By:
Free (Carol)
Former
chair, West Virginia Humans Into Perversions (“WHIP”)
E-mail:
free@bdsmdc.com
If you will no longer enjoy being part of the organization if you keep running into someone who hates your guts (or vice versa), don't run.
If you don't think having the organization functioning better when you end your term than it did when you began is enough reward, don't run.
If you are committed to getting the organization to run better, you will be one of the 20%. If you are going to get resentful about it, don't run.
Listen and learn. You're the one making the decisions now and you have to live with the results. However, learning from the past can save you a lot of effort, and also keep you from blindsiding people with changes they didn’t expect.
Ask them what has gone right, and what has gone wrong, before you arrived. Ask them about procedures that have been followed in the past, so that you can either continue them, or give people notice that there will be a change.
For example, suppose the bylaws read as follows:
It would be a really good idea to find out about that goat!
They can likely give you some insight into the politics, what is important to the group, etc.
The response applies even if "this" is a nasty description of your ancestry. If they are discussing something that needs discussing, and are just being tactless in the heat of the moment, this will help get them on your side. If they are being hostile, this will frustrate the life out of them. (And if they pass this response on to someone else, they won't get any sympathy.)
The members are never going to understand who does what, but they will understand if they are not getting what they need from the organization as a whole. If you are the treasurer, and it's the secretary's job to get the membership cards out, don't respond to a member's question about where the card is with, "That's not my job." You'll get a much better response if you say, "I'm so sorry you haven't got it yet! Let me check with X and see what is going on with that."
For example, if the organization has a "safe sex" rule, there will be at least one person who tells you, "But this is my wife! It's really silly for me to have to take these precautions with her!" You can start off with, "I know that this is really inconvenient and silly for the two of you," without committing yourself to do anything about it. And once you have said that, you can explain things like, "This organization is an educational organization as well as a social one, and in a public dungeon, we want the new people to see models of how to be safe. So we fully understand that you won't use all these precautions at home, but the rules here require that everyone use them."
Don’t wait until a crisis to tell your members what is going on in their organization. If they have been a part of the process all along, they will forgive you the occasional crisis. But if you only talk to them when there is a crisis going on, you won’t have them behind you enough so they will support you then.
If you wait for the board on which everyone is brilliant, has lots of time, is dogged on following things up, and knows both how to assemble dungeon furniture and design a Web page, you will wait a long time! Instead, try to recognize what capabilities each person has, and get each assigned to jobs in which those capabilities are most important. Maybe the person who is bright but socially inept can be treasurer. Maybe the person who is completely reliable but not very smart can be given a list of what needs to be done and when that is specific enough that s/he can't screw it up, and then his/her reliability will shine.
At some point everyone gets tired of doing the job. Don’t be forced to hang on because there is no one interested or capable of taking over. If you bring up new leaders, they will be available to replace you at some point. The goal is precisely NOT to do everything and have everything depend on you. The goal is to have an organizational structure and processes that are so good and so well-documented that no one will even hiccup if you are hit by a bus. You're not trying to make yourself essential, you're trying to make yourself obsolete, or at least easily replaceable.
Even if you can't use what's being offered, even if the job was not done to your satisfaction - say thank you. A thank you goes further towards developing a commitment to the group than any other single thing - and it’s free!
If an event went well, try to figure out everyone who contributed to that result, from the person who did the publicity to the person who cleaned up afterward. Don’t just tell those people how grateful you are—tell your entire membership. Talk about it at the next meeting, spread the word in your newsletter, etc. Be effusive in your praise.
Conversely, if someone screwed up, think before saying anything at all. Remember that the point of criticism is to make sure it’s done better the next time, and thus it is unnecessary if there won’t be a next time. For example, maybe this isn’t the right person for that job, and you should get someone else to do it the next time, rather than trying to correct someone who will just never be able to do it?
If you do need to criticize, take the person aside, acknowledge the good parts of what they did, and then state the criticism in as positive a manner as you can.
If people have responsibility for an area, they want to have some control. Don’t tell your educational director, “We need to have these presentations in the course of the year, and here are the people who should give them, and here are the dates they should take place.” Not only does this create more work for you, but it takes away part of the sense of professionalism of being an educational director if the person is just carrying out someone else’s mandates.
For example, you can call the person and say, "It seems to me like your schedule may have changed in ways that make being [insert title here] a burden for you. If that's not true, and you are just having a temporary problem, let me know and we will work around it. However, if it is true, we really like you, and we would much rather have you as a happy member than as an unhappy board member. Would it be helpful if we got someone else to be [insert title here] instead?" Often, the person will be relieved to be let off the hook. And you don't end up in a situation in which, for example, the person dealing with new members turns them away because that person is burnt out.
I was once trying to figure out how to move a piece of equipment from one dungeon to another. Someone was standing in the first dungeon watching a scene. I walked up to him and asked, "Hey, I'm need to get this so the other dungeon. Can you give me a hand?" Not only was the person happy to do it, but it turned out that he was a single guy who had been feeling a bit isolated when everyone else started pairing up to play. As someone who tends to take the "I can do it myself!" approach, it was a revelation to me that not only could I ask for (and get) help, but I could increase the feeling of community in the group while doing so.
So try, "We need someone to go look at possible new space on Tuesday," rather than, "Can someone serve on the space committee?"
The membership at large sees a request, and they have no way of knowing whether there are already 100 volunteers, or whether you have no one. But if you know that X is on night shifts, and you need someone to go out during the day on a weekday, ask X if s/he can help.
Which would you respond to better?
Most people wouldn't get near that second request. Even if they are otherwise willing to help, they don't want to get caught up in politics, and become the next one considered an asshole. So accentuate the positive, for your own benefit in getting help as well as the group's overall benefit.
Board members should, if anything, be more careful than anyone else to obey the rules. If it is perceived that some people are subject to more rules than others, then everyone will test the limits. If, on the other hand, you personally show that you are willing to live within the rules, others are more likely to respect them.
If it was a ten buck fine for tossing cigarette butts in the toilet three years ago, you don't want to go calling for someone's firstborn if they do it next week.
The problem is not that someone is making too much noise. The problem is that other people are being disturbed by the noise. So, is there a way to fix that? If there some dungeon space that is removed enough so that the noise won't penetrate? Can you schedule a time for quiet people and a time for noisier ones? Similarly, the problem is not that someone is doing needles/cuttings/squick of your choice. The problem is that others are too squicked to do the kind of play they want to do. So maybe a different area or different time for such play will meet such needs.
That has two aspects. First, if there is something you really don't want getting out, don't give in to the temptation to sound off to even one other person. Second, if there is something that a group of people is going to know about, then assume it will get round to the rest of the group, and plan accordingly. For example, if you make a controversial decision, announce to the group what you have done and why. That is a lot better than them hearing a version distorted by going through the gossip mill a few times.
First place, some scene relationships require a whole spreadsheet program to understand. (I personally was once called upon to mediate a situation that appeared to result from a relationship gone bad--and the relationship involved, by my count, at least 11 people.) Second place, if you understood them all on Monday, they might have all changed on Tuesday. So don't give A's phone number to B just because you saw A and B making out last week--they may have split up by now, and A may consider B a stalker.
Some people are always going to leave the group for one reason or another—leaving the area, changing interests, problems in their own relationships. If you don’t have a way to attract new people, you have a dying group. And if people don’t hear about you for a while, they think the group no longer exists.
And once a group starts dying, it’s much harder to bring it back than it would have been to keep that from happening in the first place. After all, people come in part to meet and socialize with others. If they only see the same 5 faces every time, they will get bored—and then it will only be 4 faces at the next event.
So subscribe to every mailing list you can find, and put out announcements early and often. Tell people you meet at other functions about your group. Advertise in the alternative newspapers, or the personals ads of your local paper.
People in the scene have surprisingly wide contacts. So make sure your group’s reputation is good with other groups.
In particular, encourage reciprocity with other groups. Yes, you may find that a few people don’t become members of your group if they get the same benefits by being members of a reciprocal group. But that’s more than made up for by the number who will decide to come in the first place because they figure that as reciprocals, they will get a good deal.
Don't, for example, use a Yahoo group that allows responses to the whole group to be your mechanism for sending out news about the group. What happens is that people respond in the heat of the moment, the way they would in a chat room. However, their responses then stay around forever in the mind of the group, and may end up being seen as much more negative than they really were. If you send out information in a newsletter, and people have to start a new thread in the chat area rather than just hitting the reply key to send a message to the whole group, you get many fewer problems.
Yep, this one was mentioned before, but it bears repeating.
Yes, you want to give the new board flexibility to do its own thing. But it takes some time, for example, to schedule a big event or an educational presentation. So get at least a few things scheduled for after your term ends, so the new people aren’t having to start their terms in a panic about having to schedule things in a rush.
Yes, you now know where all the bodies are buried. However, if you emphasize the negative, you’re hurting yourself as well as your group. People will think, if the group was that bad before you started, why did you decide to lead it? And if it wasn’t, what was it about your leadership that caused it to go bad?
Don't expect them to do things exactly as you did, or exactly as you want them done. Remember that one of the rewards for working that hard is getting to do things their way.