Tips on building trust and gaining confidence from your association board.
By Andrew Hay, CAMEx, CCAM-ND.PM
Be The Expert T
hink back to a time in school when you had a teacher that you learned the most from. What were they like? Did they have to spend countless hours looking up answers for the students or did they have most answers at the ready? Did they simply read from the textbook each day or did they apply anecdotal or real-life examples to help solidify the learning process for the class? Now think to your style as a manager. Do you find yourself telling the board you have to research items that are on the agenda and being discussed in a meeting? Do you simply copy and paste sections of the governing documents or Civil Code to your homeowners and board members with no additional input or insight? As managers we are as much educators to our client board members as we are support for them. If you have a portfolio of clients who simply dictate their decisions to you without ever soliciting your feedback or opinion, then you likely have fallen into (or inherited) the trap that many who struggle within our industry have succumbed to. This dynamic results in a much more difficult, and time consuming, way of managing associations and has been the undoing of many who have entered this industry. If you are able to become a trusted expert to your clients and to build rapport within the communities you manage, you will find that your boards spend less time delaying decisions for ‘more information’ and more time focused on ways they can improve their community. Here are some simple ways to challenge yourself to become an expert and industry professional that many of your successful peers have become. 1. KNOW THE AGENDA/BOARD PACKET This is the simplest and most important way to achieve trust with your clients. If you have prepared the board packets and agendas for your meetings, shouldn’t you be the person who knows the most about them? If you allow your clients to dictate everything that goes onto the agenda and then do not hold them accountable to provide backup for those items, how can you or the other board members be prepared to speak/decide on the matter? Nothing should be in that board packet or on the agenda that you don’t have at least partial working knowledge of and it is reasonable to ask your board members to provide you with details for anything they ask to have added to a meeting.
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Vision Spring 2021 | cacm.org
