Officers Archives - Shul Politics

The Puck Stops Here

Our Shul is in Presidential transition mode awaiting the upcoming membership meeting where we’ll vote and then witness the changing of the guard. In the years where we don’t have a vice presidential succession plan, it’s sometimes a difficult task finding the right person to accept the job. I blame Harry Truman and Hockey. Let me explain.

Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that said ‘The Buck Stops Here’. It’s a play off the phrase ‘Passing the Buck’ which was originally a poker term, but has come to mean – not taking responsibility. By keeping the sign on his desk Truman was acknowledging that the President has to make the decisions and he was accepting the ultimate responsibility for those decisions. It seems that the sign was last sighted on the Presidential Desk during the Carter Administration.

I think some people reject the Shul Presidential position, not because of the amount of work involved, but rather because they don’t want to shoulder the responsibility for all that goes on in the Shul. In fact, that’s a better stance than accepting the position and then passing the buck.

Let’s segue to hockey. Except for a few notable exceptions the goalie is not a glamour position in hockey. After every goal scored, the goalie’s head is lowered because he ultimately is the one who let it go by. Yes, the defenceman should have done his job, but the goalie’s responsibility is ‘The Puck Stops Here’.

It’s the same with the Shul President. Even if your budget is in the black, with a great Rav, and solid people in key roles behind you, there will be some shots on goal that you’ll have to handle. They can’t be anticipated, and there’s sometimes a significant difference between a save and a flub. The truth is most of the flubs are not season enders, but it takes strength and commitment to be in the net night and day for two years.

I tip my hat to both the outgoing and incoming president for accepting the responsibility of the position. The upside is that although it looks like a long season, I don’t know of any president who regretted it after their term of service ended. It’s pretty clear that along with the responsibility comes tremendous satisfaction and merit for the tens of thousands of minutes of davening, learning and chesed that takes place in the Shul each year under your reign. Yasher Koach!

Reposted in honor of the outgoing EH and the incoming YK.

Understanding Your Shul President

Being a Shul President is taxing, tiring and consuming. If you understand the trials and tribulations of the president you can help your shul, yourself and of course, the president. Although there are Shuls with female presidents, I’ll use the pronoun he in this article for ease of writing and reading.

Leader
Shuls have an interesting configuration in the partnership between the Rabbi and the President. The Rabbi is hopefully the undisputed spiritual leader, while the president is responsible for the non-spiritual needs, in addition to supporting the Rabbi in all matters. If the Rabbi and the president are not working well together, trouble is sure to follow.

In regard to the lay leadership, the overall mission of a Shul as a place for prayer, learning and loving-kindness are set, however some shuls do add new mission ingredients to the standard mix. Leadership abilities definitely come into play when handling special projects like a new building or when handling crisis situations.

The overall key to leadership is seeing the big picture. There’ll be a lot of issues and problems that come up day to day, but a focus on the mission, which includes providing a peaceful place for the members to daven, learn and help each other must always be upfront. The president is there to serve the members and he must always keep that in mind, especially if a member gets hot under the collar. It’s not a reciprocal relationship and that can sometimes make it difficult.

Manager
Management is a key presidential skill. There are numerous things that need to be taken care of on a weekly basis and the buck stops with the president. He’s the one who’s responsible. A president can sometimes get away with being a so-so manager if he has some good people under him that get things done.

The president also has to manage those who do volunteer to work on shul affairs. The general rule of thumb is to let those who volunteer have the space to do the job in the manner they see fit. Sometimes this might result in lesser success, but in the long run it benefits the Shul. The president needs to be aware of what’s going on in each area and to support the shul volunteers in the roles they assume.

Governor
The president is the governor of the Shul and needs to develop that talent. There are a lot of decisions that have to be made and then enacted. It’s important for the president to depend on the membership to help govern. Talking out issues with the members, understanding the various points of view, clearly spelling out their thinking on every subject, getting feedback and then making a decision and going forward. If the president works with the membership, the right decision will be made more often and there will be less difficulty administering the results.

Peacemaker
Perhaps the most difficult yet important role is the president as peacemaker. He must truly hear and understand each member’s point of view, even if he might disagree. Even when the president is quite sure the member is wrong on a particular issue, he must still try to make peace and try to satisfy the member in whatever way possible. This can be very difficult, but when it comes to the successful care and feeding of a Shul, shalom trumps emes (peace overrides truth).

Member to member conflicts can be even more difficult and the president has to develop the skills of Aaron HaKohen a renowned peacemaker. It’s not easy, but when members see that the president does truly care about them, they will be more successful in their peacemaker role.

Summary
Of course there’s much more to say about this subject, but just as a president must understand his members’ attention spans when it comes to the Shabbos announcements, so to a web writer must understand the attention allocation of his readers.

It’s hard to find the highly developed qualities of leader, manager, governor and peacemaker in one person, so cut your president some slack. If you do accept the wonderful responsibility of being shul president, you can surely grow from the effort.

(Published in honor of EH)

Models of Chesed

In last week’s post, I tried to make the point that beyond our needs for socialization, Shuls serve as a character development arena. In this venue we can work on diminishing our egocentric view of the world to accomodate perspectives other than our own and create deeper connections to acquaintances in the Shul.

Another important roll of a No-Frills Davening Shul is the models our co-members serve to help up improve. One person motivates us to improve our davening, another our learning, and another our chesed. This week one of the “models of chesed” families made a wedding. This family regularly invites single members of the community to their Shabbos table and is involved in many chesed activities. The husband took on the Shul Treasurer position after having served two year as president. And it doesn’t stop there, as a member of the building maintenance committee he is constantly upkeeping the electrical and plumbing systems of the Shul as well as supervising the daily and weekly cleaning activities.

Beyond the institutional chesed involvement, is the personal chesed. This includes attending levayas, visiting the sick, giving rides or helping out in any way. We can’t all be expected to reach the highest level of chesed, but observing a family such as this, we are certainly motivated to make some additions or improvements to our activities. Mazal Tov to the H family on their Simcha. May they continue to take their chesed higher and higher so that we can improve from their rising tide.

Finding Shul Officers: Beg, Buy or Recycle

Easy-to-Enlist Officer Candidates in Short Supply
Experience and discussions with people in Shuls indicates that about 20% of your member families will be continuously active in running the Shul. If your Shul has 100 member families, you will have approximately 20 active families to fill 4 officer positions: president, vice president, treasury and secretary. After a few years you will run out of easy-to-enlist officer candidates. What do you do then?

Beg
The first method to fill your officer slots is to ask people who have not been active to get more involved. A certain amount of people will respond positively if asked by the right person, at the right time, in the right way. Many will say no. We can’t blame them. People are very busy with their jobs and family and it’s not an easy exercise to determine how to allocate one’s “free” time. You may achieve more success in this avenue if the members of the selection/begging committee were officers themselves at some point. I would also recommend putting some thought into how to respectfully ask the potential officer.

Buy
If you’re not successful on the beg, anther options is to buy. One type of buying involves offering officers some sort of financial incentive such as reduced membership. The problem with this is the importance of community service is diminished and the question of why some people receive incentives and some don’t is explicitly or implicitly raised. Another type of buying is outsourcing secretarial, financial functions and making those officer positions directorial rather than operational.

Recycle
Another option to fill your open slots is to recycle past officers. It’s not uncommon for a past treasurer or secretary to accept a post as vice-president or president. Another variation is when a person accepts a position year after year. As I mentioned in a previous post, our Shul has 4 treasurers, and 3 of them are perennials.

The biggest recycling question is whether to recycle presidents. On one hand, the President can be a very demanding job and asking them to do it more than once requires thought and discussion. On the other hand, the set of managerial, leadership and personality traits necessary for an effective president are hard to find, so the pool of candidates is even smaller than the pool for the other officer positions.

Finding Shul Officers is not easy, so thanks to all those who have served, and hopes for those who haven’t to seriously consider getting more involved.

First Published Nov 20, 2013

The Unfulfilled Potential of the Vice President

Of all the different Shul officer roles, the vice president is the one with the most unfulfilled potential. In theory the Vice President should be able to take some of the burden of the President, but it never seems to happen. Instead the Vice President is often under-worked and at the end of their term they sometimes seem slightly embarrassed at the small amount of work they did in that role.

One reason the vice president is under utilized is that most people recognize that the president is vested with the majority of power and so they go to him with their issues. A good president wants to address their members’ issues so he deals with the problem instead of handing them off to the vice-president. On the day-to-day issues, the vice president is rarely involved.

With regard to power sharing, most organizations have a man at the top structure. The buck starts and stops with one person. It’s rare that there exists a working power sharing arrangement. The roles of the secretary and treasurer are pretty well defined, but the vice president often does not have specific tasks to accomplish in the bylaws. Some Shuls explicitly specify tasks for the vice president, but in others those types of tasks are fulfilled by committees so the vice president is left with little to do.

An important role the vice president can fulfill is assisting the president in talking out issues. However sometimes the president will use a former president or a board member for input. If the president holds regular officer meetings then the vice president can be involved in the governing process through these meeting.

Perhaps the most important role for the vice president is president in waiting. Some vice presidents explicitly specify that they won’t serve as president, but many VPs do go on to become president. Being vice president insures that they are not coming into the presidency cold. Implicitly agreeing to become president is a huge commitment and for that alone we should express our appreciation for the vice president.