Board Member
Having just been fired from a new client who was totally uncooperative with our staff, uninterested in setting things up properly between the 2 entities and basically unorganized, in disarray and their Board members existing without any common goals, our staff recently collaborated on the following, in order to help other community associations to avoid enduring what we just had to….
1. Stay involved, engaged and current in all of the issues that affect the association. Do not be interested in just the issues that you, as a Board member/Unit Owner are concerned with.
2. Trust the experience of the management company, but when having a question or an alternative, communicate that concern or question the staff respectfully.
3. Offer your opinions in a constructive fashion, rather than in the form of a demand or command. Repeatedly demanding instead of acting in a collaborative manner quickly becomes demoralizing to the recipient.
4. Attend to association business promptly, timely and when promised. There is nothing worse to management professionals than to have a Board member promise to do something, not follow through, ignore it and then blame the management company that it did not happen.
5. Listen to your fellow Board members, your neighbors and management company. To not listen to and collaborate with others always demonstrates that there are other psychological factors and motivations for being on the Board, rather than what is good for the association as a whole.
6. Pay attention to the needs of your association. Do not just focus on your pet projects, and when there are concerns being voiced by others, make sure that these are also brought to the other Board members’ attention.
7. Don’t be afraid to research a question, concern or issue. The world, technology and legal issues are changing more quickly now than ever, no one has all of the answers at their fingertips and management should not be belittled when they do not have the answer. Sometimes what you ask for cannot be fulfilled as quickly as you would like, and sometimes you do not communicate well, or what you are asking for is in conflict with what management is being told to do or how it should be done.
8. Associations that employ property management companies will get the best results if they and their Board members would be open-minded and patient. Management may have different, better, and more efficient/hi-tech ways of getting things accomplished. To totally thwart the management company from doing things in a better, more efficient way is hurting both entities.
Overall, community association property management is a collaborative venture and in order to get the best, quickest and most efficient results, requires the Board of Directors and management working together in harmony. If the following is not the desire for the association, why hire a management company? Why not just have an administrator and a bookkeeper and micro-manage them 8 hours a day?
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