Forget the rules and start over

MACPA volunteers revamp its governance and structure, rally inclusive participation

NOTE: The following article appeared in the August 2002 edition of Association Management, the magazine of the American Society of Association Executives. It is reprinted with permission, copyright August 2002, American Society of Association Executives, Washington, D.C.

By Tom Hood, MACPA Executive Director
and Bill Sheridan, MACPA Electronic Communications Manager

Marty Yospa couldn't take it anymore.

It was June 1999, and he had just spent a large chunk of his day at the annual leadership retreat of the Maryland Association of CPAs. Many of the day's events focused on MACPA's volunteers, but Yospa, a partner with Gorfine, Schiller & Gardyn in Owings Mills and a member of a couple of prominent MACPA committees, was troubled. For years, he had felt like an outsider in the organization, kept at arm's length by what he saw as a select group of longtime members who wanted to do things their way.

So when leaders of the retreat asked volunteers what they liked and disliked about the association, Yospa's hand shot into the air.

"I stood up and told them I was sick and tired of the good ol' boy mentality," he says. "There was a group of people who had been there even longer than I, and they were doing things that were of interest to me, and I felt like I couldn't be a part of it."

The room went silent, recalls Yospa, as all eyes fixed on him. Then, slowly, other volunteers began nodding their heads.

"There was a good deal of agreement about that point," Yospa says. "It seemed as though the structure of the organization had inhibited (the volunteers) from being as active as they might have been."

While it might have appeared to be mere venting at the time, Yospa's critique unwittingly became part of a massive restructuring project that has streamlined the MACPA from the inside out. Today, its government is smaller but more efficient. Its staff of 30 operates not in departmentalized units but in interactive value streams organized according to the services each stream provides members. Perhaps most important, it's now easier than ever for the association's nearly 10,000 members to get involved. We've become more in touch with and more relevant to our members than ever before. And this new structure allows us to stay focused on what matters to our profession and to our members.

The roots of change

The seeds of the restructuring process were actually sewn prior to the 1999 retreat. Two years earlier, the organization developed an extensive strategic plan that resulted in several key elements, including a vision, a core purpose, a list of core values, and a mission for the association. That strategic plan would serve as a catalyst for many of the MACPA's changes.

In addition, a series of nationwide meetings in 1997 resulted in the CPA Vision Project, a grassroots endeavor that used past traditions and current trends to create a roadmap to the profession's future. That project produced vision and mission statements that today serve as a backbone for the profession. But it also produced a note of caution: To stay a step ahead in a changing business world, CPAs need to change as well.

Then, in May 1999 the association's Board of Directors approved a reinvention plan that tried to align the organization with the articulated visions of both the MACPA and the CPA Vision Project; prioritize the association's programs, services, and products; drop low-value programs or add resources based on strategic importance; create and deliver value to members; and expand the association's relationship with members.

But the caution bells tolled at the June 1999 retreat. In addition to Yospa's input, a separate exercise involving the association's volunteers produced some eye-opening results. The volunteers were asked to identify which of their activities held little or no value for members. Scores of answers surfaced. The same volunteers then were asked to choose which of those activities should be eliminated. The fact that only three were chosen reflected the natural challenge that most associations face: reluctance on the part of our volunteer leaders to eliminate low-value, nonstrategic activities to make room for new initiatives.

After the retreat, MACPA leaders were left to ponder a few facts:

The CPA Vision Project had warned them of changes that were affecting the profession. Specifically, technology, globalization, and competition are forcing CPAs to respond to market pressures by adding services and changing many of the ways they do business.
Some of the MACPA's volunteers felt discouraged from being more active.
Those volunteers who were active often were doing things that held little value for the rest of the members.

"Our market was changing, our members were changing, and we saw the symptoms," says Carter Heim, managing partner with HeimLantz Business and Tax Service in Annapolis and the MACPA's president and chair at the time. "We were spending money and time doing work that we weren't sure was valuable to members. We were seeing decreasing involvement from volunteers, and we had been through the vision process, which told us things were changing. We had a lot of indicators that gave us some advanced warning."

Volunteers take the reins

Clearly, it was time to act.

So Heim and the rest of the association's leaders rolled up their sleeves and went to work. Their first step was to eliminate themselves from the equation. With volunteers feeling excluded, the obvious solution was to include them in the process.

"We knew our leaders couldn't be leaders in this. We could be participants and give permission to do it, but we couldn't lead it," Heim says. "If you've identified parts of your constituency who feel they can't participate or express opinions, then you need to structure your process in a way that makes them feel like they can participate."

Their solution was to create a Structure and Governance Task Force and split it into two age-based teams — the Under-35 and Over-35 committees, each of which would be populated and run entirely by volunteers. Their tasks? To develop a game plan for reinventing the organization. All ideas would be considered and, thanks to an associationwide solicitation, all volunteers would have the opportunity to participate.

Yospa himself was asked to chair the Over-35 team and Tami Bensky, senior manager with Clifton Gunderson in Timonium and an MACPA member since 1995 who had never volunteered in any capacity before, offered to lead the Under-35 Task Force.

The demographics of the two groups were strikingly different.

Many of the older volunteers, for instance, were longtime members who had a variety of experience and opinions about the restructuring process.

"There were one or two who thought the current structure was fine and didn't know why we were doing this in the first place," Yospa says. "Then there were others, like myself, who thought it was time to move on, to develop a method by which we can operate in the future. Others were somewhere in the middle, saying, 'Well, this part sounds good, but this part doesn't.' We had a mixture of everything, and I really think that helped the process."

The younger group, meanwhile, was made up entirely of first-time volunteers who could barely contain their enthusiasm for the task ahead.

"Everything was so spontaneous and everyone was so new to the process that the ideas were just flowing," Bensky said. "We really felt we had the ability to shape the organization so that everyone could become more involved."

The search for consensus

The task forces began their work in February 2000. For the next three months, the groups met separately to develop proposals for restructuring the organization. Some members preferred face-to-face meetings; others felt more comfortable communicating electronically. But all were encouraged to participate in any way possible.

And there were no sacred cows. "Everything was on the table for us to work with and change if we wanted to," Bensky says.

The free flow of ideas was vital to the process, but it was equally important that the groups reach a consensus on what needed to be done. Doing so meant finding a facilitation tool that would encourage participation from everyone while helping them reach a common solution.

The tool MACPA chose was the Grove process. Developed by The Grove Consultants International of San Francisco (www.grove.com), the process uses graphic facilitation to help volunteers visualize their ideas. It also encourages participation, promotes teamwork, and keeps meetings focused on predetermined objectives.

"The Grove process builds consensus, and you can't move forward with something like this until you get that consensus," Bensky says. "If you can't get everyone in your group around the same idea, you're not going to sell it to anyone else."

Doing so proved easier than expected. The ease with which each group moved through the process was, in Yospa's words, "almost unreal." By May 2000, each had come up with a series of recommendations to present to the MACPA's Board of Directors, which enthusiastically accepted them. Commonalities between the two proposals led to the formation of a design team, a group of 12 volunteers (four board members and four volunteers from each of the two task forces) that was asked to determine the best route to initiate change within the organization.

Putting the plan into action

The design team's recommendations — approved by the board in September 2000 — initially focused on the core of MACPA volunteerism: its chapters and committees.

The association's seven chapters are drawn along Maryland's geographic borders — Capital Area, Central Maryland, Eastern Shore, and so on. Its committees center on topics of interest — federal taxation, technology, financial planning, and the like. Before the restructuring project, however, they shared a dilemma: how to get more members to participate. The rosters of many groups contained 25 or 30 volunteers, but only a handful of them would faithfully attend the monthly meetings.

So the association's design team ran beta tests on two chapters and two committees. The groups ran their own Grove training sessions in an effort to re-establish their objectives, then began operating as communities of like-minded members. They shared information and networked when appropriate, yet were not burdened with monthly meetings and other time-consuming requirements. A new mantra surfaced: Take the "commit" out of committee and create unity through community.

The results were almost immediate.

"The committees that have gone through it first — like the Federal Taxation Committee — have come out of (the process) with a better sense of purpose," says Carol Kirwan, the association's director of technical services and regulatory affairs and a liaison to a number of MACPA committees. "People can serve better when they have a true sense of purpose and know what's expected of them. And rather than doing what we've always done, we're now looking at what's important to our members and what serves the largest number of members."

The process has spread to other committees and brought the benefits of restructuring into focus. The committees are learning to focus on what the association's members are passionate about. For example, members now have the option of volunteering for one or two activities at a time, rather than agreeing to commit to a year's worth of time to a particular committee, as before. Today, MACPA members who never volunteered previously are signing up to speak to high school students about the accounting profession. Others are holding summit meetings with MACPA leaders to discuss the challenges CPAs face. In addition, with the board's blessing, MACPA resources are being reallocated to better serve the new communities. Groups are saving time and money by conducting some of their activities online.

All in all, the changes have given the MACPA the freedom to connect to our members in some different ways. And while we're not connecting nearly as much as we would like to, we're getting a lot more of those one- or two-time connections.

Heim agrees: "We have to find new ways to create opportunities for our members. You always have to have different ways in which they can connect."

With the restructuring plan showing promise, in late 2001 the association's bylaws committee began working on the new structure and governance into a revised version of the MACPA bylaws, which was approved in July in a vote of the full membership.

Repositioning board and staff

Meanwhile, the Board of Directors instructed the MACPA's staff to begin working within the parameters of the restructuring plan, while the board and staff made three significant changes.

The association did away with its traditional departments. A new system was created to eliminate department boundaries and establish self-directed, cross-functional value streams, as noted earlier. The goal is to encourage personal growth among the staff while promoting communication across disciplines. The anticipated result: a stronger, more effective staff that anticipates members' needs and is empowered to address them. Today, staff members who deal directly with members are no longer restricted by titles and departments; rather, they are empowered to make the decisions necessary to meet the needs of members.
The board, meanwhile, underwent a significant change of its own. The MACPA's governing body used to include the presidents of each of the association's seven chapters; under the restructuring plan, the chapters are represented by two seats on the board. And MACPA staff, which previously had been excluded completely from the board, now is represented by the executive director and the deputy executive director, who share one vote. The board is now lean and mean — and quite diverse. And even though the board is smaller, it's an extremely deliberative body. In the past two years, several major discussions have been very fruitful.
The board and the staff share a more collaborative relationship. Staff members routinely are invited to attend board meetings and participate in the officers' planning sessions. They submit quarterly operations reports to inform the board of recent staff activities — and staff presence at meetings allows the board quick answers to its staff-related questions.

"That's important," says Heim. "The staff has a big interest in making sure the organization prospers and grows, yet they never used to have an official seat at the table."

Lessons learned

Gutting and rebuilding the organization has been a long, challenging, and ultimately fulfilling process. With every step, the process taught the MACPA's leaders and volunteers valuable lessons.

Among them was how to accommodate the needs of members who were ready to embrace change while continuing to serve those who weren't.

"In the end, we didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We changed the bathwater, left the baby there, and worked around it," Yospa says. "We were very mindful about not turning anybody off, because that's just as bad as not entertaining them and their needs. We weren't looking for a revolution; we were looking for a fast evolution in which we could accommodate the needs of both the traditionalists and the people who wanted to move ahead."

Perhaps the most important lesson, though, was learning to listen to the members. We knew the answer had to come from them. For this to be successful, the board and the staff couldn't say, "Here's the solution." We wanted the members to tell us what the solution was. And when we gave them the opportunity, they did.

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