The Training Is Four Years. My Term Is Two.

I looked into getting better at my job.

This seems like the sort of thing we should encourage in civic leaders.

I’m serving as president of a small, all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce in a rural mountain community. I’ve never been trained to run a Chamber of Commerce. I’ve spent most of my career in consulting and technology, which has given me a useful collection of tools for solving problems, building systems, and making PowerPoint presentations no one had requested. None of it prepared me for the strange experience of running a tiny civic organization, where a conversation about long-term strategy can be followed immediately by a question about a restaurant’s new appetizer menu or, inevitably, extension cords.

There is, I discovered when I went looking for ways to fill the gaps between my day job and my volunteer job, training for this.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce runs the Institute for Organization Management, a professional development program for Chamber, association and nonprofit leaders. Its curriculum covers many of the things you would hope someone running one of these organizations might know: finance, governance, membership, strategic planning, legal issues, partnerships, technology, volunteer development, leadership. It is substantial, with ninety-six hours of instruction across four weeklong sessions. The traditional course of study is structured across four years, although the program is flexible enough that a sufficiently determined person can complete all four sessions within a single year.

So technically, time wasn’t the problem. I could finish.

All I needed was four weeks.

Except I’m a volunteer.

I have a full-time job, the kind that pays the mortgage, and then I have what frequently feels like a second full-time job running the Chamber for free. Completing the program quickly would mean finding four separate weeks when I could step away from the first one so I could become better trained for the second one. Then there was tuition, travel, lodging, meals and everything else that comes with attending four weeklong sessions. Our Chamber operates on a small budget, and I’m one of the people responsible for protecting it.

I couldn’t make the return on that investment work.

Not because the training wasn’t valuable. It plainly was. Not because the Chamber wouldn’t benefit from having someone with that training. It plainly would. The problem was that we would be investing a significant chunk of the Chamber’s limited money, and I would be investing a significant amount of time away from the career that actually pays me, to professionally develop a volunteer leader whose departure date was already written into the bylaws.

And here’s the part that makes the problem mine: I helped write those bylaws.

The term limits weren’t theoretical. Our Chamber had learned, through experience, what can happen when leadership stays in place too long. We had seen bad leadership become entrenched, and when we rewrote our bylaws, part of the reason for imposing term limits was to make sure that couldn’t happen again. I believed in that decision then, I believe in it now, and knowing what I know today, I would still make it.

But bylaws are lousy judges of character.

A term limit designed to protect an organization from a long run of bad leadership also prevents it from having a long run of good leadership. The clock doesn’t care whether the person sitting in the chair is damaging the institution or finally figuring out how to make the damned thing work. At the end of two years, it runs out either way.

That’s probably as it should be. No organization should protect itself from bad leadership by simply hoping every future leader will be good. But it creates a problem I hadn’t fully appreciated when we built the clock. If leadership has to turn over, expertise has to be able to stay. Otherwise, the very mechanism that protects the institution from becoming dependent on one person can also prevent the institution from accumulating what that person learned.

The answer can’t be keeping the right leader forever. It has to be building an organization that keeps getting smarter no matter who is leading it.

That’s the arithmetic I couldn’t get around.

The Clock We Don’t Talk About

We talk constantly about capacity in volunteer organizations, usually because we don’t have enough of it. There is always more work than people, more need than money, and more jobs than anyone quite knows how to do. Seriously, if anybody knows QuickBooks, call me.

Capacity usually gets discussed as a question of how much. How much money do we have? How many volunteers? How many hours can they give us? How many people are willing to say yes before we have to start asking the people who have already said yes to six other things?

There is another dimension I didn’t understand until I had been doing the work for a while: how long?

How long will the person who knows this still be here? How long does it take to learn the job well enough to stop making avoidable mistakes? How long does it take to build the relationship that makes a five-minute phone call possible instead of a three-week process? How long before this particular investment pays off? And, perhaps most importantly, does the institution’s time horizon extend beyond the people currently running it?

That question changes the arithmetic.

A project that pays off in six weeks is easy to love. A membership campaign that produces fifty new members by March gives you a number to announce at a meeting. Everybody gets to clap, you get to feel briefly competent, and the evidence that something happened is right there on the spreadsheet.

A relationship with a neighboring community might take years. A new volunteer may need months before they’re ready to own something instead of simply helping with it. A business survey might matter most when next year’s strategy gets written. Professional education may not make you substantially better at the job until you’re nearly finished doing it.

The incentives aren’t sinister. They’re arithmetic. Anything whose return arrives during your term has an advantage over anything whose return arrives after it, particularly when the person making the investment knows from the beginning that someone else will be sitting in the chair when the payoff comes.

Once I noticed that, I started seeing it everywhere.

Some of the things we do at the Chamber pay off almost immediately. We’ve changed how we talk about ourselves, expanded our reach, recruited new members, tried new events, built new partnerships, and watched some of those experiments produce visible results much faster than I expected. Other work moves at the speed relationships move, which is to say at whatever speed they damn well please. Some conversations have to happen more than once, trust has to be earned rather than announced, and some ideas won’t reveal their value until long after the meeting where somebody first suggested them.

The first category is intoxicating. The second is where institutions are built.

The trouble is that volunteer leadership tends to reward the first while depending on the second.

Nobody Did Anything Wrong

What makes the credentialing example interesting to me is that nobody did anything wrong.

The U.S. Chamber’s IOM program wasn’t closed to me. The program is flexible. Nobody looked at a volunteer Chamber president from a tiny organization and told me I didn’t belong there. I looked at a legitimate professional-development opportunity, looked at what participating would require, and decided the math didn’t work.

I wasn’t doing anything wrong either.

I know I am a temporary custodian of our Chamber. Our Chamber doesn’t pay me, this role isn’t the beginning of a Chamber-management career, and I wouldn’t be investing in a credential I expected to carry through the next twenty years of professional advancement. I’m trying to serve one organization, in one place, for a limited period of time.

For a career Chamber professional, the arithmetic is different. Professional development follows them. Their current organization benefits, their next organization benefits, and they carry the expertise and credential through a career. The investment has time to compound.

Mine doesn’t.

The IOM program was designed to invest in the professional. My problem was figuring out how to invest in the institution.

Those aren’t always the same thing.

A staffed organization has places for knowledge to accumulate besides the person at the top. The accounting practices remain. The calendar remains. The vendor relationships remain. Someone knows why that particular insurance policy exists, where the contract lives, and what happened the last time the organization tried the brilliant new idea everyone has suddenly rediscovered. People leave, but memory has somewhere else to live.

In a small volunteer organization, sometimes the person is the memory.

Then the term ends.

Congratulations to the new president. Here are the keys. Good luck.

I exaggerate, but not by much. Small civic organizations can be remarkably sophisticated while still depending on systems that would horrify anyone paid to think about organizational continuity. Important information lives in somebody’s inbox. A process exists because Sharon knows how to do it. A vendor relationship belongs to whoever happens to have the vendor’s cell number. Somewhere there is a binder, and everyone agrees the binder is important, although nobody is entirely certain where it is.

The organization works because people know things, which works remarkably well right up until those people leave.

What disappears may be much more than a name at the top of the agenda. It can be years of accumulated context: which relationships matter, which promises were made, which experiments already failed, which traditions are cherished, which traditions are merely old, and which apparently harmless suggestion should never again be uttered within fifty feet of a board meeting.

The new leader doesn’t begin where the previous leader stopped. Too often, the new leader begins somewhere behind them and spends the first part of the term rediscovering the distance.

That is a very expensive way to run an organization whose primary labor source is free.

A Very Organized Form of Dependency

Documentation without distributed ownership is just a very organized form of dependency.

It took me longer than it should have to understand that, largely because I had become extremely good at the dependency part.

I had allowed too much of the Chamber to accumulate inside me. The inbox was mine. The calendar was mine. Too many of the relationships were mine. I knew which person to call when a problem appeared, where certain things were stored, what had been promised, and which apparently simple decisions contained seven years of local history and should therefore be approached wearing protective equipment.

For a while, that felt efficient, and it probably was. If you know the answer, answering is faster than teaching somebody else how to find it. If you have the relationship, making the call is easier than bringing someone else into it. If you can solve the problem in fifteen minutes, spending forty-five minutes helping another person solve it can feel ridiculous when there are six more problems waiting.

Do that long enough, though, and something strange happens. You stop merely doing the work and start becoming part of the infrastructure that makes the work possible. This is flattering right up until you remember that infrastructure is supposed to remain when one guy goes home.

In the middle of my first term, I started trying to undo some of that. We shared calendars, documented events and processes, captured vendor information and started recording not simply what had been decided but, when it mattered, why. I tried to make relationships belong to more than one person and information live somewhere more durable than my inbox. A password, I discovered, becomes substantially more useful to an organization when its continuity plan consists of something more sophisticated than hoping I remember which Post-it note it’s written on.

That helped, but documentation only solves the easiest part of the problem. A procedure can preserve steps. It cannot preserve judgment. A shared drive can tell the next person what we did last year. It cannot necessarily tell them why, or whether it was a good idea, or what almost went wrong, or why one particular relationship matters more than its name on a contact list would suggest.

More importantly, none of it creates capacity if I still own everything.

If everyone knows exactly how I do everything but I still do everything, we haven’t built an institution capable of surviving me. We’ve written a biography.

So the harder work has been learning to give things away before I leave. That means giving context instead of instructions, letting someone else know something first, allowing somebody else to answer, and occasionally watching someone solve a problem differently from the way I would have solved it without lunging across the table and grabbing it back.

I believe the technical term for this is leadership development.

It has also changed what I think succession means. I used to understand succession primarily as finding the next person. Eventually there will be another president, another board, another collection of people sitting around the table wondering why we own quite so many extension cords. Obviously, somebody has to be willing to take over.

Now I think finding the next person is only half the job. The other half is deciding what the next person shouldn’t have to rediscover.

What the Institution Learns

Every volunteer organization loses knowledge. That part really is normal. People leave, boards turn over, presidents finish their terms, treasurers quit, committee chairs burn out, and the person who has run the quirky local event since the Bush administration, the first one, finally announces that she would like, just once, to attend it.

Some loss is unavoidable. What isn’t unavoidable is requiring the organization to relearn things it has already paid for once, usually in somebody else’s time.

That’s the part I think we underestimate. When a volunteer leader learns something through experience, the organization has made an investment whether it meant to or not. It may have paid in mistakes, missed opportunities, awkward conversations, unnecessary meetings, damaged relationships, frantic phone calls or simply hundreds of hours of someone’s life. If that knowledge leaves when the person does, the next leader gets to buy it again.

Once I started thinking about the credential I didn’t pursue, I began wondering whether we define professional development too narrowly for organizations like ours. If anything, doing the job has convinced me that people running volunteer institutions need far more training than we usually give them. These are organizations managing money, contracts, insurance, volunteers, events, partnerships, communications, conflict, governance and public trust, sometimes under the direction of people who were elected at an annual meeting because they made the tactical mistake of sitting too close to the front.

Training those people matters, but perhaps the most important professional development available to a term-limited volunteer leader isn’t something that accumulates only inside the leader. Maybe some of it needs to accumulate inside the institution.

That may mean thinking differently about professional development for organizations like ours. Not simply training the president, executive director or board chair, but helping the organization build knowledge it can keep: shared training, governance education, repeatable systems, deliberate handoffs and ways of transferring judgment rather than merely files. I don’t know what the right model is, and I suspect it looks different in an all-volunteer Chamber than it does in a staffed nonprofit. But I know what problem it has to solve.

The person who gets smarter can’t be the only place the learning lives.

When we document a decision and its reasoning, the next board inherits more than a result. When two people learn a task instead of one, the organization gains redundancy. When someone else owns a relationship, institutional memory gets a little wider. When we explain why a process exists instead of simply handing over a checklist, we leave behind some judgment along with the instructions.

That is education too. It just doesn’t come with letters after your name on your email signature. And unlike a credential I might complete while the clock on my presidency is already running, the return on that investment arrives precisely when I’m gone.

I still like the idea of the credential. Under different circumstances, perhaps I would have pursued it. There is something deeply appealing about discovering, after improvising your way through nonprofit management, that somewhere there is an actual class called Volunteer Development.

Of course there is.

Would have been nice to know.

But I no longer think my decision not to pursue it is particularly interesting. The mismatch is.

There are people doing complicated, consequential civic work in organizations too small to employ professional leadership. They negotiate contracts, manage money, recruit volunteers, build partnerships, navigate governance, run events, handle conflict, represent businesses, work with local government, manage risk and try, on a good day, to build a little more trust than they spend. Then, often by design, they leave.

We should train those people. We should make professional education accessible to them, and we should recognize that volunteer does not mean amateur when the responsibilities themselves are professional in every way except the paycheck. But we should also recognize that no amount of professional development solves the continuity problem if everything the leader learns leaves with the leader.

The answer can’t be keeping the right person forever. We wrote our bylaws specifically because we learned the danger in that. The answer has to be building institutions capable of learning even while the people leading them change.

Because the real problem was never that my term was shorter than the training. In fact, it isn’t. If I wanted badly enough to earn the credential before my term ends, I could.

The problem would be leaving behind an organization that had learned nothing because I was the only one who had.

I have an expiration date. The institution shouldn’t.