We Have Always Done It That Way

All units in your association should be focused on achieving your overall outcomes. I don’t care what they do, everyone should be talking about how to achieve them.

Let’s illustrate this with an example: growing annual meeting attendance by 20 percent. What could HR do to contribute to this outcome? Re-writing the employee handbook certainly doesn’t. But what if HR began talking with the meetings department and helped them to tailor their position descriptions to better focus on marketing the conference? What if they helped the VP of Meetings to design and implement effective incentives programs for growing meeting attendance? What if they proactively searched out position candidates who had great experiene in growing meeting attendance? You get the idea.

Of course, this requires identifying your outcomes in the first place. That is where your senior executives need to put their attention: identifying the organization’s outcomes and then getting everyone talking about how they can contribute to achieving them.

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