I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions.
Why? Because New Year’s is too late! Why spend weeks or a month planning what you’re going to do instead of getting right to it? Now is always a better time to start than later.
When I ask an association board member, leader, staffer or committee head How is your association doing? I get a lot of different answers. Some answers are about membership: the number of new members, renewals, meeting attendees. Some answers focus on how much success the association is having building relationships with legislators and impacting regulations. Other answers emphasize culture, finances, events, continuing education, committees and affiliates. The answers are broad because the work of associations is broad. That’s exciting! Think about how much impact you can have! It can also be intimidating: Think about how much there is to juggle, wrangle, organize and administer—with mostly volunteers.
As I write this, people are experiencing a lot of stress and fear about politics, the economy and the state of the world. But whenever it is that you’re reading this, you’ve probably been stressed and fearful about something pretty recently, and it’s taken a toll. We feel those emotions so strongly that they can be debilitating. We can find it impossible to move forward and make progress.
Notice that phrase: bringing in business. Not sales. Sales is an important part of bringing in business, but it’s just one part. That’s important, because a lot of people tell me they hate sales and will do anything to avoid doing anything remotely considered “sales.”
Giving a talk about succession the other day, I started off by asking attendees, “How many of you are thinking about retiring or selling your business?” Not a single hand went up. That may be because no one wanted to show their cards to possible competitors in the room. It could also be because too many of us don’t think about succession in advance. After all, we love our businesses; that’s why we run them. We’re not comfortable with the idea of stepping away and turning our responsibilities, our vision and mission, and our legacy over to someone else.
Members are the lifeblood of an association; if they’re not involved and engaged, your association can’t accomplish its mission. And yet, finding members to volunteer, to fill committees and move into leadership positions is a challenge for many associations.
I’m getting a lot of questions about hiring right now:
Should I hire?
When should I hire?
Who should I hire?
How should I hire?
How are you doing with your goals? It's a question I've been asking my clients a lot. The answer I'm getting most is some variation on, "Um... not really sure."
When I talk to leaders of associations, three things always come up: Their membership isn’t growing the way they need it to, they don’t have enough volunteers, and their leadership is getting burned out.
People are sometimes surprised to learn I have a coach. “But you’re a coach yourself, Jim! Why would you need a coach?” It is exactly because I’m a coach that I know how important it is even for coaches to have a coach.
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