12/11/2017

What Effective Decision Making Looks Like

We want staff leaders who aren't afraid to make changes

When it comes to decision making, an association can sometimes send mixed signals to itself. It celebrates decisiveness as a virtue—we want staff leaders who aren’t afraid to make changes, and we strive to fill board seats with professionals who have a mind to innovate. But associations also pride themselves on being deliberative bodies, emphasizing the importance of caution and research before trying something new.

My feature on decision making in the new issue of Associations Now, spotlights just a few of the problems that emerge when these two ideas grind against each other like gears that won’t quite lock together. Rash decisions aren’t particularly common among the association experts I spoke with, but many associations do suffer from a problem with over-deliberation—and its close cousin, neglect. A promising idea that sounds intimidating gets punted in the name of “we need one more study,” or gets tabled in other ways until it disappears.

Shelley Row, a former association executive, is right to call out the emotional side of this problem—often, the real statement behind “we need one more study” is “I’m scared to pursue this.” But it may be helpful to know that a little extra deliberation can help conquer that fear—so long as the deliberation is focusing on what the real concern is. As SmithBucklin’s Dale West, CAE, told me, ““People have a knee-jerk reaction and immediately think what’s right in front of them is the actual problem to be solved. And when we go deeper we realize that that is actually not the problem that has to be solved.”

Please click here to read the complete article from Associations Now.