Standing Rules, Book of Policies and Task Forces, Oh My!

The Executive Board gathered in Nashville at the beginning of June for our quarterly in-person meeting and when I sat down to read our Board packet in advance and noticed that the packet was 475 pages long, I knew we were in for a dousy of a weekend.

This meeting felt a little different than it usually does.  Our conversations are usually  anchored at a 30,000 foot level, monitoring the performance of the Fraternity through policy governance and discussing really big topics, talking frankly about the impact of those topics on our organization and how to best navigate in to the future.  And while we did some of both of those, most of our meeting this time was in the fine details, pushing through other responsibilities that we have as a Board.

We spent hour upon hour reviewing our current set of Standing Rules and Book of Policies, painstakingly editing language to make these parts of our Governing Documents more accurate, relevant and up to date.  We thoughtfully reviewed the report submitted by the Executive Board Nomination and Election Process Task Force and reconciled our own take on the recommendations with in-depth feedback we solicited from various stakeholder groups, all in an effort to best decide next steps and how to continue to position our Fraternity for future leadership success.  We spent time carefully reviewing the feedback from the workgroup evaluating the Canadian Member experience, pushing ourselves to consider ways we can continue to enhance membership experiences for all.

This work was slow.  It was tedious.  And at some points if I am being honest it was draining.  But it also served as a wonderful reminder of several key points about our responsibility and privilege of serving on the Executive Board:

• ALL of our work is important. The line by line review of the Governing documents is just as impactful as the bright and shiny conversations about future innovation.  For all of us, regardless of how we serve, there are some parts of our job that feel invigorating, and there are others that we push through.  But we push through regardless, because it all matters.
• Our job as an Executive Board is to push ourselves, and our organization, to do better. Sometimes this looks like personal/professional development.  For instance, as a result of our conversation about the Canadian membership report, we added self-study materials about Canadian culture to our next DEI Ends training.  This can also look like improvements in how we function together as a Board.  We survey ourselves after every in-person meeting to learn what we can do better and after this meeting, thoughtful feedback was provided that we will learn from to better manage our agenda and time together in future meetings.  To better serve, we must always be learning and growing.
• There is no group of sisters I would rather be doing this work with. The days were very long. We worked through dinner.  But the strength of each woman around that table buoyed the atmosphere. We never waivered when it came to holding each other accountable to the work of positioning the Fraternity for successes in the future. I cherish our Executive Board weekends together…for the sisterhood, for the impactful work we do, and for the engaging and thoughtful conversations that we have together.  I know these are the same feelings that fill the cup of many of our volunteers at all levels; this is why we serve.