Forget the rules and start over: an association's volunteers revamp its governance structure and rally inclusive participation.

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 Certified Public Accountants, Lutherville. Many of the day's events focused on MACPA's volunteers, but Yospa, partner, Gorfine, Schiller & Gardyn, Owings Mills, Maryland, 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 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 sown 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 changes that MACPA implemented.

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 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, non-strategic activities to make room for new initiatives.

After the retreat MACPA leaders were left to ponder 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 that they do business.

* Some of 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, HeimLantz Business and Tax Service, Annapolis, Maryland, and 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

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.

Clearly, it was time to act.

"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 would be populated and run entirely by volunteers. Their rasks? To develop a 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, Clifton Gunderson, Timonium, Maryland, 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 AL 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. (See sidebar, "Graphics Facilitate Creative Vision," for further detail on the Grove process.)

"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 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. (See sidebar, "Restructuring--Inside and Out," for details of MACPA's reorganization model.)

Building member momentum. 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, MAC PA 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 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 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 June 2001 MACPA's bylaws committee began working the new governance structure into a revised version of the MACPA bylaws. As this article goes to press, ballots for voting on the revised bylaws have been mailed to MACPA's full membership with responses due by late July. Early responses have been quite positive.

Repositioning board and staff. Meanwhile, the board of directors instructed MACPA's staff to begin working within the parameters of the restructuring plan, while the board and staff made three significant changes. Three significant shifts were made.

1. 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 communization 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 our members.

2. The board, meanwhile, underwent a significant change of its own. 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 diverse. And even though it is smaller, it's an extremely deliberative body. In the past two years, several major discussions have been very fruitful.

3. 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 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 round 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.

RELATED ARTICLE: RESTRUCTURING--Inside and Out

Thinking of restructuring your organization? Here's some advice from those who've been through the process at the Maryland Association of Certified Publie Accountants (MACPA), Lutherville.

CONSIDER GENERAL STEPS

MACPA followed four key provisos when embarking on its restructuring process.

1. INVOLVE YOUR MEMBERS--AND A LOT OF THEM. Those who worked on MACPA's project say a grassroots effort is key. "You have to involve people who normally might not participate," says board member Tami Bensky, senior manager, Clifton Gunderson, Timonium, Maryland. "Otherwise, you're just turning over the same ideas."

2. STUDY YOUR HISTORY. "Before you can even start, you have to take a very introspective look at where you've been and how you got there," says volunteer Marty Yospa, partner, Gorfine, Schiller & Gardyn, Owings Mills, Maryland. "You have to find out why you're doing what you do and ask yourself whether (anything] is broken." Adds former MACPA President Carter Heim, managing partner, HeimLantz Business and Tax Services, Annapolis, Maryland: "There's a lot of groundwork that has to be laid to understand where you are today and what might be out there for the future."

3. CONSIDER USING TECHNOLOGY. "Sometimes you need an alternative place to store (data] and a structure your volunteers can use to share information," says Heim. For example, members of MACPA's Under-35 Structure and Governance Task Force made extensive use of an Internet discussion forum as a way to exchange information. "In fact," says Bensky, "I think there were some members (of the task force] who only participated electronically."

4. BE PREPARED TO PUT THE PLAN INTO PLACE. If you truly want a grassroots plan to restructure your organization, you have to be eager to accept the proposals produced by your members. "If you're not willing to trust the process and accept the results as valid, then the process loses all credibility," says Bensky.

CREATE SPECIFIC GOALS

Recommendations from the design team tasked with creating MACPA's restructuring plan affected the organization of both staff and governance. The team identified five goals for governance and structure:

* Align with vision and mission of MACPA.

* Build a community of value by and among members.

* Expand MACPA's relationships with member's.

* Streamline the board of directors to operate more efficiently.

* Retain board diversity and demographic mix of members.

The anticipated results included connecting to members in new ways; creating new opportunities for members; promoting communication with members; building a stronger, more effective staff; and establishing a collaborative relationship between board and staff.

TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION

The recommendations from the design team reflected changes to both volunteer and staff structure.

VOLUNTEER LEADERSHIP. For volunteer leadership, the restructuring meant changing the composition of both the executive committee and the board. While the executive committee went from seven to six members, the board was reduced from 22 members to 14.

STAFF. MACPA's staff was organized in a vertical structure based on typical departments (marketing and communication, membership, professional development, and so on), a model which often impedes the flow of value to the member or customer when intradepartment hand-offs get delayed or turf bettles occur.

The new structure, which was agreed upon by an internal, staff-led team, was based on a horizontal view. In essence asking the staff person to look back from the members' point of view and ask how they receive value--then rebuild the organization from that perspective. Thus MACPA now has several major ways to deliver value to members and each one of those is assigned to a director or manager who is responsible for the ultimate results. Each value stream becomes a self-directed work team with representatives from other disciplins (formerly departments) as needed to deliver their value proposition to the members. This type of structure also lends itself to activity-based accounting, by allocating staff tune across value streams, which is quite useful for setting priori ties and evaluating programs that may be intangible or difficult to measure, such as image promotion and legislative advocacy.

GRAPHICS FACILITATE

Creative Vision

The Grove Consultants International (www.grove.com), San Francisco, were an important part of MACPA's restructuring success. The Grove process uses a methodology called graphic facilitation, an interactive style that leads groups through a planning process using large-scale imagery and displays (templates). MACPA's structure and governance task forces created a structured process by which they incorporated a series of the graphic templates to facilitate committee and chapter planning without restricting their creativity. This gave the board authority over resource allocation, while giving the communities (the committees and chapters involved in the process) the freedom to create their visions for the future.

The process was framed as follows:

1. CAPTURE COMMUNITY ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND CELEBRATE PAST SUCCESSES. To create change, past accomplishments must first be recognized. Each community collectively mapped its progressive history to identify its larger patterns, review the community's past achievements and challenges, reveal different perspectives, celebrate the accomplishments, and recognize what had been learned along the way.

2. SETTING THE CONTEXT AND AGREEING ON CURRENT REALITIES. The context was presented to and reviewed by committees to establish a common background and to accomplish the following objectives:

* Understand the strategic context of the CPA Profession and Maryland association.

* Develop an understanding of how communities achieve the mission of MACPA and how they fit into the vision process.

* Develop a mission statement for the focus of the communities.

* Establish a process to evaluate the products and services provided by communities to determine if tie goals are being met. (Note: This exercise is done annually with all community and association leaders.)

3. IDENTIFY ORGANIZATIONAL STRENGTHS, PROBLEMS, OPPORTUNITIES, AND THREATS. As they focused on past achievements, committees suggested new projects to start or past ideas that can be let go. Meanwhile, they also defined the criteria for evaluating committee activities; identified new projects, services, or activities to begin; identified projects, services, or activities to expand upon, continue without additional resources, or discontinue completely.

4. CREATE A VISION FOR THE COMMUNITY. Realizing the driving forces for change in the context of the organization and recognizing the focus the community has had historically, it was appropriate to take five bold steps.

* Agree on the central purpose of the community.

* Identify key objectives for the community.

* Recognize trends or factors supporting the community's purpose.

* Identify other trends or factors that are challenges.

* Determine high-level strategies for the community.

5. DEVELOP AN ACTION PLAN. With a common understanding of their history and purpose and an evaluation of their activities, communities prepared to develop strategic action plans. The steps for doing so included the following:

* Focus on the central purpose for which the community exists. (Recognizing that all communities exist to serve members, what is this community's specific reason?)

* Define objectives in terms of specific deliverables and outcomes that give meaning to the community's activities in the context of the association.

* Assess current resources in terms of volunteer time, skills, and staff support.

* Identify additional resources necessary to accomplish the community's objectives.

* Identify the major phases of the community's objectives.

* Define success factors and guiding principles.

* Identify challenges and potential obstacles.

* Establish group norms for working together (accountabilities of individual volunteers and staff).

Community leaders each submitted game plans to be evaluated against a system established by the board of directors. This system included criteria for evaluating community activities and the allocation of resources in alignment with the strategic initiatives and objectives of the association. Key criteria included the size of the community and scope of services offered, number of community members and other members served, member and volunteer satisfaction, resources required and revenue from community activities (conferences, roundtables, etc.), strategic importance of proposed activities and communities, and other measures that the board deemed necessary. This process keeps the association staff from ever having to say 'no' to a valuable volunteer. Rather, game plans and resource requests (staff, money, and time) are put in priority by the board of directors.

So far, MACPA is pleased with the results of this process and the inclusivity it has fostered, particularly among its volunteers.

For information on training in the Grove process contact the Business Learning Institute at www.bizlearning.net.

Tom Hood is executive director and Bill Sheridan is electronic communications manager of the Maryland Association of Certified Public Accountants, Lutherville. E-mail: [e-mail] and [e-mail].