February 15th-February 19th

On Monday this week, I had a meeting with Kelly (Dr. Millard’s Secretary), in order to find out the best way to coordinate schedule for our first board meeting. Most of our board members are in the leadership department but Adam (from Boys & Girls club) and Dr. Starcher (Business Division). We had picked Thurs. Feb. 25 (11am-12pm) for our first board meeting date and had everyone scheduled except Adam and Dr. Starcher. Kelly helped us a lot by giving us tips on the easiest way to contact people and coordinate schedules. On Monday evening, I spent about an hour and a half writing up the bylaws of the Leadership Consulting Firm, which was not an easy task, and these will be presented at our first board meeting to our board members for tips and approval. On Tuesday, we had our weekly meeting with Dr. Millard and we presented our bylaws to him and he helped us correct & revise them a little bit with his further knowledge of organizational bylaws. We also went over the things that we will need to include in the first board meeting and spent time talking about our to-do list for our board meeting. Then, on Tuesday evening, TJ and I went to the boys and girls club to talk to Adam about having the meeting on Feb. 25 to make sure that it worked with his schedule. Well he wasn’t there and none of his employees knew where he was at, so we had no luck finding him. Another guy who is helping with our project then called him and he said that date was not going to work for him. Then, TJ talked to Dr. Starcher on Wed. afternoon and he also said that date and time did not work for him to be able to make the meeting. This was disappointing because we really wanted these two people at the meeting, they both have an area of expertise that we did not want to lack in our first meeting. So now our meeting is going to have to be pushed back to the week after Spring Break.

The greatest challenge this week was trying to coordinate everyone’s different schedules to have one time open-at the same time as all the other group members. We did anticipate this being a challenge when we started but not something that we thought would push back the progress of our project. I think that being flexible is a good thing but at the same time, it’s kind of frustrating when you make a lot of plans and then they get pushed back.

My greatest joy this week would have to be putting together the bylaws and then having Dr. Millard be very impressed with our progress on this step of our project process. Since this is something that we both has neither done before, it was nice to know that we had Dr. Millard’s (someone who has experience in this area) approval!

One particular leadership lesson I learned was that sometimes everything doesn’t go exactly the way you pictured it and you have to be flexible and sometimes even re-align your goals and time frame for things. I know that it didn’t ruin our project or anything, so it was just something we had to adjust to.

Question: Does anyone have experiences with board formation or board meetings that they could offer us any advice as we are in the process of planning?