Coordinating People Who Have Been Doing It Longer Than You Have

At thirty-one I took over an association whose active members had, in several cases, been involved since before I was born. I had the formal role. I very obviously did not have the standing, and for the first eight months I made every mistake available.

The mistakes were all versions of one thing: trying to establish authority through the role. Referring to decisions as decisions, citing the constitution, being slightly formal. All of it read as insecurity, correctly, and produced a polite non-compliance that I could not point at — everyone agreed in the room and then things did not happen.

What worked, eventually, was narrow and slow and had nothing to do with authority.

The first thing was doing the unglamorous work visibly. Not to prove anything — I genuinely needed to do it — but the effect was that people who had watched three previous chairs delegate the tedious parts saw me doing them. About four months in, an eighty-year-old member who had been the most quietly obstructive started staying behind to help stack chairs with me, and after that his position in meetings changed completely. I do not think he decided to support me. I think we had become people who stack chairs together.

The second was asking about history and meaning it. Not as a technique for making people feel valued, which is transparent, but because they knew things I needed. Why a particular event is in June, why we do not use a particular hall, what happened the last time someone tried the thing I was proposing. Three times this saved me from a decision that had already failed before, and each time I said so publicly, which was worth more than any amount of consultation theatre.

The third, and the hardest, was being clear about the small number of things I would decide regardless. I had spent months trying to get consensus on everything, which meant nothing was ever settled and everything was reopened. Naming two or three things as mine, explaining why, and holding them was better received than the consensus-seeking had been. I think people had been waiting to find out whether there was anything I would not fold on.

What I would not do again is apologise for my age, which I did constantly in the first months, in small deflecting jokes. It was intended as modesty and it invited exactly the response it was pretending to head off. Nobody needed me to acknowledge it; they needed me to be competent and to not waste their evenings.

The general shape, if it transfers: standing comes from usefulness and from having been right a few times where it was checkable, and it accumulates at the speed it accumulates. There is no way to get it in the first month, and the strategies for appearing to have it all make it slower.