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BNI & The Power of One
BNI 770 - URGENT QUESTION - Can We Hold a Vote of No Confidence?
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In this Power of One episode we answer an urgent question submitted. Can we, or should we, hold a vote of no confidence with our chapter's President??
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Welcome back to B and I and the Power of One podcast. Thank you for joining us again today. Back with more of your topics and show submissions. This one, this one's a bit of a doozy. Came in right under the title Urgent and Anonymous, which immediately tells me well, this one will be fun. And so I'm not going to read who it's from or where they're even from because I don't want to give away any of that part says hello Tim, I love your podcast. Long time listener, first time question. I've been a member for the last five years and have a question which you may want to use as a discussion on your awesome podcast. However, I would like to remain anonymous, which by the way again always possible. If you have a question, a concern, we will try to address it. And I know some people just would rather be anonymous for all kinds of reasons and that's perfectly fine. I've had several members have complaints coming to me as I was last year's VP and this year I was the new application specialist and been in B and I longer than most people in my chapter. They've asked is there a way to have a vote of no confidence in the current President who has changed the culture of the group for the worst since we've had our visitor host step down, the conflict specialist step down and another member leave. We have visitors coming in and are hearing foul language by a member in the weekly presentations since joining the President not reining this person in. Also that person, that member during their feature presentation had more follow language including the C word and an S word that describes a female who sleeps around a lot type of manner to which the President just laughed. This is a business meeting for visitors and this is unprofessional and just doesn't look or sound good. I am sure we could take this to the Executive Director. However I don't think he'll do anything as he'd like this president in place and has only attended three times this year. Please advise and keep Anonymous okay, so you have, if I'm reading this right, two issues. You have a member. I'm just trying to read this again. We've since have had our visitor host step down, the conflict specialist step down, another member leave, visitors coming in and hearing follow language by a member in the weekly presentation since joining and the President has not ran the person all right, so you have two issues. Number one is you have a member who is acting highly inappropriate and unprofessional. So step one is all of these members who have A complaint about it should be putting in a complaint in writing. So anytime you have a complaint you want the chapter to look into and take, potentially take action on, it has to be in writing. And writing could be an email, that's fine. But you can't just walk up to somebody and say, I have this complaint. You guys got to do something about it, because now it's hearsay when the next person shares and so forth. So you have to be willing to put it in writing on what your actual complaint is. It would sound to me like this chapter has multiple members who are having the same complaints about this member. And urgently to your title on this should be writing a complaint to the membership committee of the chapter to put an end to that. Right? You got to put an end to that. That's not a president thing. It's not the president's job to rein this person in, though they should be a part of it as leadership. This is a membership committee issue. And so you need to put that in writing and let the membership committee meet, speak with and take potential action with the member who's behaving inappropriately. So I wouldn't first step in and be like, we need a vote of no confidence on the president. Because really, I would agree with you, the president should be shutting it down. I would agree with you that it's highly unprofessional and lacks real leadership, that they haven't tried to stop it or make a comment about it in the meeting when that is happening. But that can be very uncomfortable for people. And some people aren't, you know, they try to avoid conflict at any point. The sad part of it or the downside of when you're trying to avoid the conflict, you often are just showing that the behavior is accepted, right? So you can almost be encouraging the behavior you don't like out of the fear of conflict. So that would be step one. Step one would be the membership committee. Get it to the membership committee. Have the membership committee meet with that member. They can do all kinds of things. They can warn the person. They could put them on probation saying, hey, if we hear any more foul language in these settings, you know, those kind of stuff, they can react to that member's reaction in that meeting. If that member's like, you know, very defiant and kind of telling them they can go pound sand too, they can remove that member from the chapter if they need to. They can put in the probation. Things like, you need to remain positive and supportive so that if that member starts complaining about the fact that the Membership committee, you know, approached him about his language. That could be a reason for removal. There's. There's a lot of options there. And not knowing the situation, not knowing, I would just say, thank God this is not my region. But I'll tell you what we would do. In my region, we have a member services director who would be working with that membership committee to make sure that they followed the process. They dotted all the I's, crossed all the T's, gave them all their options. We don't make the decision for the membership committee, but we support them and make sure that they are going down the right path and don't make any mistakes along the path of the decision that they ultimately make. My guess is if this was our region, this member would be put on immediate probation by the chapter. Around language use, around remaining positive supportive during it, and it would be a next strike, you're out kind of thing. The vote of no confidence in the president would be more if the president was actually doing this, if the president of the chapter was using inappropriate language, if the president of the chapter was highly encouraging this. I don't know that you have to go to that step right now, but as a chapter, as members, I think it is absolutely within your right to write a letter or memo to the President saying, here are our concerns as members of this chapter that has happened over the last couple of months or however long this has been. And while we are confident in your ability to lead this chapter, these things need to change in order for us to continue, continue to be successful. That is an option. Somebody could sit down with the president one on one and have that conversation. And the best way to have that conversation is to just start by saying, hey, if I know something that I think is really hurting your credibility in our chapter, would you want to know about it? And they're going to, of course, say yes. And then you can bring this up and just say, I really believe, and I've heard from others, that the culture is really changing for a negative. And you know, we've had member X over here swearing, using inappropriate jargon, doing these things in the meeting. And your lack of putting an end to that, I think is really going to hurt your credibility moving forward if you don't, you know, and ask, how can I help you change this culture? And so sometimes it's just a matter of pointing it out. We've had examples where presidents are just completely unaware that their behavior was negatively impacting them or, or the chapter at the time, you know, they. And they make changes and, and somebody just needs to kind of point it out to them so that they can make the appropriate changes. And there's been a lot of success stories in that we've had it where they become defiant and they're like, well, forget you, it doesn't matter, this is the way I am. If you don't like it, then you would go to your executive director or your director or whoever's supporting that chapter and share your concerns and share the conversations and work with them on potentially making a change if needed. And I've seen sometimes where they were like, well, I don't need this, then I don't want to be the role. And they just voluntarily step out and that happens as well. So you can never control, I talk to my kids about this all the time. We can't control other people's emotions and other people's reactions to certain situations. And, but we can also, we can never assume what they will be. Right. So again I've, we've many cases where we've had that tough conversation with the President and they changed. They just were completely unaware that what they were doing was having that kind of effect. And they just because they were unaware of it, they were willing to change and make those changes to go forward. Because ultimately anybody who's taking these roles should be doing it to increase their visibility, increase their credibility in the chapter. Nobody wants to take this role to hurt their results and hurt those things. It's unfortunate that some do have that effect on themselves. They will negatively impact their visibility, negative impact their credibility, which ultimately negatively impacts their profitability. But that's what an opportunity is, right? It's two sided. That's why when we do chapter success training, we hammer that as the one message I repeat over and over and over again is that you have an amazing opportunity to build your visibility, to build your credibility and ultimately build your profitability by taking these roles. You just also have an amazing opportunity to destroy both of them. And so you got to take it very seriously. So that's what I would do. I wouldn't start by looking and targeting the President yet. I would be absolutely putting in complaints to the membership committee and making sure that they take action of some sort. What they end up doing is ultimately up to them, but that's where I would start. And then in terms of the President not reining it in and the culture, I would be trying to have that, that conversation with them one on one or again have your director or your managing director or Executive director, whoever is in charge of supporting the Chapter have that conversation A lot of times the executive director is not the direct support to any one chapter. Right. Our role often is overseeing the entirety of the franchise, the overview of the entire operations, the team, whatever that looks like. In each region, it could be different. So they might not be the first step anyways. You said that person hasn't been there, but only a couple times. So that's where I would start. That's where I start. I think this is a membership committee issue. I think it's an urgent one. I absolutely. If what you're saying is true about language and stuff, you are, you are 100 correct that it will absolutely kill the results for every person in that chapter. Even though it's one member misbehaving, doing those kind of things, they will impact that group as a whole. You're going to have more members leave who don't want to be a part of it. You're going to have very hard time getting visitors to actually apply because of it, which is lost opportunity for everyone on both ends of that. And it's crazy. It can seem crazy anyways, but it's real that, yeah, one person behaving this way doesn't just negatively impact themselves and negatively impacts the entire team. Once you let somebody in as a member, they are part of the collective we now. It's not just them or just me, it's the collective we. And so they represent all of you in that moment. And that's a very serious thing. So put it in writing, get it to your membership committee immediately. Get multiple people to do it because it just amplifies the effect. Right. And the seriousness of it. And that's how I would move forward. So thank you for sharing. I know it's a tough situation. I hope this is helpful and. And for everybody just to kind of understand the processes and everything else. And if you ever have a question, question, topic, anything of the sort, go to bnipowerof1.com leave it there and as always, leave us a review. Or if you really want to help too, share the links to the episodes with other members in your chapter. You can text the link right to them, say, hey, I found this interesting. Listen to this one. Those kind of things. It helps expand the show to everybody else and I appreciate that help. Have a great day. Sa.