Adaptive Leadership: It Will Never Be One-and-Done

10 December 2025 Leave a comment

I had the opportunity today to participate in a very stimulating ASAE Academy session on “The Adaptive Leader.” Some thoughts emerged …

To start with a statement of the obvious: organizations are more than their structured resources. They’re made up of people. And no matter how clear the mission and how abundant or well managed the systems and resources (financial, human, intellectual property, technology), it all is for naught if the people aren’t effectively supported, empowered, and engaged within the workplace.  

But people are complicated. They can’t be systematized. 

That challenge is not new, it’s just most severe today.

The session pointed out that, currently, there are five generational cohorts in the workforce. Now I am personally skeptical about generational categorization. I think length of experience in the workforce is a more determinative factor than year of birth. But the two things do largely correlate, so maybe that’s just semantics. My only caveat is that while any system of categorization can provide context, all are prone to over generalization. None provide an adequate and reliable solution that can be rigidly and uniformly applied to the leadership dilemma. 

So, regardless of how you categorize in order to try and understand them, there are many varieties of life experience in your workforce today. Each brings different needs, expectations and preferences to their role.

One thing is common to ALL of them: they are all coexisting in a workforce struggling to adapt to massive, recent disruptions that haven’t been fully resolved in an environment that continues to face new disruptions at a rapid and unrelenting pace. Things aren’t going to settle down and provide us more certainty any time soon.

There are the obvious external disruptions, from technology (including but not limited to AI), to changing market conditions and business imperatives, and combustible societal and political factors.

But many associations are all still coping with even the basics: an incomplete adaption to a post-COVID workplace and lack of comprehensive agreement on how we are meant to work today. And just as with generational categorization, here we are equally prone to oversimplify: is the “right” approach work from home, return to the office, or hybrid? And while hybrid seems to be the golden mean, exactly what hybrid form, structure, and processes are meant to apply eludes any clear and universally applicable judgment. Flexibility is desirable, but how flexible can we be, and meet both individual and organizational needs? There is no one right way, and many associations are still struggling to find theirs.

So we’re trying to get things right in unsettling and uncertain times. That is not a condition that is conducive to getting the best from people. 

To be sure, what we see in the workplace today is just the latest phase in a decades-long evolution from hierarchical, rigid structures of direct authority to more flat, collaborative hierarchies. In that sense, none of this is new.

But we are experiencing it in a particularly acute moment of disruption and uncertainty.

It is all happening so fast and on a massive scale.

The seminar left me with two, overarching take-aways;

  1. This isn’t going to be solved in a one-and-done manner. We all hunger for a fix that will last at least as long as the models they replace. But it won’t be that simple. It is a truism only because it is true: our only constant is change. We need to be adaptive today, tomorrow and consistently into the future. And the future is coming at us faster than ever.
  2. Senior management needs to be humble and self-aware. Staff is looking to us for a degree of clarity and certainty that, frankly, we cannot provide for them. While, with maturity, we may have a higher tolerance for ambiguity, senior management is also struggling to find the right norms of operation as a team themselves. And we are people too, just as vulnerable to doubts and uncertainty as people are in the structures lower down in the overly simplified concreteness intended to be conveyed in an organizational chart. 

But as leaders something more is called for from us. What we are called to do is approach these conditions with a reality-based, but constructive and positive attitude. Not naïve sophistry, but not defeatism either. Acknowledge rather than downplay or dismiss the validity of what people are feeling. But also act in firm assurance that, while we don’t have absolute answers to all their concerns now, this is solvable. 

That solution won’t come as edicts from on high; they will have to be crafted collectively. Something is called for from every member of staff, not just the c-suite. But the promise of reward is there.

Oh, and then there is the dynamic of effective leadership as a staff and the contiguous dynamic of effective leadership from voluntary governance.

It should be fun. It is certainly a challenge. 

While generative AI has been used to create the accompanying graphic, I do not use AI tools in composing the content.

Filed under The Nature of Associations, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

CEO effectiveness & volunteer boards

6 January 2016 1 Comment

I was recently invited to share one piece of advice from what I have learned in my years as an association chief staff officer on effective partnership with volunteer leaders, for a book soon to be published by ASAE.  After giving  some thought to the matter, for me it came down to what JimiStock_puzzel Collins calls Level 5 leadership: “the paradoxical blend of personal humility and [fierce] professional will.” You need to be able to take your own ego-gratification out of the equation when assessing the association’s strategic needs, but also refuse to make allowances for any limitations that might be present on your board by compromising on the level of leadership their role demands from them. You need to be authentic in giving the board credit for association success and in truly owning any board failure as your own. And never, never, never, letting a setback cause you to doubt yourself or become tentative and risk averse. Take the hit, learn what you can from it, turn the page, and move on. In doing so, you become not only something of a safety net for the board, making it less risky for them to take bold action. You also model the behavior that will enable them to be effective in their own leadership roles.

Filed under The Nature of Associations, The Way We Are, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

The extent (and limits) of a board’s authority

27 June 2012 Leave a comment

The rich “are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed.  (“Yes, they have more money,” Ernest Hemingway is apocryphally reported to have cynically added.)

In the same vein, non-profit boards are different from corporate boards.  They have less latitude to lead.  Even when they have the clear legal authority and are acting entirely consistently with their duties and obligations, they sometimes lack the power to actually execute their decisions.

These thoughts have run through my mind these past days, as I followed the drama over the firing and re-hiring of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan. As an alum of the University, I care about what occurred, but I don’t pretend to have any inside knowledge or unique insight into the Board of Visitor’s actions. But observing the process I couldn’t help but recognize something that is a fact of everyday life for every association executive working with his or her volunteer board.

I don’t know, but it is very possible that the UVa Board of Visitors was objectively correct and perhaps even obligated by their duty to serve the best interests of The University to take the action they did in forcing Sullivan’s resignation.  Perhaps she was failing to perform her duties in a satisfactory fashion, or failing to act in a manner consistent with the direction set by the duly authorized board.  If that were the case, the board’s action was not only legally correct, but the only responsible one for them to take.  On the other hand, perhaps it was a political or personality thing, which would make the decision more questionable.

But it really doesn’t matter.  Where a for-profit corporation’s board can take an action and implement it with little need to explain or justify itself, a non-profit board faces thousands of stakeholders who feel they have a right to be fully informed if not directly involved in every decision “their” association/institution’s leaders take, and who are not slow to exert what they perceive to be their right of veto.

Like I said, I don’t know how valid or justified the UVa Board of Visitor’s initial action dismissing their “CEO” was.  But thirty-plus years in the association business has taught me that a board needs more than just the legal authority to take action … it needs to get buy-in from enough of its constituency to make the decision stick, and the UVa Board of Visitors clearly failed in this regard.

Having led trade associations, whose boards are made up of individuals accustomed to serving on corporate boards, this can be a particularly hard lesson for association board members to learn.  They sometimes fail to appreciate the difference in governance realities between their own company’s board and the association’s.  I can easily imagine the surprise and genuine confusion of members of the UVa board (from such companies as Morgan Stanley and Google) to the reaction of faculty and students.  “They don’t have all the information we do … why do they think they know better than those of us with all the facts and data in front of us?” Or more angrily, “What gives them the right to usurp the authority we were elected/appointed to exercise as a board?”

The lesson to be learned, is that in the not-for-profit world, position power, legal authority, even being right are insufficient.  Leaders and boards need credibility and stature and trust sufficient to bring those they lead along with them.  Or they face embarrassing failures.

Just ask UVa’s Board of Visitors.

Filed under The Nature of Associations Tagged with ,

Bringing the next generation into governance

28 March 2012 1 Comment

When I ask association leaders (both volunteers and staff professionals) what their biggest long-term governance challenge is, the most frequent answer I hear back is the challenge of bringing the next generation of leaders on board.

“Young people don’t volunteer the way we used to.”

“They don’t have the time to devote to volunteering that we did.”

“Their needs and expectations are different than ours were when we came up through the ranks.”.

Each of those statements is probably true enough, although every one of them would do better for some deeper inquiry. When discussing generational issues, oversimplifications and broad generalizations  appear to be the norm, and can do more damage than good.

But the underlying concern of current leaders about future leaders is real, serious and important:

“Who will come after us and ensure the association continues to fulfill its mission?”

And, “How can we engage the younger generation, particularly in the area of governance?”

Serious, selfless and leaderly intentions.  I don’t for a moment doubt the sincerity.

But as I listen to the discussion that follows, there is one question that persistently occurs to me:  exactly who or what are we trying to reform?  

When current boards discuss this issue, do we actually focus on changing the governance system and culture to make them more likely to interest, engage, excite and be rewarding for the next generation of leaders?

More often, it seems to me, what actually happens is the established board, made up of more seasoned and experienced individuals,  is looking for ways to get the next generation to change, not the system.  They struggle to find ways to make the youngsters  more fully understand and appreciate the current governance system just the way it is.  In short, it’s all about trying to make the next generation leader more like we are ourselves, so that they will want to step into the leadership system and culture just as they are.

Are we trying to remake the next generation of leaders in our own image or are we trying to establish a governance model that will be sustainable and serve the membership into the future?  Are we willing to design a governance  model and culture to suit the needs and preferences of the next generation, even if the result is a system we would find uncomfortable ourselves?

Filed under The Nature of Associations Tagged with , ,

Consensus is not a dirty word

10 January 2012 Leave a comment

At a GWSAE Speakers Series event a number of years ago, Margaret Thatcher described consensus as the opposite of leadership.  She used words to the effect that consensus is an abdication of leadership obligations; true leaders take you somewhere the group otherwise would never go.

Recently, on ASAE’s CEO network listserv, a rather energetic discussion on consensus also emerged.   One of that dialogue’s most forceful and articulate participants took an equally hardline against consensus, dismissing it as just a synonym for unanimity.  Of course it’s nice when a decision is unanimous, but how often does that happen? In the real world, the majority rules and once a decision is made it is the board’s duty to support the outcome and the staff’s duty to do their jobs and make it so.

Both Lady Thatcher and that association CEO were right, to a point.  The need to “build consensus” can be a too convenient excuse to avoid making hard but necessary decisions.  Or a tactic used by the minority to mire the association down in an endless process of unproductive delay.  Or the well-intentioned but nonetheless unrealistic and naïve effort to achieve an impossible unanimity.  Regardless of the cause, it can leave the association locked in inactivity.

But I felt the need to defend the concept of consensus, and I hope not just because “consensus-builder” is a personal leadership characteristic mentioned frequently in my performance reviews over the years!

Yes, consensus can be used as an excuse for not meeting the unpleasant duties of personal and organizational leadership, and yes it can become the perfect (but impossible) ideal that is the enemy of the good (but achievable) outcome and lead an organization into a paralysis of irrelevance.

But I have too often observed boards where, although every action is unanimous (or nearly unanimous), the absence of underlying consensus reveals an organization in a state of total dysfunction and locked in constant and unproductive conflict.

Conversely, I have viewed boards where the debate over every agenda item is vigorous (sometimes even heated), and the decisive votes are often close, but the underlying consensus on the governing values, principles and direction of the association is so strong that it results in a prevailing organizational and leadership culture that is robust, positive and healthy.

So my bottom line is that consensus is different from vote count.  Voting is just the raw application of numerical power.  Of course votes are binding, but ignore consensus at your peril.  And don’t make the mistake of assuming you have consensus just because you have the votes.

That would be like the politician who assumes and starts acting like the election results have given him or her a mandate for action (particularly for change) that goes much further than it actually does.  The minute they get to Congress and start “doing what the people sent me here to do,” the rug gets yanked out from underneath them.  That landslide vote in the last election does not make what awaits them at the end of their equally sudden fall any less shattering an experience.

The real world of politics (whether in government or associations) is a world where divisions will persist.  Differences that are often deep and irreconcilable.  They cannot be eliminated; they can only be bridged. The leader who understands the extent, and even more importantly, the limits of the existing consensus is in a position to take the association where it needs to go but otherwise would never get to, and equips him or her with the insight needed to take it there.

The leader who knows how to maximize or even expand the scope of consensus is in a position to take the association to new heights.  Consensus isn’t reductive.  It is the key to unlocking the organization’s full potential.

Filed under The Nature of Associations Tagged with , , ,