update: our board volunteer makes everyone’s jobs harder

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer who was the chair of a board and had one board volunteer making everyone’s jobs harder because of his struggles with technology? Here’s the update.

I found your advice and the advice in the comments very helpful.

To start, I wanted to clear up something that that came up in the comments: this is not a 501(c) organization, though we do volunteer work for them. I fudged some of the details to make my story less recognizable, but this is actually an employer-sponsored affinity group. So no, there is no requirement to have a secretary and no legal forms to complete or anything like that. Other than chair and vice chair, all other board positions are up to our discretion both in title and responsibilities.

After you published my letter, the rules and guidelines of our affinity group were thrown into chaos because of anti-DEI executive orders. While our group was not eliminated, it became very difficult to get anything approved and we had to re-work all our plans for the year.

I used this as an excuse to sit down with each of our board members and redefine their roles and responsibilities to better align with our new guidelines. I worked with John to figure out where he can contribute without slowing anyone down. As it turns out, he was starting to get stressed because he couldn’t keep up and was happy to take more things off his plate if he got to keep participating!

Ultimately, we decided that he would continue scheduling and taking notes for our regular monthly meetings. I’d send him a thorough agenda ahead of time, which limited the number of notes he needed to take. Then, any non-standard or urgent meetings would be scheduled by the vice chair. Those meetings would be event-specific, and whichever board member was leading that event would set the agenda and take notes.

This seemed to work well for the team! John got to stay involved without getting overwhelmed, other board members got a chance to step up and lead meetings, and I got to focus on making sure our events would be approved under the new rules.

I’ll be stepping down from the chair role at the end of this year, but I’m working hard to recruit new members to support the new chair next year! John asked to stay on the board, and the new chair is happy to have him.

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