RSS feedGetting back to community organisations from a few days ago…
Regardless of the highly toxic mix of individuals, one of the main problems of managing a co-operative or community organisation, is the inexperience of the management, and their need to continually relearn lessons. Lessons which in many cases were only just learned a year or so ago, by the previous management. This cannot be particularly conducive to streamlining the operation of the organisation, and considering that most groups struggle for financial survival anyway, it is a wonder that they still exist at all.
Another related problem is that many of these “managers” have only experienced the social side of the other managers of the organisation, and suffer what I call the “me too” effect. Several years ago, a member of an organisation I was involved with, who had no management or business experience, was placed in an important management position, along side other more experienced people. Their experience on the board consisted of simply arguing about issues which anyone with even a small amount of management experience, wouldn’t even question. Because they saw the confident way others acted, ignorant of their professional experience, this person tried to act the same way, but made all the wrong decisions. It was a waste of their talent, which lay in other non-management areas of the organisation, and bogged the other managers down with petty and time wasting infighting.
Currently, at another group I’m involved with, there is a pending purchase request for various bits of computer equipment, valued at around the $1000 mark. Unfortunately, the purchase request was put in before a quote was obtained (inexperience again), making approval difficult at best. When called upon to provide a quote (after several weeks of refusing), the value was actually much less (~70%) than the original request, and the specification of the equipment was completely wrong for the purpose it was being bought.
This then descended into arguments about who the “expert” was who put together the specification, with half the management saying they were an expert, and half saying they weren’t. This ended with a rather detailed and amusing week long argument about what the rules of the organisation say about chorums and approvals for purchases. In the end, the fight was more about getting the badly specced purchase approved, than whether it was a complete waste of money for the task at hand. That is to say, you wouldn’t buy a Holden Commodore because a Commodore driver who had jumped the odd gutter, had told you it would be best for off road driving.
Coming back to the management side of the issue, perhaps the following “out of the box” idea would be a better way of addressing the problem.
The terms “board” and “director” should be replaced with “committee” and “committee member” or “member representative”. In some community groups, these quite corporate terms (board & director) are used to describe the management, and in many cases, this seems to fuel egos. A recent amusing quote: “NO ONE – has the right to go over the heads of the board. Aren’t we the ones running the show?!”
Experienced professional company directors and managers should then be approached for pro bono directorships on a “board”, which meets every few months. Their role would be to observe and make recommendations to the committee members. The committee members would in some ways be accountable to the board. Currently, managers in community organisations tend to be accountable to nobody except themselves.
The result is that the management are closer to the ground than they have been in the past, more in contact with the membership of the organisation, and are supposedly more able to act with better guidance than they did before.
This also partially syncs with the recent Power to the Edge (thank you Nathan for the link) methodologies of the U.S. military, where basically command and control, in conjunction with senior personnel, are moved much closer to the edge of the organisation. They are then provided with information they need to better perform the tasks for which they are ultimately accountable.
Goodbye ivory towers, long approval chains and pseudo-directors with egotist tendencies. Hello warm and fuzzy feeling, making correct decisions, and helping to push the community group forward.
It is amusing, yet sad, to think that all over the world, community organisations spend a majority of their management time either arguing over petty rule interpretations, or making stupid mistakes which any professional manager would spot a mile away. Assuming that community groups aren’t just there as playpens or training grounds for would be managers, there must be a better way.