At a recent town meeting, the results of a survey indicated that a lack of trust was a central issue. The meeting, which at that point had reached two hours, was drawing to a close without addressing this issue. Community members were asked to send in their suggestions for how to increase trust in our community. What follows is my answer.
Your Crisis of Trust
Dear members of the POA board,
You asked for input on the pillars that were part of the town meeting the other night, including how to re-build a community of trust on the island. I’m glad you are thinking about this, because you don’t have a trust problem; you have a trust crisis. Solving this starts with you.
Begin by behaving with respect toward one another.
Board members need to observe more decorum at meetings, including meetings you attend at the ARB, ERB, and finance committee. That means you genuinely work to solve problems and look for compromise. Eye-rolling is unprofessional and childish. Check your tone for dismissiveness and arrogance. I suggest returning to several in-person meetings a year, speaking respectfully to each other and staff, behaving in a trust-worthy manner, and trusting each other to do the right thing for the community. And then doing the right thing for the community. From where I sit, it looks like you do a lot of posturing.
Behave with respect toward the community.
Read our documents and follow our rules and guidelines. Expect (and require) members of the POA board ERB and ARB to adhere to the policies of those groups. Say you are sorry when you make a mistake, and do whatever it takes not to repeat the same mistake again.
Trust the professionals you have hired.
Our staff has never been smaller or more professional. Outsourcing accounting and auditing has led to 4 years of clean audits, and still you allow individual owners to call the staff’s professionalism into question, or to cast doubt on accounting practices (which were agreed upon by some of the very people continuing to complain.) All of our trusted, hired professionals have expressed confidence and satisfaction with the current system, and you are now demanding a new system based on the preferences of a very small but loud faction of the community, costing the rest of us unnecessary angst and money.
In addition, allowing a board member to openly question, in a meeting, whether staff would deliberately stonewall a work party for their own ends is unconscionable: it destroys morale and reflects poorly on everyone. The community needs to hear you correct board members and other owners who put forth things that are inappropriate or untrue. All board members should expect higher of each other and hold each other accountable for creating a safe workplace for staff. Publicly undermining or privately bullying staff is unacceptable and creates a workplace of hostility.
Trust the intentions, commitment, and work ethic of those who served before you.
This unique community has been managing a wide variety of challenges for almost 35 years. There are lots of ways of addressing challenges, and you would benefit, as board members, from asking questions of people who have been here a while. What worked? What did you try and fail? Why are things done a certain way? No matter how important you are (or were) in your day job, you need to approach your board position with a sense of humility and service. Treating people with arrogance and dismissiveness is not a recipe for trust. Neither is allowing community members to continually focus on perceived errors from a board of almost a decade ago.
Expect and require community members to behave respectfully in public forums.
Name-calling, cursing, interruptions, ranting, bullying: none of these should be allowed in any meetings, and those who fail to adhere to decorum standards should lose their right to participate. Members should not send reply-all group emails to the community, especially if they malign individual board members or other members of the community. There is no way to have trust in a forum that permits personal attacks.
Reduce the corporate jargon
We seem to have devolved into a bunch of corporate-speak, using words like FINCO for the Finance Committee, pillars, etc. When trust is scarce, jargon creates more suspicion. We are not a corporation. We are a community.
Show up
Attend meetings, social events, and discussions. It’s part of understanding your community and your constituents.
Get some help
- Get some training in how to receive feedback. Board members and staff need training in both customer service and how to balance the needs of their role with their own health, family, and well-being.
Set boundaries for each other that everyone can agree upon and support.
Provide community members with some guidelines for requesting accountability in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack.
Think about a community wide retreat: there was some impetus toward a restorative event for the entire community two years ago, but it never got scheduled.
Being a board member is a huge time commitment and an exercise in frustration, which I understand and appreciate the efforts you are putting in. It’s the little moments that can undermine your good work. I hope you will take these suggestions in the spirit they are offered: a genuine wish to see you succeed.