Running a small organization
Feb 6, 11:33 PM by Eric Allen
Disclaimer: This is written entirely off the cuff. I just got back from a club meeting and need a place to pontificate with no interruptions.
How do you run a relatively small organization, say a club on a college campus? How do you make decisions? How do you handle disagreements? In some clubs this is hardly an issue, but in others it is crucial to the clubs survival and success. I see two extremes of organization, with some possible leeway in between. On the one hand you have what my friend John describes as “a craigslist.” The club’s executive board is effectively nonexistent, and members simply use the club as a forum for organizing activities and discussing events. On the other end is a complete autocracy, where the club president (and possibly the e-board as well) has complete power, and decisions are made by him/her alone. Both work well in their own situations, and both have merits and disadvantages.
As it is currently configured, the Progressive Students Alliance here at RPI operates essentially as a craigslist-style organization. The recent few most successful club events were spearheaded by determined club members, and the club did little to support the events as a whole. This worked well, because the interested members formed their own committees and had zero interference. The regular meetings of the PSA are mostly random debates on specific issues. This can be quite entertaining, but rarely is a productive conclusion reached. The debates are not begun with the intent to take action as a club, and rarely is action taken as a result. For a bunch of kids talking politics, this works quite well. We have a regular attendance at meetings of around 15 members, and the discussions are interesting. It’s worth my time to go!
At the other end you have clubs in which the membership has little say. I haven’t been in any that are all the way to this extreme, but the closest was probably my high school robotics team. The policy there was “it’s a democracy, but only one person votes.” This allowed for discussion and input from the members, but all decisions were made by the club president with complete authority. It was basically a benevolent (well, at least I think I was benevolent) dictatorship. For a small robotics team, this was a wonderfully efficient organization. When hard decisions had to be made, we could make them very quickly, and only one person had to take the hit if the decision was a bad one. As long as the president (me) generally did what the members preferred, things ran smoothly.
As well as the autocracy of the robotics team worked, I’m leaning toward craigslist-style organization these days. The one problem that plagued me as president every single year was motivation. If I tried to get the group to act as a single group, it was hard to get everybody on board. Other opinions and other engagements made life hard, and we ended up with a very small core of members. Now that my organizations have no critical deadlines or goals to meet (well, UPAC Sound has shows, but they’re not that hard), it’s much easier to simply let the members do what they want to do. In the case of W2SZ, the amateur radio club, we are working on several projects as individual groups of members, and it is working quite well. When we needed to pull together as a group for the recent VHF contest, we marshaled plenty of members. Nobody’s feelings are hurt, and the club moves forward at a comfortable pace.
Club organization is an interesting topic to me because it is so closely bound to leadership. A single club president can drastically alter the operation of a club, and shift it toward one of these two extremes in a fairly short amount of time. A good leader needs to understand his or her options, and take appropriate actions. These two strategies each have their place, and I believe it is imperative for me, as a club leader, to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
