challenge I’m going to leave you with, too was:

Q10 What is one action you could take today to start your association on the path to outside-in engagement?

Not sure how to answer that? Check out the whitepaper at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6 to get some ideas!

Leading Engagement from the Outside-In

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Leading Engagement from the Outside-In

I’m excited to share the launch of the sixth whitepaper in the ongoing Spark whitepaper series, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In: Become an Indispensable Partner in Your Members’ Success.

Co-authored with Anna Caraveli (The Demand Networks), the whitepaper tackles the question: if engagement is so critical to associations (and we would argue that it is), why aren’t we doing a better job of it?

Of course, associations have always been “about” engagement, and in the past several years, we’ve had a renewed focus on engaging our members and other audiences. The thing is, most of us aren’t really doing it well. Could that be because we’ve been thinking about engagement all wrong, focusing on what we want members to do and how we define value? Leading Engagement from the Outside-In describes a radical shift in our understanding of engagement, one based on an approach that encourages us to view the world from our audiences’ perspective, focus on the outcomes they want to achieve, build authentic relationships, and harness the power of collaboration to co-create the value our organizations provide.

Speaking of, I’ll be blogging more about the whitepaper in the coming days, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark whitepapers, too:

 

Turning Good Ideas Into Action

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Ansoff Matrix Template

Looking to increase your association’s revenue?

Growth can come about either through acquiring new customers/members or increasing sales to existing customers/members. And you can sell either existing programs, products, and services or new programs, products, and services.

In short, Ansoff’s matrix.

The thing is, associations often struggle with this. Why?

I would argue it’s because of a lack of clarity, a lack of commitment, and/or a lack of execution.

Image credit: Edraw

Review: When Millennials Take Over

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

“Every 20 years or so, a new generation enters the workforce, and the rest of us, quite frankly, freak out about it.” 

Cover Image - When Millennials Take OverI recently had the opportunity to read a review copy of When Millennials Take Over, a new book by Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant designed to help us get past the freak out and to a “ridiculously optimistic” view of the future of work.

Their basic thesis is that the environment in which our organizations operate has changed – we have to move faster, with less hierarchy and more sharing of information, and learn how to be digital native institutions.

Sounds hard, right?

Fortunately, the Millennials, the generation born between 1982 and 2004, can help us. Although GenX is currently the largest segment of the workforce, within the next three years, the Millennials will be taking over. And that’s a good thing. As Notter put it during a recent book release event sponsored by ASAE: “The goal is not to ‘deal with’ Millennials but to learn from them. It’s not that Millennials are extra special or have all the answers, but they’re a ‘secret decoder ring’ to help us understand and adapt to these changes.”

Notter and Grant have identified four key capacities that they believe will drive the future of business:

  • Digital
  • Clear
  • Fluid
  • Fast

Digital expects widespread customization and personalization, which includes staff as well as customers and members, and continuous improvement. Going digital is not just about how much you spend on technology (although most of us ARE underinvesting); it’s also about developing a digital mindset, in which you design around the needs and convenience of your audiences (both internal and external), even if that makes things harder for the organization.

tl;dr: In the era of Amazon and apps, your old excuses for 20 years outdated tech and processes won’t fly.

Clear demands information at everyone’s fingertips. Millennials have always had the “why” explained to them – that’s how they were raised. The great thing about this is, when our organizations share more information in a more transparent way, we dramatically increase both the speed and the quality of the decisions we make.

Fluid requires us to break out of our silos, not to the point that there’s no hierarchy at all (Google tried that and found it didn’t work), but to the point that teams are flexible and ad hoc, and different people get opportunities to lead based on their skills match with the project and task at hand. That means that EVERY person needs to know what your organization’s key performance indicators, that is, the keys to success, are.

Fast is the end result of all of these. As Notter and Grant point out, not everything needs to be ultra-fast all the time – there is still room for institutional knowledge and deliberation – but speed is important. As Grant observed at that same book release event, think about how quickly you dump a smartphone or tablet app that doesn’t work as expected. We need to move faster on idea generation, creating rudimentary prototypes, gathering information, and improving/scaling, pivoting, or killing those ideas as appropriate.

tl;dr: Don’t do another member survey! And don’t make decisions about what to do based on the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Create a Minimum Viable Product, and decide what happens after that based on actual data about whether people buy and use it, and what they think about it.

The book makes an excellent companion to Notter and Grant’s earlier Humanize. But where Humanize was a bit heavier on theory, When Millennials Take Over focuses heavily on the practical, sharing detailed case studies of four organizations who exemplify the authors’ four key capacities:

The American Society for Surgery of the Hand, a small membership organization that still manages to invest well in technology, personalize and customize, learn from experiments, and incorporate results-only work environment principles.

Menlo Innovations, a software firm that is so transparent about information that they’ve invented their own resolutely low-tech project management system so that every person knows exactly what every other person’s top priorities are and where they stand on achieving those goals. This lets teams that are ahead of schedule know immediately who needs help and offer it without the intervention of boring project status meetings or project managers or complicated negotiations over email. Menlo even invites clients into the office on a weekly basis so they can see first-hand what’s going on with their projects and make more effective decisions about their own budgets and priorities.

Quality Living, a rehab center for people recovering from brain and spinal cord injuries, that understands the importance of shifting decision-making authority and action to the individuals and groups who are best equipped to be successful in a particular situation, no matter what their official place in the organization’s hierarchy. That might mean that someone very “low level,” who is closest to the patient and her needs, values, hopes, and dreams, directs care for that patient across the entire team of more “senior” people.

Happy State Bank, a community bank operating in Texas, that is able to make good decisions almost absurdly fast thanks to their laser focus on caring and relationships (not exactly traditional for financial institutions). As Notter is fond of pointing out, trust enables speed, and that’s exactly the environment Happy State has created, not just among staff but between staff and customers.

Ultimately, this is about all of us – Boomers, Xers, and Millennials – working together for the good of ourselves, our organizations, and our customers/members. We take turns leading the change:

For every Luke Skywalker (Millennial), there is always a need for an Obi-Wan Kenobi (Baby Boomer), and even an occasional cynical and independent Han Solo (Generation Xer). We know it is cliché, but we’re all in this together.

When Millennials Take Over is available in Kindle and print editions at Amazon.com. For a limited time, the Kindle edition is only $0.99 (that is not a typo), or you can download a chapter as a preview for FREE.

 

Adopting the Mission Command Mindset

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Adopting the Mission Command Mindset

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article about some of the latest developments in military leadership, and, as part of it, they shared the idea of the Mission Command Mindset.

At its simplest, Mission Command dictates that senior leaders provide guidance and intent — the what and the why — and that subordinate leaders have maximum latitude to design the how. It embodies deep trust between senior and subordinate.

In other words, senior leadership sets the vision, and all the details about how that vision is executed are pushed down to those closest to where the activity is taking place, like so:

Mission Command graphic

All I can say to this is: YES!

Associations NEED this approach, because far too often, we go the opposite way, with senior staff micromanaging every detail of every thing.

Our Executive Directors/Chief Staff Officers are supposed to be the bridge to the Board. Like the Board, they should be focused on the 30,000 foot vision and strategic direction, but often they don’t, and they end up dans la merde, losing their focus on where the association is trying to go overall, and in the process, working a million hours a week.

“But I can’t trust my people to do a good job if I don’t insist that they let me review every single marketing email before it goes out!”

(That’s an actual recent example from a $100M annual revenue association client.)

Look, if that’s really the case, then you either:

  • didn’t hire the right people
  • didn’t get them the right training
  • don’t understand that just because someone does something a little differently than you might doesn’t mean that they’re wrong

I’ve written about this before around the concept of being willing to unplug, but the point is that your staff members know things you don’t by virtue of being close to the situations they’re dealing with on a daily basis. Which the US military apparently understands, and their situations are often life-and-death. Don’t you think you can trust your staff to send out a marketing email without getting five layers of approval first?

Image credit: globalsecurity.org

Three Keys to Inspire New Ideas from Staff

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

What does it take for associations to succeed at innovation?

I’ve been doing some research on innovation initiatives in associations for a client and had written a bit about it for the Spark blog a few weeks ago. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mark Athitakis from ASAE about what I’d learned in a little more length, and he wrote the following piece for Associations Now. They’ve graciously given me permission to share it.

The best ideas for your association may come from your employees, but how do you get those ideas launched? Money matters, but so does trust and support.

Your staff has ideas about new services your association can provide for members. Some of those ideas may be very good ones. Problem is, how do you help get those ideas organized and tested?

Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE, CEO and chief strategist for Spark Consulting, has recently been interviewing leaders at associations that have launched internal innovation and new business development programs. “We talk about innovation in the association world a lot,” Engel says. “I wondered what was happening. Is anybody doing this well?”

The answer is yes, though not without some serious effort. Engel’s research uncovered three common elements of successful programs.

1. It needs its own funding. Success here, Engel says, requires “paying attention to opportunity and then being able to do something about it now, not in 24 months when you can finally make room in the budget.” The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, for instance, maintains a $500,000 fund that’s used annually to invest in new ideas from staff. That includes hiring people dedicated to working on it, as opposed to burdening current staff with new duties.

2. It needs a clearly defined process. A marketing staffer may have a brilliant idea, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she has the financial know-how to put together a business plan to show how it might work. The three associations Engel studied each had a clearly defined process for staff to propose an idea, institutional support for making the proposal, and a clear set of benchmarks for it. “They’re asking, ‘What criteria do you need to meet in order for this thing to continue passing the test?’” Engel says. “It can be a revenue criteria, but it doesn’t have to be. It has to be clear what standards you’re going to need to keep going.”

3. It needs institutional support. This can be trickier than it seems. Chuck Cochran, CAE, ASHA’s chief staff officer for operations, says the association launched its own program in 1997, during a reorganization. ASHA was in silo-smashing mode, looking to flatten hierarchies, make board activities more transparent, and involve staff in more of the decision making. “The culture change in the organization was huge,” he says.

That kind of hard-won trust and transparency encourages staffers to come forward with their ideas. “I can’t imagine what [the program] would be like if there was distrust,” Cochran says. “People would be afraid they’re going to be zapped.” Cochran estimates that today about 80 percent of the ideas proposed via the fund are successful—that is, proved themselves financially viable after three years and became part of the regular operating budget.

You don’t get to that point, Engel says, without leadership endorsing the concept. “The CEO or executive director has to be supportive of the decision,” she says. “Senior leadership has to say, ‘Yes, this is a good thing.’”

But practically speaking, you also don’t get there without money, and not every association has half a million dollars available to road-test a new idea. Cochran encourages associations to look at the status of their reserves; if they’re in excess of 50 percent of annual unrestricted operating expenses (the typical target for reserves), those excess dollars may provide the start-up costs for a fund.

Because new ideas may require dedicated staff, the amount of money matters. But Engel suggests that even a smaller-scale effort is worthwhile. “It’s a lot easier to find a spare $500,000 set aside for your innovation budget if you’re ASHA than if you’re a $2 million association,” she says. “The raw amount of money doesn’t scale. But the concept—if all you can set aside if $5,000, even if you can get 5 percent time, that part of it is scalable.”

Does your association have a program to encourage staff to propose new ideas, and how do you make it work? Share your experiences in the comments.

Reprinted with permission. Copyright, ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, July 2014, Washington, DC.