Principled Innovation LLC

The new founders: A post for board members

April 22nd, 2009

This post is for association board members.  If you are an association CEO or staff person, please share it with your board.

If you are serving on your association’s board of directors today, I’m wondering whether the following thought has ever crossed your mind:

I didn’t sign up for this.  The people who served on the board before me didn’t have it this tough.  Why do I have to make these decisions?  Why can’t I just serve out my term and let the board members who come after me deal with these problems?

If you’ve ever thought in this way, even for a fleeting second, I understand.  Like you, I serve on a governing board, and so I really do grasp how challenging such service can be, especially during difficult economic times.  But here’s the thing:

You did sign up for this, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.

Doing what’s right, doing what’s hard, doing what’s necessary, especially when it’s not popular, is the work of leadership, which is exactly what boards are supposed to be doing.  If your predecessors on the board didn’t take their roles seriously enough to leave a stronger, future-ready organization to their successors, then they failed to fulfill their core responsibility to the association and its members, as well as to you and your peers.  They broke their covenant, and left the responsibility to you.  Your association can’t afford for you to continue the pattern.

Now, take a moment and read Monday’s post on disruptive reinvention.  After you’ve had a chance to think about it, I want you to consider this question:

How much do you respect and value the unique contributions of your association’s founders?

Given your long-standing relationship with the association, my guess is that you honor the founders’ contributions a great deal.  So, I want to challenge you to become one of your association’s “new founders,” one of the inspirational leaders who brings wisdom, foresight and courage to bear on today’s problems.  Wise leaders ask the big questions and listen to many different perspectives before thinking through possible answers.  Leaders with foresight encourage creative thinking and innovation by envisioning what can be.  Courageous leaders make the tough decisions to abandon what no longer works in favor of building more sustainable organizations.

As I wrote in Monday’s post, associations need disruptive reinvention and right now.  The kind of painfully slow incremental change that association boards prefer is simply not an option anymore.  As new founders, you and your board colleagues must bring a different sensibility to the association’s conversations, one that recognizes the primacy of the future over the past, values inquiry over certainty and enables any stakeholder to act quickly to disruptively reinvent the organization.

It’s time to embrace the revolution.  As a new founder, you get to create the future.  No one said it would be easy, but this is the job.  Are you ready for it?

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