Communication Failures

By Greg Hyland, CPM, AACPM President Elect
Greg.Hyland@ci.yuma.az.us

Have you ever noticed that no matter what you do, it’s never enough? And there’s always someone who thinks he or she could have done it better? Naturally, these folks are usually on the sideline and don’t often step forward to set themselves up for criticism.

Those of you who know me know that I’m not a shy individual. I usually say what I think and often make some people unhappy. But, sometimes these things have to be said. I also realize that we are an organization of volunteers, chaired by a board of volunteers. I’m reminded of that fact on an almost daily basis by my family and my employer.

With that said, if we go with the premise that we are a professional organization of public sector managers and are dedicated to several ideals, including performing our professional duties with honesty and fairness; contributing to the advancement of the dignity and integrity of the public management profession; upholding the rights of others in all of their personal and professional activities; seeking to maintain the highest degree of professionalism; maintaining and advancing their knowledge of the public management field and contributing to the growth of the profession; working to raise the standards of excellence of the profession and to facilitate professional development of all practitioners. We do all these things; aspire to the highest of ideals, all for $15.00 a year. If those of us who drink coffee drink one Venti Americano per week, we spend $143.00 per year, or nearly ten times as much drinking coffee as supporting your professional organization.

I suggest we take a step back and reassess how each and every one of us sees our interaction with our societies and with the academy as a whole. And if this is truly a professional organization of public sector managers, ask the question, what is it worth to us?

Now with those thoughts in mind, I’m going to throw out some ideas for each of you to think about. If you have suggestions, comments, know how to solve the world’s problems, or want me to take a flying leap after reading this, just let me know.

Here we go…

Over the past year we’ve been having some problems with communication within our beloved Academy. The members are frustrated, the Society Presidents are frustrated, and believe me, the Board is frustrated. So much so in fact that we spent an entire day during our mid year board meeting trying to figure out how to better communicate with our members.

We spend thousands of dollars each year publishing information on the Academy’s website. You’d think that in today’s world all of our members (professional organization of public sector managers, remember) would go to the website on a regular basis to see what new information’s been added. Guess what? You’re wrong. I recently had the opportunity to research the visits to the Academy’s website and during a one month period. We had a total of 122 unique visits to our Home Page. I find this very interesting as the month I chose was the month surrounding our national conference when you’d expect a high number of visits. If we use a conservative membership number of 1,700, that’s only 7% of our members who visited the home page of our site. The publications page was visited directly by 180 people, skipping the home page, but this still only equals 11% of the members received information about the upcoming conference and candidate information from the website.

We’ve talked about printing and mailing our newsletter to all of our members, but the House of Delegates didn’t want to increase dues or adjust the budget to pay for the increased costs. Rough numbers, it would be about $15,000 per year to send each member a printed copy of the quarterly newsletter. Now that’s a lot of money, however, we might also ask the question, how much is it costing us to not send out a printed newsletter to each member. It’s something to think about.

Here another thought to ponder; the Academy Board is supposed to communicate with our members through the Society Presidents. Did you know that we don’t know who some of the Presidents are? Believe it or not, some societies haven’t reported who their officers are, haven’t paid their assessments, haven’t paid their dues, and haven’t submitted a membership roster. And, it’s almost the end of the year. Interesting, huh?

Now let’s take this to the next step. The “no-name” societies mentioned above haven’t submitted a roster so the Member at Large for Member Affairs can’t send out the Membership Certificates to the new members (we don’t know who the new members are); the Member at Large for Communications can’t notify the society President when the Newsletter information is available on the website, therefore the society members don’t know there’s new information for them to read. Not very professional, is it? It gets better. Did you know that the no-name societies can’t seat anyone in the House of Delegates, have a member run for national office, accept the Wilkinson scholarship, accept the Henning Award or award Askew medals, etc. because the society hasn’t fulfilled the obligations I mentioned above.

The no-name societies also affect the rest of the academy members because the societies haven’t remitted the dues due to the academy, even though they probably collected the full fee from their society members. This causes a detrimental effect on the academy’s revenue and forces the board to reduce services to the entire membership. I would hope they aren’t doing all this so they can save that $15.00 a member.

So, how are we going to begin to resolve this first issue? I’m going to begin by personally e-mailing all academy members with updates on what’s happening with the academy and subtle reminders about what the societies are supposed to be providing the Board. Will this make some folks unhappy? Probably so, but I’m tired of hearing that the Board doesn’t communicate, and I’d rather have the problem of too much communication than not enough. Also, if a member doesn’t want to read what I’ve got to say, they can always use that key that says “Delete” on it.

One more topic, then I’m done for this issue.

One of the requests often made from societies was for visits to each state society by the academy board. For the past two years, the board has made a practice of attending society functions (when invited) across the country. Some expenses have been paid by some societies, while other expenses have been on the academy. The visits seem to have been well received and have always been on a first come first served basis. The line item in the academy’s budget used for these visits has always been “Board Travel,” although this was definitely misleading and should have been split into another account, possibly “Additional Support for Societies.” The Board members who attended society events did so by using their personal time and only received reimbursement for the travel costs they incurred (based on the actual transportation and lodging and the GSA per-diem rates for meals and incidental costs).

Unfortunately, because of budget constraints, these visits will need to be severely curtailed, if not cancelled entirely. If societies would like to reinstate this practice, they’ll either have to reimburse the Academy for the expenses or determine a method to increase revenues into the Academy’s budget.

As always, if anyone has any recommendations on anything I’ve mentioned in this edition of The CPM Connection, or on anything the Board is doing, please let me know. I’m always available at (928) 373-5023, office; (928) 580-4751, cell; (928) 317-0990, home; or Greg.Hyland@ci.yuma.az.us.

© Copyright 2007, American Association of Certified Public Managers®