Take It To The Board with Donna DiMaggio Berger
Take It To The Board with Donna DiMaggio Berger
The Power Hour For HOA Leaders, with Organizational Strategist Dr. Edward Gurowitz
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Most Board Members and Managers start their day with a plan which can quickly become derailed when, due to various events and challenges, pure reaction mode is activated. Emails explode, “urgent” problems crowd out the important work, and before you know it, you are stuck putting out fires instead of leading. There is a better way to manage not only your day but your overall association operations, so Take It To The Board host Donna DiMaggio Berger sat down with Dr. Edward Gurowitz, a PhD psychologist and organizational strategist, to talk about the simple practice he calls the Power Hour: protecting one intentional, highly focused hour each day to move from reactive governance to responsive, proactive leadership.
Donna and Edward dig into why community association conflicts so often have nothing to do with facts or technical know-how and everything to do with communication and POV. They explain how boards get trapped defending positions, why micromanaging operations burns out volunteers, and how a clear vision and mission can shift an association away from a purely punitive reputation. They also unpack a bold idea that changes how decisions are made: agreement and consensus are fragile, but alignment is strong. When leaders listen and learn first, they can make accountable decisions everyone will support even when they disagree.
Then Donna and Edward get practical about better board meetings: codes of conduct, staying on agenda, cutting “communication waste,” and simple conflict tools like “timeout” and “oops/ouch.” They also talk inclusion and the gap between intent and impact, plus the single question that can turn a heated debate into a productive conversation: “Help me understand how you came to that conclusion.”
If you serve on an HOA board, manage a community association, or advise boards professionally, this one is packed with leadership and meeting facilitation tactics you can use immediately. Subscribe, share this with a fellow director or manager, and leave a review so more communities can trade chaos for clarity.
Conversation Highlights:
- Practical ways board presidents and managers can break deadlocks and move discussions forward
- Why structure and intentional time management create more freedom and productivity
- The biggest time management mistakes high-performing professionals make
- How to identify the difference between a conflicting thinking style and a difficult personality
- Questions leaders can ask to better understand opposing viewpoints during meetings
- Tips for creating a board culture where different perspectives are viewed as an asset rather than an obstacle
- Guidance for association counsel navigating board impasses and leadership conflicts
- Why one focused hour can outperform an entire chaotic workday
- Strategies for protecting focus and productivity during crises and high-pressure situations
- The mindset shift that can transform how boards communicate, collaborate, and make decisions
Related Links:
Reclaim One Strategic Hour
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone, I'm Attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger, and this is Take It to the Board, where we speak condo and HOA. In the world of community associations, most days don't go as planned. You start with a clear agenda, and within minutes, it's overtaken by emails, emergencies, resident demands, and issues that feel urgent but may not actually be critical. Before you know it, the day is gone, and the work that really matters gets pushed to tomorrow. For board members, managers, and yes, even busy association attorneys like me, that constant state of reaction can feel like the job itself. What if instead of trying to control your entire day, you could take back just one hour and use it to focus on what actually moves the needle? Today I'm joined by Dr. Ed Germowitz. Ed is a PhD psychologist and organizational strategist with more than four decades of experience helping leaders and teams understand how the brain drives behavior, decision making, and ultimately how organizations succeed or fail. Dr. Germowitz is the creator of the Power More, a concept built on a simple but powerful idea that one intentional, highly focused hour each day can shift you from reactive to strategic. Dr. Grumowitz's system offers a way to regain control, focus on strategic priorities, and reduce burnout. While this may sound like a conversation about productivity, it's really about something deeper. It's about protecting your time and roles and professions that constantly compete for it. It's about making better decisions because you actually have the space to think. In a world where board members, managers, and association attorneys feel like they're putting on fires all day, Dr. Grumowitz can teach us how to carve out just one hour to actually be a more effective leader for our communities, clients, and colleagues. So with that, Dr. Growowitz, welcome to take it to the board.
SPEAKER_00Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01So I am excited to have this opportunity to talk with you. I did a little digging into the power hour, and it's intriguing. So can you start out, Dr. Gerowitz, or may I call you Ed?
SPEAKER_00Of course.
SPEAKER_01Can
How The Power Hour Works
SPEAKER_01you start out by giving us an overview of how the power hour works?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's pretty individualistic, but the premise of the power hour is exactly what you said. It's to move from being reactive in your governance and your in your role as a board member or chair to being two things, responsive and proactive. What I've found in my work over the years is that when things don't go well, the breakdown is almost always in communication and collaboration. It's not technical. All board members should have access to the same information, the same legal briefs. I'm sure you do a great job of briefing your board on the legalities. Those are not the things that cause breakdowns. What causes breakdowns is when people give up effective communication for taking a position that they have to be right about and that they're going to defend at all costs. When I lived in Vermont, there was an old saying, here lies the body of Justin Gray. He died defending his right of way. His right was real, his case was strong, but he's as dead as if he were wrong. And we see this. I've been chair of and served on a number of nonprofit boards, national and local, and uh people burn out. And they burn out because they take positions that they feel they have to defend. So the Power R has two parts. One is at least an hour, sometimes more, a couple of hours, working with me directly to discover where it is that they're stuck. What are the issues that have them stuck, and what are the tools that will get them unstuck? So, for example, a very simple tool that we forget, assuming positive intent.
SPEAKER_01That's a good one. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Everyone on the board is there to contribute. Everyone on the board is there to have the organization work. Everyone who belongs to the organization wants it to work, and yet we fall into treating each other as adversaries or enemies. So starting with that, really looking at that, you know, one of the I start by examining people's assumptions about their fellow board members and about themselves and asking a very simple question. Is that true? Well, most of the time when people actually stop and look at it, it's not true. So we give them tools for communication. I'll sometimes work with the chair, I'll sometimes work with the whole board. In one large national organization, international actually, I worked with the executive director, the chair of the board, the board, and the executive committee all separately on how they've communicated internally and how they communicated together. After that, as you said, what I recommend is that each board member in the course of their work, let's say you spend 20 hours a week on your work as a board member, take one of those hours to utilize the tools we went over to look at what exactly are you doing. One of the things I find, especially with nonprofit boards, is that boards tend to take way too much, I'm gonna say interest, I really mean interference in the operations of the organization to see where you can step back from that and focus to empowering the staff, the executive director of the staff, rather than the board doing the work about the operational work.
SPEAKER_01Are you saying that there's too much micromanaging going on by the board at times?
SPEAKER_00Okay, let me first of all let me tell you my own bias. There's
Positive Intent And Better Communication
SPEAKER_00a there's a model called the policy governance model. It was developed by a husband and wife team named Carver. They've written several books on it. That model is relatively simple. It says this the job of the board is to set policy. The job of the board is to set goals, and then turn the execution of that policy and the achievement of those goals over to the executive director and the staff, not to get their hands into the operations of the organization. If they find that they've got an executive director or staff who aren't keeping to policy or aren't achieving the goals, it's time to do something about them. Maybe get a new one, maybe re-educate them. But that it's not the job of the board, except in an extreme emergency, to step in and actually take over.
SPEAKER_01So let me let me stop you there. There's so much to unpack with just the little bit of information you've already provided. For our association boards, sometimes they're self-managed, right? So they don't want to spend the money or they don't have the money to get those safety nets you're talking about, which would be a professional management team, uh counsel like me. So those folks, they really do have to dig into it a little bit more. But what you just said is so important because it's what we say all the time to our clients, which is listen, the board makes the policy, your management team enforces the policy.
SPEAKER_00In the case that you're talking about, the board needs to literally have two hats. Are we now sitting with our board hat or with our management hat? And and keep the two very distinct because the two jobs are very distinct. It also, I mean, in general, for an organization of any size, I think that's that's not a good model to to for the board to be also I've I've been there, I've been on boards that did that. And what happens is sooner or later, I'm thinking of one board I was on that there was an advisory board to a government agency, and the people who worked for the government were the ones who executed on the mission of the organization. The board was meant to be advisory and fundraising, the more they interfered with the the people who were actually doing the work, the more they were at loggerheads and the more the uh the the relationship became adversarial.
SPEAKER_01But you talked about burnout, Ed. So if you're wearing two hats and you don't have the safety nets that I'm I'm calling it a safety net, which is you're outside experts to to assist you, then really I would imagine that contributes to earlier burnout on the part of those directors.
SPEAKER_00Very, very, very much so, because you're doing two jobs. The other thing is there's a there's something that is uh outside the United States that we don't do, at least that I've rarely or ever encountered, which is that boards in, say, Germany or England, they have executive and non-executive directors. The executive directors are the CEO, CFO, et cetera, of the organization. They sit on the board, they're voting members of the board, but they're there specifically to represent the operational function of the organization. Non-executive directors are there for usually a couple of different reasons. One, subject matter expertise, two, governance expertise, and three, the ability to bring in money, especially in the case of a nonprofit board. So, you know, that's in my opinion, that's a better model, but we don't use that in the United States for reasons I've never had time to research.
SPEAKER_01Well, for some of our associations, uh, they do have governing documents that allow assistant officers to be placed on the board, but that's that's not the typical landscape. I want to go back, I want to go back and give you an example. Okay. So I agree with you that the default setting for most people should be that the person they're dealing with, where they're coming from, is based on good intentions rather than bad intentions until they reveal themselves. Let's say it becomes very obvious. But let's take a typical condominium or homeowners association board, five-member board. Now there's been some upheaval in the community, and that's normally tied to deferred maintenance and large projects, and of course, money, special assessments and what have you. Let's say there's an election, and then two people get on the board, and those two people were previously the subject of enforcement and uh action. So now we already have that tension on the board, potentially leading to an impasse at time. I believe it or not, I've had some boards add where it's four members, and they cannot agree to appoint a fifth member. So they are perpetually in a deadlock position. What do you do with that? We're only
Governance Versus Micromanaging
SPEAKER_01capturing audio, but for our listeners, Ed is shaking his head and laughing.
SPEAKER_00Um that's a mess. So, first of all, a homeowners association board is a different kind of board. Generally speaking, in my experience, both as a homeowner and as uh as a person who's got some expertise about boards, the selection process is terrible because it's whoever, whoever is willing very often, I shouldn't generalize, very often it's whoever has the loudest voice and the strongest position about something. They don't want uh Christmas decorations, or they do want Christmas decorations, or they don't want parking in the street, or they do want parking in the street. It's very issue focused. The minute you focus on an issue rather than on the principles behind the issue, what's the function of a homeowners association board? It's to have, well, what's the function of a homeowners association? It's to have the higher quality of life for the people in the development. Now, if you test everything that comes to the board against that principle, certain things are going to be clearly irrelevant. Clearly irrelevant. Certain things are gonna be very irrelevant. Uh people to taking in their garbage cans, just from an aesthetic point of view, makes a difference. People having a party in their backyard that's not overly raucous doesn't make a difference. So one of the things I have worked with a couple of homeowners associations, and one of the things I try to get them to go do is go back to first principles. Why do we have a board in the first place? What's our function? And to remember that whether it's a homeowners association or you know, the board of the Sierra Club, your function is to lead. It's not to manage.
SPEAKER_01I I'm so glad you brought that up because that is one of my questions. I and an observation over many, many years is that I'm not sure all board members grasp the fact that they were elected to lead. In Florida, there's mandatory board member education, Ed, but it's it's more about the enforcement, um, collecting assessments, entering into contracts, all the management issues, all the governance. But there's not an emphasis on leadership. So what do we do about that?
SPEAKER_00There's not a good understanding of what leadership is. People think leadership is telling people what to do. That's exactly the opposite of leadership. That's that's management or supervision. Leadership is really about some number of things. One, set policy. First of all, determine before even prior to that, what's the context? What's the vision for, let's say, the the development? We have the I live in a gated community. What's why do we have this little gated community in the south end of Reno, Nevada? What do we want that community to be? That's the overall context, the purpose, or vision, if you want to call it that. Secondly, policy. What policies reflect that purpose? So once that's done, then the job of leadership is first of all, inspiration. It's it's to have people take on, be inspired to own the policy, own the purpose as their own. What there's no point in living in a community versus the greater independence of just owning a house out someplace where nobody bothers you. There's no purpose to it unless there's an overall vision for what you want the community to be. Uh so that uh one of the good things that our homeowners association board does is every year they put on a Christmas decorating contest. A minor thing, it's an obvious thing, but it it creates a certain pride, a certain spirit. It's inspirational. Even to people who don't decorate, you know, we'll go around on Christmas Eve and look at all the decorations.
SPEAKER_01My own age, okay, Ed um does a great job of leading. We the last two years, we've had a holiday home tour. So just like you're saying, it's like a progressive dinner. You go from home to home, and it's been it's been a huge success, and you get to know your neighbors and you see it. I love that idea. Um would it help if if residential associations, if those boards uh put out a mission statement? Because I know one of the things, one very few of them have it. I've I I haven't come across any, but I'm thinking as I'm as we're having this conversation with a mission statement. Again, it's something you can go back to time and again. And when you stray from the mission, people can kindly show you the mission statement and say, how does this dovetail with the mission statement? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00Exactly
Vision Mission And Real Leadership
SPEAKER_00right. I couldn't agree more. In fact, it starts with a vision. Mission is vision plus action. I like that. If our vision is a close-knit community where people care about each other, one of the ways to do that, a mission might be creating home tours. That when you have a HOA meeting, it's not just a meeting, it's uh maybe it's a potluck, maybe it's uh uh they have a speaker, something more than just, hey, you know, Fred's been parking on his lawn again. So yeah, absolutely. If I see, and that's key to leadership. That kind the way you're thinking of it, Donna, is exactly what fills the gap between management or supervision and leadership. The other piece that leadership has to do is empowerment. HOA boards, rightly or not, have a reputation for being punitive. If you if you go on Facebook, there's always somebody on there with a long story about how he was in the right, but Karen, for the head of the HOA board, for you know reasons of her own self-aggrandizement and power came after him and he won. It's nonsense. It doesn't work normally. But if a left with nothing else to do but enforcement of code, boards will default to being punitive. Boards shouldn't be punitive. They should be building up the vision and mission of the of the uh association.
SPEAKER_01Organization, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Organization in a way that people want to participate. You know, in my my area I live, we're we they have a rule residents park on your driveway or in your garage, leave the streets for visitors. Everybody sees the sense in that. People don't abuse because it makes sense. It everybody can think, well, if I had a visitor, I'd like them to have someplace to park nearby. So, you know, that's that's an HOA functioning well.
SPEAKER_01Well, let me stop you for a second. What if we don't all agree on the vision? I love that. I agree with leadership, and I want to apply these principles not just to association boards, but to like management companies and all the other vendors in this space, all any organization really, where there's a divergence of thought on what the vision should be. How do you how do you get around that?
Alignment Beats Agreement In Decisions
SPEAKER_00Well, you're getting to the heart of a very important issue. Agreement is the weakest form of governance. So give you a simple example. My granddaughter just turned 18. She's going away to college next year. She looked at a dozen colleges. Now, as a proud doting grandfather, I think she should go to Harvard. She decided to go to a small college in Boston. I can disagree with that and be aligned with it because it's what she wants. I can be 100% behind it even though I don't agree. Boards need to work on the basis of alignment. Leadership needs to understand that the goal is not agreement, it's not consensus. Consensus is as fragile as an eggshell because it means everybody says yes, everybody agrees, and anytime anybody withdraws their agreement, the whole thing falls apart. There's a much stronger form of government, and I've written a couple of articles on this about decision making. What I call participative decision making. There's one accountable decision maker. Let's say it's the chair or a person of the board, could be a committee. That's not important. Their job is to listen and learn from everybody involved, people who will be carrying out the decision, people who have a stake in the decision, people who need to be informed of the decision. And if in the end they make a decision based on what they learned, not based on their authority. Too often boards, uh, particularly nonprofit or HOA boards are like that, operate based on who's got the loudest voice, who's going to make people most uncomfortable if they don't get their way.
SPEAKER_01I want to emphasize what you just said, Ed, because we've got a lot of boards that want to hold owner commentary at the board meetings until the end, after they've already made all their decisions. So they've gone down the agenda, they voted on three things, and it's done. And then at the end, they are open to owner input. I've said for a long time that there is sometimes some very good input to be had before you make that decision. I think we've got some boards that have been traumatized by really dysfunctional board meetings, yelling and screaming. So they just want to get their work done. But that point you just made is so important. I want to reiterate it that decisions from leaders should be based on what they learn, not who they are. Your decision should be based on what you learn, not who you are. I'm the president, so I'm gonna make this decision.
SPEAKER_00Right. Let me let me expand a little on that. First of all, boards need to have codes of conduct. Bullying, yelling, name-calling, profanity should be not allowed. They should be simply ruled out. And the chair has got to be strong enough when somebody starts going down that road to stop them. If not the chair, then if they have nobody has sergeants at arms anymore. I just dated myself. Only Congress has that. Here in Nevada, we have a public meeting law. Most states do. That public meeting law requires publication of the agenda ahead of time, well ahead of time. Public commentary at the beginning of the meeting. Action, you know, the usual run through the agenda, then public commentary again at the end. That for me, if the board is listening to the public commentary and they're listening to learn, because their job is to lead, leadership is listening and learning. If their job is to lead, they're listening to that. And one of the key qualities I would look for in selecting board members is people that can hold their own opinion lightly.
SPEAKER_01Ed, I'm not sure we're gonna have anybody serving on boards in Florida if that's the litmus test. Well, let me say this. Over the last five years, I would say my colleagues here at Becker and I have been creating more and more of those board member codes of conduct. And it covers just what you were addressing the quorum, how do you speak? Who speaks? Um, one of the issues we have is sometimes the person on the board who has the fewest skills when it comes to communication is the person who's doing most of the communicating, whether it's with fellow board members or the owners or outside vendors. I don't know how they gravitate toward it, but I have for a long time counseled. You really need to pick your communicators carefully. So even though maybe you have a five or seven member board, figure out who is the best communicator. Like you said, hold those opinions lightly. Normally, when we have enough people on the board, you're gonna find somebody with those skills. But again, that may not be the person who raises their hand first for that job. The person who raises their hand first for that job may be the person least suited for the job.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely right. But see, this thing is look, every human being has three critical focus, full focus, foci, in their in their life. Things that are important to them, things they're worried about, and circumstances they're dealing with. And if you create a Venn diagram and you get that part in the middle where those three things overlap, and you can put a communication right to that bullseye, they will cooperate, they will engage, they will communicate, and they'll create value. One of the skills of a good meeting facilitator, and boards rarely use meeting facilitators, the chair tends to focus on that. So I would say one of the things you need in a chair is someone who can start off with, where do we agree? You know, Henry Kissinger, when he would start very what were going to be very difficult diplomatic meetings, he would start by saying, Can we all agree today is Monday? Just to get something on the table that everybody agrees on. And I don't mean that in a trivial way, because if you can start from what we all have in common, it'll always be some value. We all want this for the community. Now, you've got a concern that this, a worry about this, that this would have unexpected consequences. Somebody over here has a set of circumstances they're dealing with that maybe nobody else on the border, very few people do. So if people are going out into the community to find what's important, I would ask three questions. What's important to you about your community? What are you worried about? And what are the critical circumstances, facts that we need to deal with? You know, it is a fact where I used to live at Lake Tahoe, that they'll get several feet of snow every winter. That's not a that's not a circumstance we deal with down here, a thousand feet lower down here in Reno. You know, so you need to know what are the things people have to deal with. And if if all they your communicators brought back to the board, even if it goes through a survey, a written survey, it's better to do it in person. But even if it goes through a written survey, the board will have what they need to learn how to lead.
SPEAKER_01Let me ask you this, because we're seeing more and more mental health challenges in our communities. And you talked about somebody's specific circumstances. What if part of those circumstances is a mental health challenge where that person or person really cannot agree on a set of facts? Do we just kind of try to do a workaround? Kind of maybe I don't I don't want to say isolate, but if we really do have an outlier, and and mercifully, I don't think this happens all that often, but we do have some real life examples of mental health challenges where we're not going to find any common. We may not even find common ground that today is Monday because the person may believe that the calendar we should be using a different calendar. How do you deal with that, Ed?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's not the board's job to deal with individuals. Now that sounds funny given what I just said. You need to aggregate what you're hearing. Part of the learning process for the board is to aggregate what they're hearing. When you aggregate, you'll have out I love your term, outliers. It's important to acknowledge that those people, just like everybody else, mean well. They're not bad people, and they're an outlier, and we're not gonna deal with that. Somebody wants to cover the the bushes in chocolate. Okay, that's nice. I appreciate that you want to have chocolate around. We're not gonna do that. And then those are hard decisions that the board has to make, and they're gonna take flack for it. One of the things I see that boards do that that I think is not useful is they they're too concerned with protecting themselves.
SPEAKER_01And being popular. Because it's a living together relationship. There is a problem when a board, when board members do not understand what it means to be a fiduciary and they are in, they do not want to make the the tough, unpopular decisions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think one I think that's got to be part of the charter of the board. So if somebody says, I want to run for the board, okay, read this. This is is this you? Are you willing to be unpopular? Are you willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? None of us want to, none of us are comfortable with it. And frankly, there are an awful lot of people, uh a large percentage of the power association who thrive on it. Uh that's why law is an adversary profession.
SPEAKER_01Well, can I tell you a story?
Elections Onboarding And Board Continuity
SPEAKER_01I was at a board meeting a couple of years ago, and the board, again, it was a board that really wanted to be popular. And so they were just asking for volunteers for various committees, even though I had suggested, look, you would this needs to be a deliberative process. Figure out maybe who you want to be on these various committees and and and that they have certain skills, but the board didn't want to do that. Fifte minutes prior to their call out for volunteers for the finding committee. There was a woman in the audience who said, I don't believe we should be finding anybody. There should be no rules. This is, you know, this is not why I moved here. 15 minutes down the road, when they asked for for volunteers for the finding committee, she she raised her hand and they did and they accepted her. They accepted her on that committee. So the the point is, you know, again, it didn't go well for them after that point because they just didn't understand it's a tough job. It's a tough job being on the board.
SPEAKER_00It's a tough job, and it's also it's it's a job, even though you don't get paid for it. It's a job. It's not something you do for recreation. You want to go recreation, go join a pickleball club. A board has tough decisions to make. That lady has a right to her opinion. She doesn't want any fine, she wants this to be the Wild West. Well, and then you'll hear, I don't want any new new developments nearby. You know, it's all not in my backyard. Well, that's nice, but that's not that's not reality. You know, if you don't like being on the airport flight path, you shouldn't have moved onto the airport flight path. We're not going to do anything about it. We're not going to make the air to try to get the airport to change the flight path. So I like what you said. Who's on the board and who's on the committees needs to be a deliberative decision. I agree with that completely. Now, when it comes to the board itself, that's tough because there is no deliberative body. There's only the election process. But then let's do use what we've learned from the election process. Have people, you know, do candidate forums. Have people answer hard questions before they're ever on the board. And if because if you put somebody, and I've run for office, I've done this. You put somebody on a candidate forum, they're going to show who they are. And I don't mean that in any bad way. But but when I ran for local office, people knew that if they didn't want somebody who was going to be active in enforcing the local codes, I'm not the guy to vote for. Therefore, I didn't get elected.
SPEAKER_01So I I think it was Voltaire who said, people get the government they deserve. And what you're what you're advising is we need to educate the electorate. We need people to, when they're casting their vote for their director in a condo or HOA, it's important. But you know, that is one of the reasons that why in Florida they did away with proxy voting in condominium elections. It needs to be a ballot. So people have to cast their own ballots anonymously. And then now that's further changed as well. But in an HOA, you can still go around and give your prophecy to somebody, and it's their decision who they're going to get on the board, which is normally their friend or somebody they think might, you know, do good things for them. So it is terribly important. I did want to ask you this, because we've been talking a lot about some of the dysfunction we see on boards. What role do you think someone like me as an association attorney or a professional manager could play in terms of, let's just take a board meeting? And I'm not talking from a legal perspective. So I'll tell a client what needs to be done legally to stay within the confines of the statute and their governing documents. I'm talking more from uh procedural leadership style. If I'm not running or chairing the meeting, which I've been asked sometimes to chair, but what role does does uh association counsel and management play, do you think?
SPEAKER_00It's a tough one. I was chief operating officer of a government agency that oversees the environment of Lake Tahoe. And we had a House attorney uh who I was pretty friendly with, and he was extremely effective, including speaking up in board meetings. Now you've got to understand a board meeting for that organization, first of all, the board was like 15, 20 people, and then there'd be a hundred people in the audience, and everything they dealt with was controversial. He didn't usually speak up in board meeting in board meetings, unless he was it was either, like you said, a legal issue or he was asked for his opinion. But his relationship with the executive director and with the board chair was such that he had their ear. And if he texted them during a meeting, they would look at his text and they would follow his suggestions more often than not. So I think unless there's a formal statement of the role of the House Counsel, I think it's all relational, and I think you know that because you're good at what you do. Um, if it becomes strictly procedural or strictly legal, they might as well have a law book on the table as you. The other thing uh when you were talking earlier, I realized if I could take this whole thing back to black canvas, I would eliminate the term homeowners association and I would make it something like governance association so that people understand that it's not this friendly social thing. Friendly social things are wonderful. I like them. But the purpose of this order of this body is governance. And that's probably that alone plus a good briefing on what governance is. The other thing, I mean, when when I worked for that state or that federal organization, we knew board members would get a two-day orientation, starting with the very basics, the purpose of the of the history and purpose of the organization. Too often, I think, I don't have data for this, but I'm guessing, HOAs, you get elected, you go to your first meeting, and you kind of figure out what what's going on, but nobody tells you.
SPEAKER_01You're spot on. And a lot a lot of times, what happens is when we have a board turnover completely, there's no smooth transition. So there's no onboarding. And and you're right, this is what becomes very important, especially if they're in the midst of major renovation projects and repair projects. You've got multi-year projects going on, and now the board has completely changed hands, or there's no collaboration, there's no communication. It it hurts the entire community.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And that's another structural point. No board should ever turn over completely. Uh board terms need to be staggered. So there are always experienced people on the board. You're laughing like you've told boards that many times.
SPEAKER_01Well, and and and I am laughing. I mean, we we have listeners in throughout the country, but in Florida, they imposed term limits. So they've listened to people to say we should not have, you know, Betty on the board for three decades. We need Betty off. And so they've imposed eight-year term limits down here in Florida. There are exceptions to it, but I agree with you. There needs to be some continuity. And this is again where an informed electorate gets gets involved. If Betty's been on the board too long and she hasn't been providing value, then she should be voted off. But whether the the state should tell people you can't have Betty anymore, that's another thing.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think there's ways around that. Uh I'm not in principle, I'm four term limits, but like eight years is a good good amount of time where you can have staggered terms, you keep experience on the board, and maybe you make it that four years later she can run again, or two years later she can run again. It's consecutive terms or something like that.
SPEAKER_01It is, and and that is true in Florida too. It is consecutive, yes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So, you know, the see, here's the thing all these problems are solved through communication. The mistake
Cutting Meeting Waste And Managing Conflict
SPEAKER_00I see boards make is they try to solve interpersonal or social problems through technical means. We years ago, I was working with a my other job is I'm a management consultant, and I was working with a very large company that had a major project. I won't go into the details, but it was as projects are behind but behind schedule and an over budget. They brought and it was an engineering project. They brought us in to see what we could do. We talked to 40 engineers and we asked them one question: What percent of your problems that are holding this project back do you think are social? And what percent are technical? These are engineers. What do you think they said the percentage was that were that were technical?
SPEAKER_0190%.
SPEAKER_0079% social, 21% technical.
SPEAKER_01But what was their perception at it? Was their perception of the city?
SPEAKER_00They knew it, they just didn't know what to do about it. Huh. We went in to clean up what we call the waste in communication, disagreement, defensiveness. I've got to win, you gotta lose, I've got to dominate, or I or I can't let you dominate. All those things. Moving that to collaboration, to alignment rather than agreement. All the stuff we've been talking about brought that project in on time and on budget. And one engineer said we spend all our time trying to take the waste out of our processes. We never thought of taking the waste out of communication. Board my board meetings I've gone to, and nonprofit meetings I've gone to, attended, and shared. The amount of waste, communicational waste, is and people, you know, I sometimes think that a nonprofit board meeting is a little like an old West saloon because everybody rides in on their high horse and ties it up outside and is ready to jump back on it on a moment's notice. That's not productive. What's productive is being united around a com a common goal. United doesn't mean agree, it means aligned on where we're going.
SPEAKER_01How do you identify at what's wasted communication and what's critical communication? And I'm thinking about meetings I've been in, so many meetings, where there's one person who's just a blowhard. I mean, they're just bloviating for 15, 20 minutes, people's eyes are glazing over and and the the messaging is lost.
SPEAKER_00Is that poor chairmanship? Because if if that person's doing that, they've gone off topic 16 times in the first five minutes. And the chairman failed to stop them. No, it's in with the board too. Assuming it's a rubber truly order board, I'll say point of order. This is not on topic. But that that's the chair's job. The chair's job is to keep the meeting moving forward. So, so that's one thing. How do you yes, how do how do I I can sit in a meeting for 15 minutes and tell you where the conversational waste is very, very quickly? And it's exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. Going off, not having a clear agenda, not following the agenda, not having a clear decision-making process, poor leadership or lack of leadership from the chair. Those are the probably the four key sources of conversational waste.
SPEAKER_01So, do you map out for your boards you work with like a conversational protocol?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, depends on the nature of the board, but but certainly, this is like kindergarten stuff. Stay on topic. Say what the topic is. If it's a Roberts Rules board, and I I personally I'm a parliamentarian, I like Roberts Rules. If there's a motion on the floor, stick to the motion. Start by saying whether you speak for or against, don't interrupt.
SPEAKER_01What about time limits?
SPEAKER_00Say again.
SPEAKER_01What about time limits? Well, you know, in Florida, we do have a lot of time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but the problem with time limits is let's say every speaker gets I see this in public comment here in Devana, because public comment's limited to three minutes, a speaker. It's either way too much or not enough. I think if you if you focus on staying on topic, if you focus on being concise, have a time limit, fine, but don't don't don't be don't don't become uh don't become rigid about it. Uh because then you get what you get in coming. Well, I yield my time. No, that doesn't work. But the other thing is have a protocol for breaches of decorum. So for example, there's an organization that I've worked with in the past called Visions that has a very simple protocol. It's called Oops and Ouch. Somebody says something, intentionally or unintentionally, that offends somebody else. You say, ouch. The person who's offended says, ouch. The rule is at that point everything stops. You deal with the ouch. Okay. Person says, Here's here's what I heard. Give you an example. I was in a meeting. We were introducing ourselves, and one guy in the meeting said, as part of introducing him, says, I'm a grammar Nazi. I said, ouch. Said, What's the matter? I said, for me, as a Jew, that they that demeans the Holocaust to call it use Nazi in that way. He said, I'm sorry, I didn't think of that. I didn't realize it. I apologize. I won't do it again. We're done. That's it. That was and that was the oops. He oops as if he catches himself. But yeah, and it's that simple. As long as everybody's agreed on it. The other protocol that's extremely important is timeout. Anyone can call timeout at any time. And when they do, the meeting stops till the person who called timeout says what they have to say, which is we're off topic or you know, whatever it is. Those sorts of things put a lot of power in the hands of the participants.
SPEAKER_01I want to talk about the participants. So it's been my experience. Now, whether we're talking about a for-profit company or a not-for-profit residential board, I gotta go into the gender discussion ever so briefly because I do see sometimes that I have women on boards where there may be one woman or two women and majority male, where they may not feel comfortable Ed saying time out or ouch.
SPEAKER_00That's why you make it an explicit published protocol. See, they're the ones who have to say, be willing to say, ouch. When it comes to gendered communication, men are completely oblivious. You said it, not me. Well, I wrote a book called Inclusion, the Role of Leadership, in which I talk about it for 200 pages. I've done a lot of inclusion work in a lot of companies in the US and abroad. Men aren't bad. They simply are unconscious. They don't know. We've had one company, international news organization, broadcast news organization, where we did workshops that were mostly men, and there were a few women, and they were about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the women, we just had the women describe, first of all, we did a survey. What's it like at XYZ company with regard to gender relations? Asked all the men, we asked all the women, we created a slide called Two Different Companies. Women and men work in two different companies in this one organization. For men, it's like we're making progress, things are pretty good, you know, it could be better. Women, it's like all boys network, we're excluded from everything, etc. So that was the base, that was where we started the workshop. And we had the women describe their experience of working in this company as a good company. This is not the KKK. And the men were shocked, but they were shocked awake. It's tough for women in a situation like you're describing. It's tough for black people in a situation in which you describe, it's tough for gay people in the situation you describe. And if they want it to get better, they they they have to make it clear impact of what's happening on them. Because what happens is people worry about intent and they forget about impact. Oh, I didn't mean it. Oh, it's just a joke. No. The impact was I felt like a third-class citizen. And I want you to stop doing that. So all the see all these social dynamics have to be dealt with explicitly. It's what's kept me in business for 40 years.
SPEAKER_01And and hopefully for another 40. If there's one question, Ed, that someone can ask in a meeting to better understand how the other person that they're probably either outright debating with or silently fuming over, if there's one question they Could ask to better understand how that person is seeing the issue so differently from them, what would that be?
SPEAKER_00I'll tell you in a second. I want to give it a little background. With the with with notable exceptions for mental health, everybody operates consistent with their perception of the world. So if I say black and you say white, even though my world is pitch dark, I've got going back to assuming positive intent, I've got to assume that somehow you see white. So here's the question you're asking for. How did you come to help me understand how you came to that conclusion? Help me understand how you see how you see it that has you say that. I want, but you've got to mean it. You can't be pro forma. The there's two every things every human being wants. I've been studying human beings for my whole life. There's, and I'm I'm convinced there's two universal principles. Everybody wants to be understood, and everybody wants to contribute. So if you say to somebody, help me understand how you see it, so that I can, and what's implicit in that is so that I can better appreciate your contribution. You now have an ally instead of an adversary.
SPEAKER_01I hope a lot of people listen to this episode and they can they can take that out and use it when they need to. Ed, before
Books Resources And Closing
SPEAKER_01we wrap up, can you tell people your books you've written and where they can find you?
SPEAKER_00Sure. They can find the books on Amazon. Uh if they just I'm blessed with having a unique enough last name that they're not hard to find if they just look under Guru, it's G-U-R-O-W-I-T-Z. There's three, but one of them is out of print. The most the the one I mentioned is it called Inclusion, the Role of Leadership. And it's about organizational inclusion, diversity, and a more recent one that I wrote about a year ago is called Transformation from Potential to Practice. I also am on Substack and LinkedIn, and I publish articles pretty much weekly on these topics. And I have a website, girlowitz.com, LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. I'm even easier to hire.
SPEAKER_01Ed, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00Donna, I have one request. Let's let's do this again. This is your your questions have been extremely intelligent and thought-provoking. And I've really enjoyed being your guest. I appreciate so much your having me.
SPEAKER_01And we will have you back on. Thank you for joining us today. Don't forget to follow and rate us on your favorite podcast platform or visit takeittotheboard.com for more ways to connect.