Category: General Management 2015 Q&A

Q&A Responses – General Management

Elections Chair

The 2015 candidates have completed a third group of questions! You can read their answers on the topic of general management by clicking on the links below.

All 2015 Q&A responses so far.

More information on our Q&A process.

Alex Tischer 2015 Q&A: General Management

Elections Chair

How would you describe your management style? Your communication style?

My management style is best described as deliberately hands-off to compensate for a natural inclination to micromanage — something that I know very well never works out (and will result in nurses hating my guts if I let it go unchecked).

My communication style tends to be matter-of-fact and dry. Which is a fancy way of saying pretty boring, I guess. But it gets the message across, so I’m ok with that. I work in emergency veterinary medicine, which often means having to communicate efficiently in situations where emotions run high. It’s important to be able to keep the facts straight no matter what the atmosphere, and to listen carefully to what is and isn’t being said.

You all described your thoughts on “the key responsibilities of a/the Board” in your manifestos. However, with the exception of the bylaws, which are legally rather than functionally focused, there isn’t a clear publicly available list of the duties and responsibilities of the board. Would you be interested in changing that?

I would indeed be interested in changing that. There isn’t any internally available list of the duties and responsibilities of the Board, either. I believe drawing up a clear statement of what is and isn’t Board’s purview would be a very helpful thing not only for the public to have but also for all Board members.

There has been a lot of mention of Board micromanagement and workload. What are two things that you would like to see immediately shifted off of the Board agendas to both decrease micromanagement of the organization and free up Board time for focusing on more strategic issues?

With Board working currently in a less than transparent manner and the lack of a publicly available list of duties and responsibilities — as bemoaned in the last question — as well as the unavailability of either an up-to-date agenda for meetings or meaningful transcripts for previous meetings, it is somewhat difficult to say what things can and should be shifted off. No one has a clear idea what exactly Board members do day-to-day, but discussing and redistributing their current workload would certainly be something worth examining. For example, having to vote to approve the induction of each staffer joining the OTW is one thing I think could be taken off Board’s plate.

The OTW has now spent over 3 years developing a 3-year strategic plan. This seems extremely long based on practices in other organizations and raises concerns both about the relevance of such a plan due to organizational shifts and, from the outside, raises questions about the ability to find consensus in the organization. What are your thoughts on how long it has taken to develop the strategic plan, and what steps would you take as a Board member to improve or streamline the process of both finishing up the current plan and setting up the development of the next iteration of the strategic plan?

Three years to develop a strategic plan with an ever-shifting implementation date seems too long a time to me. I know the Strategic Planning committee have been working hard at surveying a number of committees but, due to the committees constantly changing, those surveys seem to end up nothing more than an outdated snapshot faster than any conclusions from them can be implemented into the strategic plan.

As a Board member I would not be in a position to directly improve or streamline anything about the current plan, we have a whole committee dedicated to work on it and I would not presume to just step in and tell them how to do their job. But I hope that during the setup for the next iteration I would be able to help build the framework that enables the committee to work faster and avoid the trap of attempting perfection over workability.

Aline Carrão 2015 Q&A: General Management

Elections Chair

How would you describe your management style? Your communication style?

I have a straightforward approach to both management and communication. I’m very talkative and friendly, but when it’s time to talk shop, I trust people to act professionally and communicate what their needs and concerns are. I do my best to be open and approachable so that people can come forward without fear of negative reactions on my part. I believe in setting clear expectations and timeframes as a way to reduce misinformation and conflicts within larger teams, all the while sharing information and progress as widely as possible. I’m also a fan of promoting dialogue among everyone involved in case of conflicts to find compromises and solutions.

You all described your thoughts on “the key responsibilities of a/the Board” in your manifestos. However, with the exception of the bylaws, which are legally rather than functionally focused, there isn’t a clear publicly available list of the duties and responsibilities of the board. Would you be interested in changing that?

Yes, I believe documenting the board’s role and responsibilities is an crucial first step towards accountability. Once we have these public and clearly stated, we can work towards a more productive board that doesn’t get lost in discussions that shouldn’t fall under their actual responsibilities.

There has been a lot of mention of Board micromanagement and workload. What are two things that you would like to see immediately shifted off of the Board agendas to both decrease micromanagement of the organization and free up Board time for focusing on more strategic issues?

Staff approval: This should be a chair-only task, since chairs are in a better position to know the person who has applied. They are the ones who will work with the new staffer, after all. I don’t believe board approval for each individual staffer is necessary at all.

Conflict resolution: Judging by board’s public minutes, interpersonal conflict resolution takes up an extraordinary amount of board’s time. It’s a subject that shows up repeatedly. We should work to move this outside of board’s purview.

The OTW has now spent over 3 years developing a 3-year strategic plan. This seems extremely long based on practices in other organizations and raises concerns both about the relevance of such a plan due to organizational shifts and, from the outside, raises questions about the ability to find consensus in the organization. What are your thoughts on how long it has taken to develop the strategic plan, and what steps would you take as a Board member to improve or streamline the process of both finishing up the current plan and setting up the development of the next iteration of the strategic plan?

The process behind drawing up the plan was ill-thought-out and this shows in the final draft. The dynamic structure of the OTW’s committees and volunteers makes all the data collected outdated in a really small timeframe. This, alongside with the constant delays in implementation, make the current plan out of sync with OTW reality before its implementation has even begun. There is no visible prioritization among goals that are critical to the OTW’s survival and those that are little more than cosmetic bureaucratic improvements. The sheer number of goals (and Strategic Plan’s own stated goal that they would be happy if we reached 50%) all but guarantees that not all will get accomplished, and the lack of clear priorities means we could well reach the end of this SP period with none of the most important changes achieved.

SP needs to work closely with chairs from the start to assess feasibility and reduce the number of revisions required, allowing for a smaller window between drafting a concise, actionable and targeted Strategic Plan and putting it in practice, as well as simplifying the process. This way, we can have a document that addresses current issues and proposes concrete solutions without creating busywork for already overworked volunteers.

Andrea Horbinski 2015 Q&A: General Management

Elections Chair

How would you describe your management style? Your communication style?

In managing people I strive to provide a supportive oversight structure that enables them to work independently but also allows them to seek help and/or support as needed. In terms of communication style, my goal is to interact with people in a professional manner that takes into account the fact that the OTW’s primarily-digital methods of interaction by definition have a very narrow bandwidth compared to face-to-face interaction. In the MBTI rubric, I’m just about the most INTJ to ever INTJ (or if you prefer, in the terminology of Laurie J. Marks’ elemental logic series, I’m exactly half air logic and half fire logic; or in terms of Hogwarts Houses, half Gryffindor and half Ravenclaw, and I choose Gryffindor), and I excel at thinking strategically and logistically, in terms of systems but also in terms of ideas and principles.

You all described your thoughts on “the key responsibilities of a/the Board” in your manifestos. However, with the exception of the bylaws, which are legally rather than functionally focused, there isn’t a clear publicly available list of the duties and responsibilities of the board. Would you be interested in changing that?

Position descriptions are part of the tasks for the Board that are identified in the strategic plan, and documenting the Board’s responsibilities and purview is also an important part of clarifying the Board’s role with respect to the organization. Carrying out this part of our work under the strategic plan will definitely help OTW personnel better understand what the Board of Directors does and why we operate the way we do, and it’s just one of the similar tasks laid out for us in the strategic plan that will, by the end of its implementation, put the OTW and the Board in a much stronger position in terms of internal structures. That said, in the meantime and in general, those curious about the duties of this or any Board should emphatically look to organizations like the National Council of Non-Profits, which maintains some very good resources on these topics.

There has been a lot of mention of Board micromanagement and workload. What are two things that you would like to see immediately shifted off of the Board agendas to both decrease micromanagement of the organization and free up Board time for focusing on more strategic issues?

I have to disagree with the notion that the Board micromanages anything. From my perspective as a member of the Board for the past three years, it’s only too clear that our workload is too much for us to do any kind of day-to-day management: we’re constantly sprinting to accomplish the things that we absolutely have to do (a mixture of management and governance, with both being shortchanged in favor of the other as required by events), while strategic issues get deferred or outsourced (to wonderful committees like Strategic Planning and Development & Membership, to be sure) and committees have mostly been left to work independently–with many wonderful results, but also with some definite problems that have required the Board to intervene directly at times. As it exists now, the Board is primarily reactive rather than proactive, and the slow pace of our work is definitely holding the organization back. That said, the answer to the fact that the Board’s workload is too much is not more directors (since we work collaboratively, adding more people would make the Board’s work more inefficient, not less); instead, we need to focus on identifying the best way to divest the responsibility for management of day-to-day operations onto a designated individual, most likely an executive director, which will allow the Board to focus on its primary responsibility of governance and alleviate some of the concerns about directors lacking management experience.

The OTW has now spent over 3 years developing a 3-year strategic plan. This seems extremely long based on practices in other organizations and raises concerns both about the relevance of such a plan due to organizational shifts and, from the outside, raises questions about the ability to find consensus in the organization. What are your thoughts on how long it has taken to develop the strategic plan, and what steps would you take as a Board member to improve or streamline the process of both finishing up the current plan and setting up the development of the next iteration of the strategic plan?

The Strategic Planning committee, past and present, has done an amazing job in terms of starting from zero in between an extremely hostile Board and organization and producing a strategic plan that fits the OTW and that will actually address the glaring internal issues that the strategic planning process identified. Three years to create a plan emphatically was a long time, but it was more than worth it in terms of the quality of the plan produced. Moreover, a three-year timespan for the plan itself is a good balance between the complexity of the goals, the need for realistic deadlines that build on each other in terms of impact and achievement, and the fact that the OTW exists in a fairly fast-paced sphere (fandom) in which a three-year timespan is about the upper limit at which future predictions are both reliable and worthwhile. I have the utmost confidence that the Strategic Planning committee will be able to produce the next strategic plan in a more compressed timeframe, given that they’ve learned as they’ve gone along through this one, and that the next strategic plan will put the OTW in an even stronger position once it has been reviewed, approved, and implemented.

Atiya Hakeem 2015 Q&A: General Management

Elections Chair

How would you describe your management style? Your communication style?

I feel this is a question that can most accurately be answered by others, so I asked some of my fellow volunteers how they would describe my style. The word that came up most often was “straightforward”. One of the great things about the parts of academia where I’ve spent my life is that in a scientific discussion, everyone can express themselves freely, regardless of status. As a lowly undergraduate, I could tell the professor I worked for “I don’t think the way we’re doing this is statistically valid” and be heard, since the important thing was always the work itself. Coming from that sort of environment, I vastly prefer a working atmosphere in which anyone can bring up any issue at any time without worrying that someone will take it personally or react badly, and I try to create that for the volunteers I manage.

While I do generally communicate in a straightforward and businesslike way, I don’t think that needs to mean formal or unfriendly, and I have been known to indulge in kitten pictures, bad puns, and terribly-drawn cartoons when I feelt the occasion called for it.

You all described your thoughts on “the key responsibilities of a/the Board” in your manifestos. However, with the exception of the bylaws, which are legally rather than functionally focused, there isn’t a clear publicly available list of the duties and responsibilities of the board. Would you be interested in changing that?

I think this is something vitally and urgently needed. Work on position descriptions for the Board was begun in 2013, but seems to have since stopped. I’d like to bring it back, finish it (with feedback from the Org’s volunteers), and make it widely available.

Having clear performance expectations will allow directors who don’t meet them to be held accountable, the flip side of which is that explicitly knowing their duties and responsibilities should make directors’ jobs easier, increase trust in the Board, and improve the relationship between Board and the OTW’s volunteers. In addition, a better understanding of what Board does should encourage staffers with the appropriate interests and skills to run for election.

There has been a lot of mention of Board micromanagement and workload. What are two things that you would like to see immediately shifted off of the Board agendas to both decrease micromanagement of the organization and free up Board time for focusing on more strategic issues?

Board meetings haven’t had informative agendas for some time, but from what’s there I would say that two things that would help are:

  1. Give committee chairs the power to approve new staffers for their committee instead of having Board involved each time. The chair is the person who is going to be working with the staffer and who can best judge if they are a good fit.
  2. Leave personnel conflicts to be dealt with committee chairs and the Volunteers & Recruiting committee except in extraordinary circumstances. It’s hard to know from the outside exactly what Board is doing in this regard, but intervening in conflicts seems to take an inordinate amount of agenda space. Clear guidelines for under what circumstances Board should be involved in conflicts between staffers or committees would help clear up uncertainty and reduce the chance that Board would derail committee work by stepping into a discussion halfway through.

The OTW has now spent over 3 years developing a 3-year strategic plan. This seems extremely long based on practices in other organizations and raises concerns both about the relevance of such a plan due to organizational shifts and, from the outside, raises questions about the ability to find consensus in the organization. What are your thoughts on how long it has taken to develop the strategic plan, and what steps would you take as a Board member to improve or streamline the process of both finishing up the current plan and setting up the development of the next iteration of the strategic plan?

My issue with the strategic plan is not that it has taken so long, but that it cannot be feasibly or usefully implemented. The Strategic Planning committee has obviously put in a great deal of work running surveys, taking input, and drafting, and of course it’s always easier to see in hindsight. However, the plan was drafted with an understanding of the Org based entirely on often outdated surveys and interviews, rather than with any direct input from committee chairs or staffers. It thus could contain no real goals or plans for the Org’s projects, and mainly is a list of documentation that committees will be expected to produce, with no plans for how this is going to happen without overloading both them and the Volunteers & Recruiting committee, which is expected to review all this paperwork.

As a Board member, I would recommend re-working the current plan to focus on the goals it contains for the Board, and goals for better fiscal management, which should start being implemented immediately. I think committee goals should be re-addressed later, working with the individual committees themselves.

Dan Lamson 2015 Q&A: General Management

Elections Chair

How would you describe your management style? Your communication style?

To start, I can say that I am INFP on Myers Briggs. I am often more intuitive than thinking and base many of my decision on feelings. I can get stressed out sometimes but generally internalize as opposed to lashing out. I am also sarcastic sometimes, but it’s part of my charm. I am generally a very calm and nice person, and it takes a lot for someone to get a rise out of me.

I am very easy going when it comes to management. I get along with mostly everyone, and I have friends on many sides of org issues. As a chair of DevMem, I like to run my committee in the classical ‘first among equals’ kind of way. I feel that this encourages dialog and free exchange of ideas, which is important in this setting. As a chair, there is the occasional idea that needs to be vetoed, but I will always explain my reasoning. I do not force my will on the committee, and if staffers have valid points with differing opinions, I always listen. DevMem mostly moves forward by consensus. This will not always be possible on board, and I am able to make hard decisions when the need arises.

You all described your thoughts on “the key responsibilities of a/the Board” in your manifestos. However, with the exception of the bylaws, which are legally rather than functionally focused, there isn’t a clear publicly available list of the duties and responsibilities of the board. Would you be interested in changing that?

Sure. I think it would be a good idea for everyone to see what a board members should be doing, and what they are or could be doing better. It would be a good thing for all board members to be able to look to as well, to better guide their hands.

There has been a lot of mention of Board micromanagement and workload. What are two things that you would like to see immediately shifted off of the Board agendas to both decrease micromanagement of the organization and free up Board time for focusing on more strategic issues?

I am very much looking forward to joining the board of directors because I think I can help contribute to the org. While I know what they do generally (and understand what a nonprofit board normally does) I think it’s very hard to really understand the day-to-day mechanics of how Board functions from the outside. I imagine a lot changes every time there is an election as well. Finding out how everyone meshes together and who has what strength, etc.

I am not 100% sure what micromanagement you are referring to in the question I am happy to answer in one of the open chats if you provide more context. I think a real discussion for the next few years is going to be discussing the need for executive staff. This person or people would be able to take over the day to day things like approving staff, drafting correspondence, providing counsel to chairs, and many of the other day-to-day things Board does. This would allow board more time for having a strategic focus on the future.

The OTW has now spent over 3 years developing a 3-year strategic plan. This seems extremely long based on practices in other organizations and raises concerns both about the relevance of such a plan due to organizational shifts and, from the outside, raises questions about the ability to find consensus in the organization. What are your thoughts on how long it has taken to develop the strategic plan, and what steps would you take as a Board member to improve or streamline the process of both finishing up the current plan and setting up the development of the next iteration of the strategic plan?

Strategic planning is a big process. Especially for an org the size of OTW. There are so many moving parts and so many volunteers. (Plus everyone working on SP is also a volunteer!) There are companies out there that charge a lot of money to develop strategic plans, and the fact OTW has been doing it internally is a testament to that committee.

Having reviewed various drafts of the plan, I still feel it is relevant to the organization. I do not think that the time it has taken raises questions about finding consensus in the org.

I think a lot has been learned in the process of making the SP, and much of it has been documented so the next iteration of this project will be completed easier.