(klosfoto/E+/Getty Images Plus)

 

New volunteers thrive when they’re given ad hoc opportunities instead of committee roles, according to one expert.

This week marks National Volunteer Week, an annual opportunity for associations to celebrate the work that volunteers do. And it is indeed work: According to the 2017 ASAE Foundation study “Mutually Beneficial Volunteerism,” volunteers contribute up to 25 percent of an association’s total work hours.

According to Peggy M. Hoffman, FASAE, CAE, president and managing partner at Mariner Management & Marketing and one of the study’s coauthors, that places a responsibility upon associations to think carefully about two aspects of volunteering: How to engage volunteers so they’ll start a relationship with your association, and how to give feedback that will sustain it.

“What’s sitting on your desk that you can’t get to, that a member can potentially do?”

On the engagement side, Hoffman said, associations will be more successful thinking about necessary tasks that volunteers can be recruited for, instead of just slotting them into preset committee niches. “Rather than just automatically say, ‘OK, we’re going to have all these jobs,’ they take on a new issue or opportunity and they build it differently than they would have in the past,” she said.

For instance, Hoffman noted one association that was looking to improve its member onboarding process. The membership committee asked a small ad hoc group outside the committee to lead a discussion about possible onboarding options, which were then fed to another ad hoc group that determined the product it should create as a result of that discussion. “People say, ‘It’s extra work. I could just give it to the committee. Why do I want to create this extra work?” Hoffman said. “Well, because that’s also the entree for your next generation of leaders.”

Finding essential volunteer tasks doesn’t necessarily require a rigorous study process, she said. The answer might be as close as that overflowing inbox: “One of the questions you can ask staff is, ‘What’s sitting on your desk that you can’t get to, that a member can potentially do?’” she said.

That work can go a long way toward identifying volunteer tasks that bring value to the organization, rather than the make-work that many committees are often criticized for. But it is just as critical, Hoffman said, to ensure that volunteers not only receive kudos and thank-yous for their contributions (though she has a few suggestions for that), but also more substantive feedback that they might be able to apply to both paid and volunteer work.

According to the “Mutually Beneficial Volunteerism” report, satisfaction on that front is the weakest: Nearly half the respondents said they were dissatisfied or neutral about the feedback they received.

Associations can address that issue, Hoffman said, first by soliciting feedback from volunteers if they haven’t already—knowing where they were satisfied and dissatisfied can clarify what their expectations are and help set tasks that will meet their goals. Another tool Hoffman suggests is a simple performance evaluation in which a volunteer is assessed for meeting or not meeting expectations on a set of criteria. Volunteers will be informed of the evaluation before their tenure begins. “It’s another way of restating your expectations, but they know how they’re going to be judged or evaluated,” she said.

“People don’t want bad feedback, but the problem right now is I get on the committee and at the end of the year we all share a drink and there’s this sense of, I don’t know if I’ve made a difference,” she said. “So you have to do something.”

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

By Mark Athitakis /(Phototalker/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Executive burnout has a way of trickling down. The smart leader knows when a break is necessary—and plans ahead for it.

Leaders often like to talk about the “tone from the top”—that the business priorities an executive expresses ultimately become what the rest of the organization prioritizes too.

But “tone from the top” needn’t be reserved for business priorities. It includes ethics, attitude, and, I’ve come to think, wellness. The CEO who looks after him or herself is in a better position to get the job done, and to encourage everybody on the org chart to feel the same way.

“A stressed-out CEO is not going to be an effective CEO.”

I wasn’t entirely sold on that notion before I began reporting my story in the new Associations Now about executive self-care. But the leaders I spoke with all made a strong case for the connection between taking care of one’s physical and mental health and the success of the staffs at the associations where they work.

Some of this is just a practical matter: An exhausted CEO is in no position to be an effective leader. “A stressed-out CEO is not going to be an effective CEO,” as Nabil El-Ghoroury, CAE, executive director of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, puts it. But paying attention to one’s own wellness is a good prompt to pay closer attention to the benefits and breaks that everybody gets, as the leaders in the story explain.

An irony of executive de-stressing, though, is that it’s one more thing to put on the to-do list. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a regular routine—a monthly spa day or day dedicated to catching up on reading. More ambitious breaks, though, require more advanced planning.

For instance, when C. David Gammel, CAE, executive director of the Entomological Society of America, knew that the association was getting involved in the “heavy lift” of a merging its meeting with another large event a few years ago, he wanted to pursue a sabbatical after it was done—two continuous months off. “I pitched the idea at that time that there would be a natural kind of break point for me to take a little bit of time off, and come back to the job refreshed after having achieved that major milestone of that meeting,” he says. “The board at that time was open to it.”

Gammel pitched the idea three years in advance, which he says helped; so did working with a board of academics who were familiar with sabbaticals. The opportunity to “let my brain spin down a little bit,” he says, allowed him to come back to the office with a fresh perspective on leading ESA. But even if you have a board resistant to a lengthy sabbatical, Gammel notes that even the few weeks of vacation time that an executive typically receives can do the trick. “It doesn’t have to be a big two-month thing,” he says. “A short amount of time that’s longer than a typical vacation but not a full-blown sabbatical can still be beneficial.”

Employees may not have the same flexibility with vacation time, but CEOs can still do their part to make those breaks meaningful. Tracy Petrillo, CAE, CEO at the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, makes a point to allow vacationing staff members to be fully off-duty, guilt-free. “I’ve said, ‘Do not e-mail each other when you’re off,’” she says. “You have permission to not reply to e-mail and not reply to member phone calls if they call your cell phone.” Deborah Callahan, CEO at the National Fenestration Rating Council, has emphasized wellness efforts at her organization, and says she’s seen fewer sick days among employees, which she credits at least in part to those efforts.

It may take time to get wellness on your agenda as a leader, and for that to trickle down to the rest of the staff. That’s all the more reason not to delay it. “You don’t have to let yourself get to a crisis point,” Gammel says. “I think it can be kind of a maintenance thing, where you take some time off and it allows you to process it, reorder, reenergize, and then come back at it. And I don’t think you should wait for a personal crisis to occur before you do that.”

What self-care routines do you practice as a leader, and how do you communicate the value of wellness to your employees?

From Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

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.

Under the Trump administration, and most Republican White Houses, enforcement of the 1968 anti-discrimination law has weakened. Housing advocates say the constantly changing federal approach has held back progress.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968. (Lyndon B. Johnson Library)

Fifty years after passage of the Fair Housing Act — a law intended to end housing discrimination and increase homeownership among minorities — key enforcement provisions of it are being dismantled by the federal government.

Efforts to enforce the landmark law, which was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1968, have ebbed and flowed over the past five decades. Democratic presidents have tended to direct more resources toward enforcing it and have put greater emphasis on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s role in desegregating cities. Republican administrations, meanwhile, have routinely scaled back those efforts.

But as the Fair Housing Act turns 50, many experts say HUD’s recent actions, under the direction of Secretary Ben Carson, represent a new level of attempts to undo the legislation.

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Under Carson and President Donald Trump, HUD has decisively pared back its role as the primary legal advocate for the Fair Housing Act. Carson instructed HUD officials to delete the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from the agency’s website. HUD recently settled a case in Houston under terms that at least one former official says does nothing to end residential discrimination in the city. And the agency terminated an investigation into Facebook for alleged discriminatory housing advertising practices. Carson has also delayed a requirement, established under the Obama administration, that local governments must create detailed plans to integrate racially divided neighborhoods. And HUD has put an indefinite hold on secretary-initiated housing cases, which historically have been seen as a critical tool in fighting systemic housing discrimination.

Advocates see the moves as a rollback of progress that had been made, particularly under the Obama administration.

“We had these important fair housing advances that were years in the making — carefully constructed rules on fair housing that were suspended with a memo from the administration,” says Philip Teleger, president of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council.

By law, HUD must still investigate housing discrimination complaints that are filed with the agency by civil rights groups or individuals. But it has stopped initiating any investigations or legal actions on its own. HUD-initiated cases have historically tackled systemic housing segregation and lending discrimination.

HUD spokesman Jereon Brown told The New York Times that the agency is not backing away from its duty to pursue the Fair Housing Act or the law’s aim to reverse discriminatory housing practices. The department, according to Brown, is turning its attention to the bulk of its discrimination cases, which he said were not race-based.

“There is no mission shift. We are, in fact, putting more emphasis in sexual harassment” complaints, Brown told the Times. “In addition, 60 percent of the fair housing complaints we receive are disability related, and the majority of those have to do with service animals.”

 

HUD Secretary Ben Carson (AP/Matt Rourke)

 

The changes at HUD have left what housing advocates say is an uneven legal landscape that varies greatly from state to state.

In some places, like Louisiana and Texas, landlords cannot be forced to accept federal housing vouchers. Elsewhere, many cities have utilized exclusionary zoning practices to keep affordable housing out of more affluent neighborhoods, say housing advocates.

Without the federal government acting as an enforcer, the task of ensuring that fair housing standards are met falls to local civil rights organizations. That’s a problem, says one former HUD official.

“You are never going to compare what local civil rights groups can do with what the federal government is going to do,” says Gustavo Velasquez, director of the Urban Institute’s Washington-Area Research Initiative and a former assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD under Obama. “Just on fair housing, the federal government has 600 people across the country working on these cases. The combined staff of local groups working on housing across the country can’t match the resources available from the federal government.”

 Recent Rollbacks

The settlement last month of a Fair Housing Act lawsuit in Houston is evidence, housing advocates say, that HUD under Carson is not committed to using court actions to address housing segregation.

That case, filed under the Obama administration, focused on the fact that Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was blocking the construction of low- to moderate-income housing in an affluent section of the city. Furthermore, according to the results of an investigation HUD released in early January 2017, Houston’s application process for affordable housing discriminated against minorities.

Turner had defended his decision to block the housing project by arguing that black residents in low-income neighborhoods didn’t want to be uprooted and dispersed to wealthier white neighborhoods. Instead, he said, more needed to be done to attract additional investment in existing black neighborhoods.

“Our underprivileged families should have the right to choose where they want to live,” said Turner in 2016, “and that choice should also include the right to stay in the neighborhood where they have grown up. … I categorically reject the notion that in order for poor children to participate in the American dream that I have to move them from where they are and place them somewhere else. The answer is to invest in the communities where they are.”

Under Obama, HUD disagreed, all but accusing Turner of being a segregationist.

But in what critics say is an about-face by the agency, HUD last reached a settlement with Houston that doesn’t require the city to construct affordable housing in affluent neighborhoods — but does allow the city to encourage landlords in low-income neighborhoods to rent apartments to families that are using federal housing vouchers. (Texas state law allows landlords to refuse to rent to voucher users.) The city will also invest $2 million in housing for families left homeless after Hurricane Harvey.

What the agreement doesn’t do, according to Velasquez, is “compel Houston to do something about segregation in the city.”

The settlement has triggered a lawsuit by a Texas fair housing group, Texas Housers, who say Houston was clearly maintaining residential segregation in the city.

But with the federal government backing away from the case, Kate Scott, deputy director of the Equal Rights Center in Washington, D.C., says any battle to force local government to comply with fair housing laws is neutered. Scott was part of a federal action in 2012 against St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, which federal investigators and the courts found were discriminating against black residents looking for housing after Hurricane Katrina. She says housing lawsuits in more conservative state courts are almost pointless.

“In Louisiana, it wasn’t an option to go into state court and sue over fair housing because we would always lose,” Scott says. “We are going to see the same pattern playing out over the country.”

In a somewhat similar move, HUD last year abruptly dropped an investigation into whether Facebook had allowed housing advertisers to target white users and exclude other users from seeing the ads if their social media activity suggested they were black, Hispanic or Asian-American.

HUD had launched that query in 2016. A lawsuit has been filed in federal court alleging that the social media giant continues to discriminate against women, veterans and single mothers in housing ads. By law, HUD will have to investigate the allegations.

 A History of Poor Enforcement

The Fair Housing Act was the last major civil rights achievement of President Johnson’s administration. It came in the wake of a series of riots in Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., and after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It also followed the famed Kerner Commission report on race, which detailed the disparity in homeownership between African-Americans and white Americans and blamed racism as the main culprit behind the riots. The Fair Housing Act aimed to reverse the pattern of residential segregation and do so through enforcement actions when necessary.

Support for the basic principles of the Fair Housing Act has historically been bipartisan, according to Teleger, the president of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Enforcement has been another matter.

“The principle that you shouldn’t discriminate in housing, that’s a pretty widely held belief, and it’s widely supported that we shouldn’t have policies that we segregate families by race,” Teleger says. “However, to effectuate those goals requires substantial changes to the status quo. There are issues like local exclusionary zoning that have a lot of local support.”

 

Protestors demand equal housing access and other civil rights at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. (Wikimedia Commons)

 

To some degree, federal resources for enforcing the act have tended to shift with political winds.

President Richard Nixon’s HUD secretary, George Romney, had challenged local zoning laws as governor of Michigan. Once he joined Nixon’s administration, Romney drafted recommendations to better integrate housing. Nixon blocked them and drove Romney from his cabinet in 1972.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton tapped former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros to overhaul HUD and double the department’s efforts to enforce the Fair Housing Act and address racial segregation. Cisneros did make some strides in that effort. For example, he sent in federal marshals after a town in Texas had refused to allow black residents into an all-white public housing development — the first time in history that HUD had taken over a local housing authority for civil rights violations. But Cisneros’ efforts were clipped after Congress slashed the agency’s budget following the 1994 GOP takeover.

Former President Barack Obama called for increasing HUD funding by 19 percent over his predecessor, George W. Bush.

In many ways, then, the efforts to step back Fair Housing enforcement under President Trump are par for the course under a Republican administration. Still, the vacillating approaches to the law have made it hard to make inroads in integrating housing, advocates say.

“When you go back and forth every eight years about whether you are going to enforce the law or how you are going to fund HUD, of course you are not going to make any progress,” says Scott at the Equal Rights Center.

That’s borne out in the data, which suggest that not much has changed in the past 50 years in terms of housing segregation.

The Kerner Commission report was updated this year to mark its 50th anniversary. Despite efforts to better include minorities and especially black Americans in the broader housing market, one metric has remained stubbornly low: homeownership.

In 1968, only 41.1 percent of black Americans owned homes compared to 65.9 percent of whites. In 2018, almost the same exact percentage of black Americans, 41.2 percent, own homes. White homeownership has ticked up 5.2 percent in the same period.

A New Era of Undoing

Although the Trump administration isn’t the first to change HUD priorities, housing experts say the agency’s current posture represents a new era.

From the time of Trump’s inauguration in January to October 2017 (the most recent data available), HUD took legal action in five discrimination cases, and all but one had been initiated before Trump took office. In contrast, HUD under Obama took legal action in 26 discrimination cases in his first year in office, and HUD under George W. Bush processed an average of 25 cases per year in his second term. (Data were not available prior to 2004.)

In the waning years of the Obama administration, HUD adopted what it called an Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which forced agencies receiving HUD-funded community block grants to complete a federal fair housing assessment in order to receive funding. Cities and counties were required to examine residential racial segregation and concentration of poverty.

But under Trump and Carson, HUD has delayed implementing that requirement until at least 2020. Carson has referred to the plans laid during the Obama administration as social engineering and questioned how inclusionary housing would impact an existing community.

“The rule would fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas by encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose — including race-neutral zoning restrictions on lot sizes and limits on multi-unit dwellings, all in the name of promoting diversity,” Carson wrote in The Washington Times shortly after the rule’s adoption.

Carson’s op-ed in 2015 seems to have presaged his actions as HUD secretary.

Few in the housing community have been surprised by HUD’s actions over the past 15 months, but they nonetheless have registered their disappointment at what they see as a large-scale unwinding of policies related to the 50-year-old Fair Housing Act.

Delaying the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, says Teleger at the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, is something of a slap in the face.

“To be suspending that near the anniversary year of the law,” he says, “speaks to how politics is trumping policy here.”

By J. Brian Charles for NCSL Today, a publication of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

By Ernie Smith / Apr 4, 2018 (mediaphotos/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Gartner’s most recent quarterly Global Talent Monitor report suggests that fewer employees are pushing themselves to go above and beyond at the office.

Does it seem like some members of your staff are less willing to put in the extra mile at work? Hopefully that’s not the case, but if it is, you’re not alone.

A new report from Gartner, which recently rebranded from CEB, finds that in the fourth quarter of 2017, a modest 19.7 percent of U.S. employees said they were willing to go above and beyond on the job. According to the Global Talent Monitor report, released last week, that’s a more than 3 percent decrease in discretionary effort from the prior quarter. (On the plus side, that percentage was significantly above the global percentage of 15.8 percent.)

The report, based on a quarterly survey of more than 22,000 employees in 40 countries, also found that workers globally are less likely to stick around in their current job (33.7 percent said they have a high level of intent to stay), though the U.S. has a higher percentage than other countries (44.1 percent, a small decline from the third quarter).

These employee attitudes are being driven by a high level of confidence in economic conditions, reaching a seven-year high, the report says. With discretionary effort and intent to stay both slipping, the report suggests that employers need to focus on boosting employee morale by giving workers a reason to stay excited about their jobs.

“Prevent top talent from looking elsewhere for new work by improving their internal job perceptions,” the report recommends. “Push career opportunities to employees based on their interests and aspirations, and target passive internal candidates by building opportunities before they become dissatisfied and look elsewhere.”

At the same time, employers are still facing recruitment challenges.

“As U.S. companies scale and evolve, recruiters at these organizations are experiencing major challenges in attracting new talent,” Gartner HR Practice Leader Brian Kropp explained in a news release. “Workers are remaining passive in their job searches, which makes it harder to pull people away from their existing companies.”

From Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

They can be expensive, require regular maintenance & inspections, and installing them can be disruptive. Yet they can save lives and property.

A series of recent high-rise fires has reignited the debate about requiring sprinkler system retrofits and installations in older buildings. Boards in these communities are learning they’ll have to fight fire with funds-LOTS of funds.

PUTTING SPRINKLER SYSTEMS in older high-rise buildings may sound like a no-brainer—particularly given recent fires like those in high-rises in West ?London and Honolulu—but winning support from owners can be tricky. Read more …

By Dana Wilkie, for Common Ground, A publication of the Community Associations Institute 2018©

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This tiny word is nearly unavoidable but frequently overused. Everything that follows it tends to make you sound like a downer.

By Judith Humphrey, for Fast Company.

The language you use shapes others’ impressions of you, but there’s a chance that some of your most common words don’t put you in the best light. In fact, I’ve already typed one of them that can do that. It’s the word “but”–a simple conjunction that’s nearly impossible to avoid yet potentially damaging to your brand and reputation, even if in subtle ways.

Typically, “but” follows a more positive statement and signals a note of disagreement, opposition, or confused thinking that’s just around the corner. Of course, you sometimes will need to register your objections at work–that much is inevitable. But (ahem) there may be a better way to do that than to just stick a “but” into your remarks and launch into your critique. Here are a few common situations where it’s better to “but out,” and what to say instead.

 1. When You Need To Disagree

It’s easy to resort to “but” when you take issue with a colleague’s thinking. You might say, “Yes, I get your point, but . . . ” This phrasing, however, positions you as an opponent who’s determined to refute the perspective your coworker just shared. It can generate a subtly tense, even hostile atmosphere.

Does this mean you can’t differ with your colleagues? Not at all. A better approach is to replace the word “but” with “and.” The entire tenor of your remarks will change. For example: “Yes, I get your point, and I’d like to expand upon it.” Or, “I see what you’re saying, and it’s triggered another thought in my mind.”

“And” introduces a more collaborative response and positions you as a positive, friendly colleague who’s shifting the conversation in a different direction, not turning it upside down.

 2. When You’d Like To Add A Caveat

Adding a caveat or qualifier is also easily done by using “but” phrases. You might tell your boss, “I can do the creative for this campaign, but I’ll need more time.” You may be right, but using “but” here undercuts the positive message you just delivered: You would be available if not for this one thing. By the time you’ve finished this statement, you’ve called more attention to the obstacle in the way than to your commitment and support.

It’s possible to communicate your caveat much more positively. Eliminate that second clause and simply state, “I can do the creative for this campaign. I’ll have it to you in a week.” If your boss has a problem with that timetable, she’ll say so. But why raise the issue yourself? After all, you want to sound like a good collaborator.

3. When You’re Dealing With Uncertainty

It’s also easy to use “but” when you’re thinking out loud, weighing the merits of two or three viewpoints. For example, someone at a meeting might say, “We could take that approach with this client, but we could try a different angle, too. What do you all think?” Or a job candidate might tell an interviewer, “I know I have the skills required for this position, but I can see that there will be new challenges, too. I’m confident I can handle them by drawing on my experience, though.” This phrasing makes the speakers sound unnecessarily tentative and confused.

It’s fine to be uncertain now and then; the key is to position your ideas clearly in spite of that. So even if you haven’t made up your mind among several options or ideas, try to show the common thread that ties them together and focus your remarks on that. For instance: “Both of these approaches could be really compelling to our client. Which do all of you think is the better one?” Or, “I know I have the skills and experience to succeed in this role, including tackling the unfamiliar challenges I’ll face.”

4. When You’re Ranking Information By Importance

A final place to avoid using “but” is in joining together two ideas that seem equally important. You might tell your coworkers, “Our gross revenues remained solid this quarter, but our profits declined.” Even a straightforward statement like this leaves your listeners to wonder which metric is more important–revenues or profits.

Better to subordinate one of these two ideas to the other. You could say, “Even though our gross revenues remained solid, our profits declined.” The goal here is simply to direct your listeners toward the most important information, and this new statement leaves no uncertainty about that. Don’t create a false balance by using the word “but.”

It’s a tiny, completely unavoidable three-letter word that says more about you than you might think. In many cases, “but” leaves you sounding a little less positive than you otherwise could. It points toward disagreement and muddled thinking on your part, and it occasionally leaves the door open for negativity and confusion for your listeners. Pay a little more attention to what you say, and you may find yourself using “but” a lot less–and sounding infinitely more positive as a result.

Adapted from an article by Jon Howland

Summertime means the weather warms up and homeowners will put their laundry out on a clothesline to dry.  Homeowners living in HOAs, condos or other common interest communities may be violating community rules by hanging their wardrobe up outside.

Nationwide, more than a quarter million homeowner associations govern upwards of 60 million people. Alexander Lee, a champion of the “right-to-dry” movement, estimates that “more than half of them (HOAs) restrict or ban the clothesline.”

A “right-to-dry” movement has sprung up and won laws in six states––Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont—to render bans on clotheslines void and unenforceable. In another 13 states, solar access laws already on the books appear to protect solar drying.

Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for use of solar.

Solar access laws in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin all delineate a homeowner’s right to install a “solar energy system,” “solar energy device,” “solar collector,” “system for obtaining solar energy” or “solar energy collection device.” The legal terminology varies, but the letter and spirit of these laws has one overarching message: homeowners may utilize the power of the sun

Yet in all of these 19 states, illegal bans persist in community rulebooks, such as HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs), and a number that likely runs into the millions of residents do not know they already have a right to dry. Solar access laws, many of them from the 1970s, and obscure amendments to state property law may not be well known.

Do you know your state law? Does your community have a policy on clotheslines?

By Allison Torres Burtka / Apr 1, 2018 Rosina Romano, CMP, of the Entomological Society of America. (Ryan Donnell)

As industry leaders, how associations respond to sexual harassment matters—to the individual and to their community. Associations are facing challenging questions about how to set the bar for acceptable conduct in their field, enforce fair policies, and promote a positive professional culture that attracts the best talent.

Two years before the #MeToo movement, the American Astronomical Society faced a sexual harassment firestorm. A prominent astronomer—a college professor who had once been honored with a prestigious AAS award—was found to have harassed multiple women and ultimately resigned from his post at the University of California-Berkeley. Then-AAS President C. Megan Urry, writing in Scientific American, called it a “wake-up call to reform our field.”

“As a professional astronomer, I have seen this behavior push women out of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM),” Urry wrote. “I am angry that so many bright, ambitious, eager young scientists have had their dreams crushed, and I am sad that the world will not benefit from the discoveries and innovations those women (and it is most often women who are targeted) would have given us.”

AAS set out to explore the scope of harassment in the field, and the findings were stark. In a survey of more than 400 astronomers and planetary scientists, “a quarter of the respondents said they felt unsafe in their workplace in the last five years as a result of their gender,” says Christina Richey, former chair of the society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and coauthor of the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last July.

“It’s something that we need to understand for the betterment of our community and our science,” Richey says. “If we want to do the best science possible, we need to have truly the best people doing it. You can’t do that if you’re not in the room. Part of the study showed that people were skipping professional events because they felt unsafe.”

That’s the opposite of just about any association’s mission. While some organizations have been dealing with sexual harassment in their professional communities for many years, the recent stream of revelations about high-profile harassers and abusers has shown its pervasiveness in all segments of society. In some industries, rampant harassment is pushing people out of the profession or causing them to isolate themselves from their colleagues.

So the problem extends beyond individuals’ safety, security, and well-being to the association’s organizational health and the future of the field it represents. As conveners of professional communities, associations are in a unique position to influence the conversation about what conduct is acceptable, particularly as their members may face harassment—or perpetrate it—in various settings, including at association meetings.

Risk and Responsibility

The revelations have prompted many associations to develop or strengthen their member codes of conduct, sometimes sharpening language to specify exactly what kind of behavior and language is considered harassment.

Julia Judish, special counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP, says she’s seen a sharp uptick in concern among her firm’s association clients about sexual harassment and their role in protecting members.

“A member who experiences  sexual harassment at an association-sponsored event could bring a negligence claim if the member believes that the association is somehow at fault for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent it, or for being on notice of the risks and not taking remedial steps,” Judish says. “Beyond any potential legal liability, most associations want to make sure members can come to their events and be safe—lawsuit or no lawsuit.”

Even thornier questions arise when a member is the alleged harasser. In perhaps the best-known case, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled producer Harvey Weinstein after well-publicized disclosures about sexual misconduct. But in a less extreme case, what would warrant expulsion or other forms of member discipline?

Associations need to define what conduct is relevant to membership, Judish says.

“Some professional societies or credentialing organizations have policies that view as relevant to holding the credential even conduct that occurs outside the context of the member’s professional activities,” such as fraud or dealing drugs, she says. But many “don’t take disciplinary action based on conduct in the member’s personal life that’s not somehow linked to their activities as a member or their qualifications for membership.”

Where the harassment occurs can create a gray area, such as when members harass people at their universities or labs. AAS’s Richey points out that society members often work in isolated settings, such as field sites and labs. “Students and postdocs are so reliant on their advisors for data and for publishing,” she says. “That’s where you get a really strong power dynamic, and that can be dangerous.”

Whatever conduct policies an association adopts, members must understand them, and the organization must apply them fairly, Judish says. “Courts have recognized that private membership organizations owe their members a common-law duty of fairness, essentially, which would require that membership organizations treat members consistently and follow their procedures.”

Making Meetings Safe

Because meetings often are the site of harassment, associations should have meeting-specific policies in place, require attendees to agree to them, and communicate them to attendees repeatedly, experts say. In a survey of people in scientific fields, 60 percent of respondents reported experiencing harassment at a meeting. Harassers often target association staff, exhibitors, and poster session presenters, says Sherry Marts, president and CEO of S*Marts Consulting, LLC, who conducted the survey.

I thought we didn’t have a problem.

In 2014, the Entomological Society of America enacted a code of conduct that specified different types of harassment and intimidation at meetings. “I thought we didn’t have a problem,” says Director of Meetings Rosina Romano, CMP. But, since then, ESA has received harassment complaints every year, and it has occasionally banned members from meetings.

Last year, ESA revised the code to state more explicitly what behaviors are prohibited. “Our ability to communicate is evolving over time,” Romano says. “There’s no manual for this. You just want to tell everyone, ‘You’re adults. Be good to each other!’”

“The attendee conduct rules should be broad enough to cover member-to-member conduct as well as the conduct of members toward association staff, volunteers, and employees of vendors at the conference venue,” Judish says. The rules should also allow the association to eject a harasser from a meeting or disqualify him or her from attending future meetings, she adds.

Marts recommends “taking every opportunity” to educate participants about the code of conduct: “Make it a ‘check-off’ at registration, put it up on signs and slides, announce it at the start of sessions, and make sure it is in the program book and online material.”

She also suggests putting the policy on one of the slides that rotate between presentations. “Saying it out loud and saying that you’re serious about enforcing it can actually reduce the number of incidents within a single meeting,” she says.

But having a policy in place isn’t enough. Associations should have “an easy, simple, direct way for meeting participants to report incidents,” and it should be publicized along with the code of conduct, Marts says. She recommends designating and training a contact person or two. “You want somebody who’s a good listener, who’s going to help calm people down and get all the details without re-traumatizing the target.” She advises using staff or a consultant rather than volunteer leaders, because of potential conflicts of interest.

Depending on your circumstances, you may also want to coordinate with security and law enforcement personnel. “I always bring in the security of the headquarters hotel and let them know this has been an ongoing issue,” says ESA’s Romano.

ESA has struggled to decide how much to tell members about incidents. Romano says many members don’t realize any problems have occurred. “Now they’re looking for a little bit more transparency from us to vocalize that this policy is in place, and that we’re taking action on it,” she says.

Marts suggests training meeting staff on bystander intervention, along with how to respond when someone approaches them about an incident. “The first time we received a complaint, it went to a temporary staff registration person who didn’t know what to do with it,” Romano says.

Training can be offered at meetings for anyone interested, including members, Marts notes. Workshops can cover topics like harassment resistance, bystander intervention, and ally skills.

A Broader Problem

An organizational culture that allows harassment to persist can cause harm far beyond the individual target, according to experts. The effects extend to “the people who see it, who hear about it, and who read about it on the Twitter feed,” Marts says. And sexual harassment may be the most visible problem right now, but association leaders say harassment based on race and other factors is a problem as well.

“Harassment can have very detrimental effects on member and employee morale and productivity,” says National Association of Realtors Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Lesley Walker. “So having an anti-harassment policy and code of conduct in place can help create a more respectful workplace, lower turnover, and increase motivation and retention.”

When more than 200 women in national security signed an open letter labeled #metoonatsec, the National Defense Industrial Association issued a statement in support. “NDIA feels responsible to set the mark, and set it high, for conduct between and among its employees, associates, members, volunteers, and event participants,” says James Boozer, NDIA chief of staff. Sexual harassment and abuse weaken the association’s mission but also “could cost us the talent we’ve worked so hard to acquire and foster,” he says.

Richey echoes that sentiment. “We’ve lost many people in our field due to hostile environments,” she says. “I’m tired of us losing fantastic scientists who are capable of greatness.”