The Checklist for the Healthy Executive
(© 2003 Bailey and Bishop)

Now that your pulse is racing, review the list of skills necessary for successful executive management in an association and find where you register. As you review the list, remember the three basic skills that are present in every topic: a) effective writing, b) effective speaking, and c) effective math.

1. Managing and Leading Up: Can you lead your board members effectively? Can you help them to help you manage the affairs of the association? Can you guide them in the uncharted waters they need to go but don’t know about yet

2. Conflict Management: The name says it all. Can you do it in such a way that the win-win outcome is the outcome most of the time?

3. Negotiation: Can you negotiate with vendors for the best options available to serve the needs of your members? Can you negotiate with staff members on issues that require a consensus?

4. Financial Management: Can you read a financial statement? Can you prepare a financial statement? Can you invest the dollars of your association into revenue-generating activities? How are you with the basic non-profit tax laws?

5. Performance Management: Can you hire effective and efficient staff? Do you know the difference between coaching and counseling? Do you understand how to fire within the law? Have you created a workplace that values diversity and supports the values of the association simultaneously?

6. Working with the Media and Working the Media: Have you spoken before the media on behalf of your association, looked or listened to the playback, and cringed? Do you know how to plant a story so that your association receives media coverage that proudly represents its best interests?

7. Dealing with the Politics: Can you build effective alliances within your membership base? Specifically, how well do you take everyone’s value systems and interests and blend them into a common good? Can you lobby? Do you know how to read the legislative tealeaves that affect your association and work with the political system to make its voice heard?

8. Marketing and Public Relations: How well do you sell your association to prospective members? Are you effective at public relations with your existing members through newsletters, websites, and the like? Do you publish an annual report and ensure it gets to your stakeholders?

9. Generating Income: Do you know what programs, events, products, and services consistently build membership, income, and good will? And, do you know your association’s customer service quotient? “The perfect vision isn’t a frozen picture of the future. Customers’ needs and wants change all the time.” (Blanchard, 119) Do you know how to take the customers’ pulse, act upon that pulse and, most importantly, affect it?

10. Adding to Your Resource Base: Resources for most organizations are scarce. Are you looking for strategic partnerships to add value to your scarce resources? And, are you looking for resource multipliers?

By now, if you cannot answer “Confidently proficient” to most of the questions above AND you cannot train your staff members in these skills, you might be thinking, “What next and what now?” The options for your self-development are many and your pulse might need a prod from a few of them. To help you, below are five key exercises in the regime for self-development of a healthy association executive. He/she understands that effective, positive leaders know themselves better than anyone else knows them and they understand the impact that their example can have for others. In short, pursuing self-development brings reward to the leader and his/her followers.

References
Blanchard, Ken and Bowles, Sheldon. Raving Fans, William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1993
Kotter, John P. Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
Maxwell, John C. Failing Forward, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000.