By Julie Boland and Robin Queen

I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all.

We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?

We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others.

What prior research tells us

Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types of informal electronic communication. In fact, these errors have interested other scholars as well.

Several years before our study, Jane Vignovic and Lori Foster Thompson, who are psychologists at North Carolina State University, conducted an experiment about vetting a potential new colleague, based only on an email message.

College students who read the email messages perceived the writer to be less conscientious, intelligent and trustworthy when the message contained many grammatical errors, compared to the same message without any errors.

And at our own University of Michigan, Randall J. Hucks, a doctoral student in business administration, was studying how spelling errors in online peer-to-peer loan requests at LendingTree.com affected the likelihood of funding. He found that spelling errors led to worse outcomes on multiple dimensions.

In both of these studies, readers judged strangers harshly simply because of writing errors.

Typos vs. grammos

Over the last several years, we conducted a series of experiments to investigate how written errors change a reader’s interpretation of the message, including the inferences that the reader makes about the writer.

For our original experiments, we recruited college students to be our readers, and for our most recent experiment, we recruited people from across the country who differed widely in terms of age and level of education.

In all of our experiments, we asked our participants for information about themselves (e.g., age, gender), literacy behaviors (e.g., time spent pleasure reading, texts per day), and attitudes (e.g., How important is good grammar?). In the most recent experiment, we also gave participants a personality test.

In each experiment, we told our participants to pretend that they had posted an ad for a housemate and gotten 12 email responses. After reading each email, the participants rated the writer as a potential housemate, and on other factors like intelligence, friendliness, laziness, etc.

In fact, we had created three versions of each email. One version had no mistakes. One version included a few typos, e.g. abuot for about. Another version had errors involving words that people often mix up, such as there for their (we called these grammos).

Everyone read four normal messages, four with “typos,” and four with “grammos.” Different people read the other versions of each message, so that we could separate responses to the errors from responses to the message content.

Errors matter – but to whom?

In all of our experiments, readers rated the writers as less desirable if the emails included either typos or grammos. We expected this based on the earlier research, described above. In addition, people differed in their sensitivity to the two types of errors.

For example, college students who reported higher use of electronic media were less sensitive to the errors, though time spent pleasure reading had no effect. Prior research on writing errors had not compared types of errors, nor collected information about the readers, in order to see which reader characteristics influenced interpretation.

Both of these strategies for understanding how errors impact interpretation are unique to our research.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is from the experiment in which we gave participants the personality test. It measured the five traits considered to be important in personality research: extraversion (i.e. how outgoing or social a person is), agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism (prone to anxiety, fear, moodiness).

This experiment involved adults who varied a lot in age and education, but those differences didn’t affect their interpretation of the writing errors.

Unlike the initial study with college students, use of electronic media had no effect. What mattered were the personality traits: people responded to the writing errors based on their personality type.

People who scored high in conscientiousness or low on the “open-to-experience” trait were more bothered by the typos. People who scored low on agreeability were more bothered by the grammos. And people who scored low on “extraversion” were more bothered by both types of errors. In contrast, how people scored on neuroticism did not alter the impact of either type of error.

Remember, by being bothered we mean that the reader gave lower ratings on the housemate questionnaire to writers who made that type of error.

Why a short email could matter

Our findings – that our personality influences our interpretation of a message – complement other research that has found that our personality influences what we say and how we say it.

In 2015, Gregory Park and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge analyzed Facebook posts from more than 66,000 users who had also completed a personality test based on the same five personality traits that we measured in our study. They found the use of words like love, party and amazing are correlated with extraversion, while the words sick, hate and anymore are correlated with neuroticism.

This research built upon earlier work by researchers Tal Yarkoni and James W. Pennebaker.

While reading our research, two key points need to be kept in mind. First, we think that errors influenced readers’ perception of the writer mainly because the writer was otherwise unknown – the short email was the only basis for judgment. Second, we didn’t ask the readers how likely they were to point out errors to the people who make them.

So, it doesn’t necessarily follow from our study that your friends will view you more negatively if you don’t proofread your email messages, or that you can predict which people will call you on it based on their personality.

But, you might want to keep these findings in mind when you write for an unknown audience or when you read something from someone you don’t know.

 This article was originally published on TheConversation.com.

If you’re feeling that Monday morning dread every day of the week — you may be onto something. While it’s not always a great idea to trust your gut about every single work issue, here’s when it may be worth wondering if your job’s in danger.

1. You’re not that busy

Ryan Naylor, Founder of LocalWork.com, offered a few hints to keep an eye out for if you think you might be fired for performance reasons: “You might notice that you aren’t getting handed as many projects as you were before. Something might have happened, or maybe there was a series of events that caused these concerns to arise.”

2. You’re given loads of days off

Believe it or not, sometimes good things disguise really crummy things. If your boss is thinking about firing you, it’s entirely possible you’ll suddenly find yourself with a lot of vacation days. “Maybe they readily grant you days off so they don’t have to face you as they plan for your termination,” Naylor said.

3. They’re cooling off

If your boss or manager sense that you’ll soon be on the way out, you may suddenly find yourself “Being excluded from important department meetings that you are customarily included in,” according to Scott Samuels of Horizon Hospitality. You might be receiving fewer lunch invitations or group emails, and Naylor says “There could be a lack of eye contact and a disconnection that feels dismissive.”

4. Your company is downsizing

“If you think the company is downsizing and your position may be eliminated, look for worried managers, a lot of executive meetings and listen for break room rumors,” Naylor says.

Ask yourself if what your department produces is still in need, or whether there’s a slow-down in demand for your services in general. And while you’re at it, Naylor says, think about whether your department is “bloated during a time of financial distress for the company.”

If any of these signs ring true, Naylor says you have to consider the tough fact that you may be let go. “There isn’t much you can do if downsizing is imminent,” he says. What you should do though, is start planning. “Your layoff may include a severance package, but this doesn’t mean you should take a vacation,” Naylor says. “The longer you are unemployed, the less appealing you will be to recruiters and hiring managers.”

5. They’re playing the field

Samuels said a sure sign you’re about to be fired is finding a listing on an internet job board of your job (or one that’s really similar) posted by your company. Even worse though, is when you find a posting of your job in your city listed as “confidential.”

6. There’s a new kid in town

Samuels said a sure sign you’re probably going to be fired is when “other individuals start becoming overly involved in your department and/or with your responsibilities,” specifically ones they’d never been previously involved in.

7. You’re on probation

Finding out that you’ve been put on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) by your direct supervisor and given a specific time frame to correct deficiencies, is never a great sign, according to Samuels.

What you can do

So, should you give up entirely and hand in your resignation? Not just yet.

Be proactive: As painful as it feels, Samuels said you should “be proactive in sitting down with your immediate supervisor and discussing/resolving issues that could result in termination.”

Step up your game: Samuels also advises putting in extra time and hours to “go above and beyond to show your commitment to the company.

Consult with HR: If at all possible, Samuels thinks it’s a good idea to “Sit down with your Human Resource Manager/Director and advise them about your observations. Ask them if there is anything that you need to be concerned about. Be tactful and careful when doing this so you don’t come across as being overly paranoid.”

Make nice: Naylor says: “If you want to keep your job, there are some things you can do. The fact that you weren’t fired out of hand might mean that they are hesitating, considering whether you are still a value-add. Show them that you are. Apologize for the incidents that led to this precarious position you are in. Show humility. Offer to show them improvement over a specific period of time. Be specific and, once again, be humble.”

Get moving: And if the inevitable is just around the corner, start planning now. Naylor says: “Your layoff may include a severance package, but this doesn’t mean you should take a vacation. The longer you are unemployed, the less appealing you will be to recruiters and hiring managers.”

By Rachel Weingarten for www.theladders.com

Despite West Point Military Academy’s rigorous selection process, one in five students drop out by graduation day. A sizeable number leave the summer before freshman year, when cadets go through a rigorous program called “Beast.” Beast consists of extreme physical, mental, and social challenges that are designed to test candidates’ perseverance.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth conducted a study in which she sought to determine which cadets would make it through the Beast program. The rigorous interviews and testing that cadets went through to get into West Point in the first place told Angela that IQ and talent weren’t the deciding factors.

So, Angela developed her own test to determine which cadets had the mental strength to conquer the Beast. She called it the “Grit Scale,” and it was a highly accurate predictor of cadet success. The Grit Scale measures mental strength, which is that unique combination of passion, tenacity, and stamina that enables you to stick with your goals until they become a reality.

To increase your mental strength, you simply need to change your outlook. When hard times hit, people with mental strength suffer just as much as everyone else. The difference is that they understand that life’s challenging moments offer valuable lessons. In the end, it’s these tough lessons that build the strength you need to succeed.

Developing mental strength is all about habitually doing the things that no one else is willing to do. If you aren’t doing the following things on a regular basis, you should be, for these are the habits that mentally strong people rely on.

You have to fight when you already feel defeated. A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he does every day. He responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, cause that’s when it really matters.” The same applies to success in the workplace. You always have two choices when things begin to get tough: you can either overcome an obstacle and grow in the process or let it beat you. Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand, if you force yourself to push through a challenge, the strength begins to grow in you.

You have to delay gratification. There was a famous Stanford experiment in which an administrator left a child in a room with a marshmallow for 15 minutes. Before leaving, the experimenter told the child that she was welcome to eat it, but if she waited until he returned without eating it, she would get a second marshmallow. The children that were able to wait until the experimenter returned experienced better outcomes in life, including higher SAT scores, greater career success, and even lower body mass indexes. The point is that delay of gratification and patience are essential to success. People with mental strength know that results only materialize when you put in the time and forego instant gratification.

You have to make mistakes, look like an idiot, and try again — without even flinching. In a recent study at the College of William and Mary, researchers interviewed over 800 entrepreneurs and found that the most successful among them tend to have two critical things in common: they’re terrible at imagining failure and they tend not to care what other people think of them. In other words, the most successful entrepreneurs put no time or energy into stressing about their failures as they see failure as a small and necessary step in the process of reaching their goals.

You have to keep your emotions in check. Negative emotions challenge your mental strength every step of the way. While it’s impossible not to feel your emotions, it’s completely under your power to manage them effectively and to keep yourself in control of them. When you let your emotions overtake your ability to think clearly, it’s easy to lose your resolve. A bad mood can make you lash out or stray from your chosen direction just as easily as a good mood can make you overconfident and impulsive.

You have to make the calls you’re afraid to make. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do because we know they’re for the best in the long-run: fire someone, cold-call a stranger, pull an all-nighter to get the company server back up, or scrap a project and start over. It’s easy to let the looming challenge paralyze you, but the most successful people know that in these moments, the best thing they can do is to get started right away. Every moment spent dreading the task subtracts time and energy from actually getting it done. People that learn to habitually make the tough calls stand out like flamingos in a flock of seagulls.

You have to trust your gut. There’s a fine line between trusting your gut and being impulsive. Trusting your gut is a matter of looking at decisions from every possible angle, and when the facts don’t present a clear alternative, you believe in your ability to make the right decision; you go with what looks and feels right.

You have to lead when no one else follows. It’s easy to set a direction and to believe in yourself when you have support, but the true test of strength is how well you maintain your resolve when nobody else believes in what you’re doing. People with mental strength believe in themselves no matter what, and they stay the course until they win people over to their ways of thinking.

You have to focus on the details even when it makes your mind numb. Nothing tests your mental strength like mind-numbing details, especially when you’re tired. The more people with mental strength are challenged, the more they dig in and welcome that challenge, and numbers and details are no exception to this.

You have to be kind to people who are rude to you. When people treat you poorly, it’s tempting to stoop to their level and return the favor. People with mental strength don’t allow others to walk all over them, but that doesn’t mean they’re rude to them, either. Instead, they treat rude and cruel people with the same kindness they extend to everyone else, because they don’t allow another person’s negativity to bring them down.

You have to be accountable for your actions, no matter what. People are far more likely to remember how you dealt with a problem than they are to recall how you created it in the first place. By holding yourself accountable, even when making excuses is an option, you show that you care about results more than your image or ego.

Mental strength is as rare as it is important. The good news is that any of us can get stronger with a little extra focus and effort.

Appeared on www.theladders.com. By Travis Bradberry, co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and the co-founder of TalentSmart.

By John Ganoe, CAE, CAMICB Executive Director

A common mistake in state legislatures considering community association manager licensing – and among the general public – is to lump community association managers and property managers into the same bucket. While both are very important roles, they are distinctly different professions with functions, skill sets and responsibilities specific to each.

A community association manager can manage every type of community: condominium associations, homeowner associations, resort communities and commercial tenant associations.  A community association manager works directly with property owners and homeowners.

Property managers oversee individual rental units or a group of rental units, such as an apartment complex. They’re responsible for managing the entire property while community association managers are responsible for common areas – not individually owned properties.

“From a legislative standpoint, this incorrect categorization occurs because state legislators misunderstand the nature of community association management,” said Matthew Green, Director, State Affairs for the Community Associations Institute (CAI).  “They believe that community association management skills are identical to those of a property manager without recognizing the vastly different responsibilities of these two positions.”

This misunderstanding of the two professions often bleeds into more general conversations occurring in this space. Compounding this is the reality that there’s a slight overlap in a couple of the duties performed. For example, both property managers and community association managers supervise certain maintenance activities, such as swimming pool upkeep and trash removal. But it’s important to understand that community association managers oversee and direct all aspects of running the business operation. This means, they authorize payment for association services; develop budgets and present association financial reports to Board members; direct the enforcement of restrictive covenants; perform site inspections; solicit, evaluate and assist in insurance purchases; and, even supervise the design and delivery of association recreational programs.

Property managers are responsible for managing the actual property and therefore handle the physical assets of the unit at the owner’s request. Property managers generally oversee rental units and leases. Their responsibilities might include finding or evicting tenants, collecting rent and responding to tenant complaints or specific requests. If a property manager is responsible for a vacation or second home, he or she may arrange for services such as house sitting or local sub-contracting necessary to maintain that property.  Alternatively, an owner may opt to delegate specific tasks to a property manager and choose to handle other duties directly.

Stephanie Durner, CMCA, AMS, who is the Director of Community Management at River Landing, a private gated golf course community in Wallace, NC, views the distinction this way,

“While property managers are generally charged with overseeing physical structures that are used by people who are not the owners of the property, association managers represent the property owners themselves and are involved in just about every aspect of the overall community. For instance, if a garage door is broken at a rental house, the tenant would call a property manager or owner/landlord. But if there’s a pothole that needs repair or if a neighbor’s dog is running loose through the neighborhood, that’s a task for the community association manager who both maintains the common areas and upholds the governing rules. To me, community association management is a more holistic approach that contributes to the overall quality of life for all the owners in a community.”

Green emphasized, “While some job responsibilities are similar, community association managers have additional functions. It’s critical that community association management be recognized as distinct from property management, because association management requires a wider variety of knowledge and skills.”

“Because of this, the Community Association Managers International Certification Board (CAMICB) offers and maintains the Certified Manager of Community Associations (CMCA) credential, the only international certification program designed exclusively for managers of homeowner and condominium associations and cooperatives,” added Sara Duginske, MS, CAMICB’s Director of Credentialing Services. “Earning the CMCA credential means an individual has taken and passed the rigorous CMCA examination, proving they have a solid understanding of the business operations involved in being a community association manager.”

For community association managers, the bottom line is they understand and are experienced and knowledgeable in the many facets of running a business operation, assuring they provide the best possible service to the associations for which they are responsible.

(Michail_Petrov/iStock/Getty Images Plus) 

Whether you’re onboarding new staff or implementing a new tech project, a good set of standard operating procedures ensures continuity and efficiency.

Justin Burniske, director of enterprise solutions at fusionSpan, explains how to build a great process document.

Why should associations document standard operating procedures?

Standard operating procedures ensure that staff turnover doesn’t impact your association. SOPs give the new staff a reference point while they are being onboarded. SOPs are also important documents for new technology initiatives. When adding or replacing technology, organizations need to address two key questions: What are the critical business processes in place? And why are those processes in place? Good SOPs will ensure your organization can answer both questions.

What are some tips for creating SOPs?

Ideally, your organization should set aside time to conduct a thorough analysis to identify the most efficient processes. Then, your team should commit to those processes going forward. If time is limited, see if you can divide and conquer: Have each department develop their own SOPs and bring them back to the group. If it’s all on you, get in the habit of asking how something is done.

How often should SOPs be reviewed and updated?

SOPs should be a living document that gets tweaked daily as processes are changed and improved, but that’s a habit only a few associations keep. Alternatively, any time you bring new staff on board, have them conduct an SOP review as they start to work through your processes. SOPs give the new hire great insight into the organization, and the new employee is a fresh set of eyes more likely to identify when crucial steps are missing.

By Tim Ebner  Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

(NicoElNino/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

You may hear a lot these days about how automation kills jobs. But automation isn’t all bad—the right tech tools can help make you more efficient so you can get away from busywork and focus on the bigger picture.

Elon Musk is the kind of guy who probably has gotten further than most out of a desire for automation, and even he’s willing to admit that sometimes he takes things too far.

“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk wrote in a tweet to a Wall Street Journal reporter last week. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

Big thing of you to say, Elon! And certainly, there’s some truth to this point. But I do think that there’s a lot of room for automation to benefit those pesky humans you have on your staff.

As I noted last week in my recap of a new Conference Board study, automation is just one of many solutions that organizations are looking at to ease the growing talent crunch that faces their organizations.

Automation need not be something nefarious. It can simply be a matter of cutting down on busywork that gets in the way of broader strategic thinking.

While a lot of folks have images in their heads of robots stealing their jobs or algorithms replacing people, automation need not be something nefarious. It can simply be a matter of cutting down on busywork that gets in the way of broader strategic thinking.

How I Personally Use Automation

As a journalist, I often deal with a lot of things that are effectively busywork, such as resizing and cropping images.

For a while, I used a set of Photoshop keyboard shortcuts to help speed up what can be a repetitive process. But, at some point, I realized that most of the images I uploaded often used a basic frame size, and that, while there are times I needed to do more aggressive cropping or illustration, in many cases, a dead center crop often does the trick.

On top of this, Getty Images added a Dropbox integration, meaning I could set a specific folder for images to land.

So, I used these features to automate my upload process. Now, whenever an image hits a certain folder in Dropbox, the automation tool Zapier will push that image to Cloudconvert, a file-conversion service that it supports, to resize and scale the pictures as needed. After the picture is properly cropped, it then goes to WordPress, where I can choose the image. If I decide I want a different crop, I just grab the original file in Photoshop and adjust accordingly.

Likewise, I often find that there are certain types of text that I’m dealing with on a daily basis that have a very specific form—such as text with straight quotes instead of curly quotes, or repetitive phrases I have to keep typing in. On my Mac, automation often saves the day for me in these situations.

One tool I use is called Rocket Typist, which allows me to set a key command so that when I want to type in tomorrow’s date, I just write “tomo” and hit the tab key, and “April 18, 2018” shows up.

Apple’s own MacOS interface also has a feature called App Shortcuts that allows for some text replacement or modifications of this nature; I’ve set it up so when I run into A LINE OF TYPE IN ALL CAPS, I can use a key command to lowercase it or set it in Title Case.

But often the biggest pain in the neck I run into is when I have a lot of text and it’s not as clean as it should be—say, spacing is off, or it’s organized in an inefficient way. One tool I’ve found helpful for this is called TextSoap, which allows me to take a passage of text and clean it up so I’m not getting extra formatting I don’t want, or it’s in a format I can actually use. I use this tool, for example, to convert credit lines from Getty Images into cutlines for the pictures I upload.

Often, I combine TextSoap with a popular launcher tool called Alfred, which I’ve set up to offer me access to specific TextSoap commands when I need them. Together, these tools probably save me a lot of time that allows me to focus on writing and all the other crazy stuff I do with Associations Now.

Automation for Yourself

All these automations work great for me and my workflow, but your mileage may vary. In fact, you may find that it doesn’t work for your needs at all.

Maybe your flow looks like something else entirely—maybe you use IFTTT to schedule tweets, or you have a great Chrome extension that supercharges the way you use Gmail. Or maybe you find all these extra tools drive you nuts and you’re really into knowing every nook and cranny of a more common piece of software like Microsoft Excel. To each their own.

But I will say this much: No matter your role at your association—whether you’re the CEO, the CIO, the person in charge of membership or communications, or someone working your first gig in the nonprofit world—you likely have ways of speeding up and simplifying your processes. You should spend time analyzing your own work habits, finding ways to improve things, and when you’ve found something good, sharing it with your coworkers or peers.

It might not be easy to find what works, either—all of my little automations came out of a desire to minimize my busywork, the stuff that gets in the way of storytelling and research. Are there things in your daily routine that are like that? Find ways to whittle them down.

Automation shouldn’t be seen as the thing that’s going to lead us to our future robot CEOs. It could be the thing that makes you more effective at your work, so that you can focus on the bigger picture.

There’s no reason that automation can’t make humans better at what they do.

By Ernie Smith for Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

(PeopleImages/E+/Getty Images Plus) 

A board chair wields a lot of power, but the role demands that power be shared.

The board chair may be the most peculiar leadership position in any organization. It’s arguably the most powerful role available, heading the group that sets direction and has firing power over the CEO. But the chair wields virtually no control over day-to-day operations and commands a group of people that is routinely replenished with new faces. And you can’t get too comfortable in the job, since you’ll eventually be termed out as well. You’re the boss. But you’re not.

“Leaders have to shift away from defining team norms and building trust.”

So it’s no surprise that board chairs themselves are often at sea about what their job is, and how to do it. A 2016 study by the Alliance for Nonprofit Management found that half of nonprofit board chairs had no leadership training, and that nearly 80 percent said they sometimes or often feel frustrated in their role.

The nature of the board-chair role will always make it something of a challenge. But that doesn’t mean the chair lacks real opportunities to lead. In Harvard Business Review’s “How to Be a Good Board Chair,” INSEAD business professor Stanislav Shekshnia, reports on the results of a study of a few hundred chairs, board members, and other stakeholders to better define success in the role. Much of the findings boil down to old-fashioned professionalism—poise, attentiveness, preparation, not filling the agenda with snoozy and irrelevant material, and so forth. But in one case Shekshnia identifies a novel and valuable way to approach the job.

The first step, Shekshnia argues, is to get out of the mindset that the board-chair job in any way resembles a traditional leadership role. “To be effective, chairs must recognize that they are not commanders but facilitators,” he writes. “Their role is to create the conditions under which the directors can have productive group discussions.”

However, that facilitation doesn’t involve trying to create a sense of community with a board the same way you might with a staff, he argues. Board members won’t be around for as long as the average staffer, and only see each other a few times a year. And the typical board member’s commitments to other jobs (and boards) is so broad that such gestures toward unity will likely be only moderately effective anyhow.

So instead, Shekshnia prescribes a task-oriented mentality, not a team-building one. That’s because boards aren’t traditional teams; they are gatherings of “experts in a temporary group to solve problems they may be encountering for the first and only time,” he writes. “To enable it, leaders have to shift away from defining team norms and building trust, and focus on quickly scoping, structuring, and sorting the collaborative work.”

For any volunteer leader who’s had it up to here with trust falls, hot-coal-walking, and other icebreaking/teambuilding shenanigans and just wants to get to work, a line like that is a cool breeze on a summer’s day. But it does make the board chair’s job more time consuming: The leaders quoted in the piece talk about the importance of one-on-one interaction with every board member, before meetings to make sure they’re up to speed on the issues, and during the meetings to make sure they’re engaged. One board chair said he makes a point to get a general gloss on where the board stands on an agenda item before the meeting, and will raise the issue himself if the board member won’t. This “often triggers a direct contribution,” Shekshnia writes.

Well, of course it does—nobody wants to be caught napping for fear the teacher will call on them. And the approach will test a chair’s people-person skills: Done wrong, it can come off as paternalistic. But done right, it can highlight one critical and peculiar element of the board chair’s job: Though you’re the person in charge, what you’re in charge of is making sure everybody feels like they’re in charge.

That distributed-leadership approach is one that Judy Freiwerth of Nonprofit Solutions Associates recommended in 2016 in light of that report on board disengagement. “The traditional ‘heroic’ model of leadership is for the board chair to hold all of the leadership responsibility as one individual,” she told me. “Research suggests that shared leadership produces higher quality governance decisions and should be considered by boards.”

If you’re not sure you’re distributing leadership well enough, Shekshnia offers a useful metric: A successful board chair, he suggests, takes up no more than 10 percent of the airtime during a board meeting. And in that, as in most things involving board chairs, there’s another irony: It’ll take a lot of time and a lot of conversations to make it look like you’re not the center of attention.

By Mark Athitakis for Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.