Helping Tomorrow’s Leaders

By Brian Rush, CPA

One of my goals for this year is to develop a process to identify, recruit, mentor and support new board members. This is extremely important if we are to maintain the level of volunteer help we need to provide effective CalCPA member services at the chapter level. I alluded to this in my first President’s Message in the June Bulletin and would like to amplify on this topic in this edition.

There are a lot of pressures on each of us to work long hours to achieve our business goals. Recent economic events haven’t made this any easier and every firm is reducing costs wherever possible. That means they are doing more with fewer resources, thereby making it difficult for practitioners to get involved in volunteer activities. The challenge of finding interested and willing professionals to give some of their time to become officers and board members is a tough one.

We can meet this challenge if we look at it from a new perspective. First, we need to re-evaluate the priority of having local chapters serve member needs. Clearly, if they have outlived their usefulness, we should rethink how members can be better served and redesign this delivery process. This is a topic for discussion among board members with input from members at large. I am not sure another member survey is going to provide any insight, but perhaps a focus group would get at some of the real issues and guide the board in developing a better service delivery system. I will work on this in the coming months and report on my progress.

Second, we need to reconsider the benefits of volunteering our time to make our community a better place. Clearly, professional development is a critical element of every practitioner. However, a broader perspective immediately leads to a need to expand our focus and look for ways we can give something back to the community and profession. This is what makes a professional more valuable.

To this end, I encourage each of you to look for ways you can make a contribution that fits your development goals and provides you with the rewards of giving. While the immediate interest is in serving on the board, other volunteer activities are every bit as important.

Finally, I realize the biggest obstacle for serving on the board is the time required. While we have tried to limit the time required of any one individual by having sufficient numbers of volunteers to spread the load in a manageable way, we can do more by making it even less of a commitment by encouraging individuals to become associate board members and serve in a less demanding role.

To that end, I am looking for individuals who would like to become part of a program to prepare for chapter leadership. These people will be asked to attend two board meetings this year and help with one chapter event. A mentor on the board will help you gain an understanding of what the chapter is about and how we go about achieving our objectives. If you then find your participation to be worthwhile, you will become a candidate for board director. This could be for the coming year or a subsequent year.

So, if you find this of interest, or know of someone who would, please respond to this blog with your name, firm, telephone number and e-mail. I will contact you and we can discuss your interest.

Thanks for considering this request.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.