This content was created by David Julian Price. This content was uploaded by David Julian Price. This is a YouTube video titled "How to be the President of your board, committee, association or club" (published 2018-02-14T01:13:33+00:00). The excerpt is a spoken presentation in which the speaker offers guidance to community organization leaders, recounting anecdotes about a woman who served as president of multiple local groups and a man who sat on 40 committees. The speaker warns against overcommitment in leadership roles, advises focusing on one or at most two presidencies and contributing meaningfully, and contrasts the roles of president and chair. The content appears to be a talk given to an audience rather than a back-and-forth conversation; it references family members and other group members in the anecdotes.
Chapters
I would never have thought that being the president of a group, a not-for-profit community group, was an issue until I witnessed what I'm about to tell you. I was in a small country town in Australia and I had a large number of people in the local bowling club and my topic was how to increase membership in organizations and of course the underlying thrust of that was how to make the meetings interesting so people will actually attend and join. But there was a particular person in the group, a lady who announced with great pride that she was the president of four of the community groups in that town. Now her husband was present, as were her three adult children, and they gave a bit of an expression when she said this, which gave me the indication that they weren't quite agreeing with her level. of Pride. And I made the comment that in my opinion, and only my opinion, you couldn't be the president of more than one, or at the most 2 groups, and do them both justice. What you should do, in my opinion, is be the president of one, maybe 2, but be on the committee of others if you really need to be involved to that degree. And she didn't agree with me. But her family were very, very vocal in saying that I was spot on. And they said to me after, thank you so much for saying it. We haven't had a wife and mother for 25 years because she's so busy out there running all these organizations. She was very much a power person, a person who wanted to be the boss of the organizations and run the organizations her way. And all that did was alienate people. It became obvious in the group that she had no support whatsoever. And in fact, what she believed was great respect that was due to her, in fact, wasn't there at all. So if you're the president of an organization, that's a different role again to being the chair, except that the chair will be part of the president's role. So just be careful about the number of groups that you may be on in a leadership position. There is another story that in some ways is worse, although this person was not the president of any group. Again, it was in a small country area, and this man was on the committee of 40 groups. That's 4-0, 4-0 groups.
And he said to the meeting, again quite proudly, that he on average traveled to 3 to 4 meetings every night, sometimes up to 400 kilometers in a day. And the The issue was that he couldn't stay at the presentation that I was giving because he had 2 other committee meetings to go to. Well, once he had left, the rest of the people said, look, the man is a joke. He's just ridiculous. He just measures his success in life as to how many committees he's on, but he doesn't contribute sensibly or reasonably to any of them because he can never be at the meeting for long enough. So just be careful about how many fingers you have in how many pies, because it can actually backfire on you. But as a chair, make sure if you're the chairman of a particular group or the president of a group, that you give it your all and give it your best. And then maybe go to another group as president when you've finished with this one.
