NMRT Board Member Final Report
1. Office Name: Member Services
2. Office Term (Date: Ex. 2002-2003): 2003-2004
3. Discuss/summarize your involvement with your
committees this year:
The Committees within the Member Services (MS) Director
purview generally were lead by NMRT members who took initiative and completed
tasks without much handholding. Many committee members also showed a great deal
of leadership of their own. Chairs had an understanding of tasks and delegated
specific responsibilities as necessary. I would say most were responsive to my
requests for updates and to recommendations and/or guidance I gave via email or
the MW Conference (e.g. the Resume Review Service and Membership Meeting (MM)
collaborated to create an appropriate handout for MM's Annual program). Despite
overall success with my involvement (i.e. I knew what was going on and could
assist those who presented issues), I think some confusion existed with keeping
me within the discussions between committee members and their chair; lacking
communication with some made supervision a bit difficult. However, I did make
myself available to all via email < mnochoa@ufl.edu > or by phone for
support.
4. Based on your year's experience in this office, what
future directions do you see your office or NMRT needing to take this year or
the following year?
Overall, I think the office should maintain supervision
of its current committees because they actively provide a variety of sponsored
events/programs and resources to assist, encourage, and educate those who are
new to the profession. Because NMRT committees will be collaborating more
frequently, I believe the MS Director will need to facilitate that. There are a
few committees such as Resume Review Service, Web, and Footnotes that all continue
to provide some of the most visible work for NMRT; Chairs have streamlined and
documented (or will) workflow as noted in their Final Reports. Unlike these,
Publicity needs to assert its role in gathering information about NMRT to
publicize and the Director should help move the committee and NMRT towards this
in the future. There is still a lot of duplication of publicity that comes from
various committees onto listservs, etc; we might want to see if Publicity can
contact committees to develop a list of contacts that many NMRT committees
already use (this has been haphazardly maintained) to save in a database for
the publicity committee to get to. A possible solution to publicity is adding
those contacts to a permanent NMRT Publicity email address that that committee
has access to streamline NMRT publicity to its Publicity Committee.
5. What tips or hints do you have that might help your
successor carry out the duties of this office?
I recommend reading each Final Report for the Committees
within MS. There is or will be updated documentation, which will answer
questions to some of the less obvious aspects of the committees. Understand the
role of the Web Committee (as opposed to and in relation to the Archives and
Handbook Committees.). Despite these hints, most MS committees are chaired by
“veteran” NMRT members; they have a high regard and respect for their committee
work and truly understand the process; most will not need constant supervision.
However, for the committees with newer chairs, I advise communicating with them
often. As I mentioned earlier, communication lines did at times get crossed. I
maintain that communication is crucial to establishing good working
relationships and thereby getting committee work done, so I would advise the
next Director to contact the Chairs at least once a week, subject to deadlines
or questions raised, via email, but also by phone.
6. Please address the role of the board member as
coordinator. For example, with student outreach split among three committees
reporting to three directors, somebody will need to take the initiative to make
sure things are going smoothly. Another example would be projects between
membership, alumni, and student outreach which need to be coordinated. How
might activities such as this be handled by board members efficiently and
smoothly? Your thoughts here will be most helpful for future boards.
As I mentioned in a previous report, early communication
is necessary since committees need to work together. Overall, the Board needs
to facilitate communication between committees and give committees the heads up
on overlapping issues. When a Director first reviews the committees within his
or her purview and determines the particular goals and tasks to complete for
the year, the Director should identify at the outset which projects will
involve other committees. Then the Director should talk to the appropriate
Board members who supervise those affected committees to let them know what you
have in mind and find out if those committees have time to work on it as well;
in that initial contact with the other Board members, you can determine the
goals of a project and generally how the project is to be handled. In some
cases, this should be done before the Director sends out to the affected
committee the email that lays out expectations for the year. In others, where
the committees have continuing members or Chairs, this project discussion
should be cc:ed to them as well. Whichever the case, by the time work gets
started by the committees, these plans should be communicated to all affected
Chairs and Board members, letting them know who their committee contacts are,
who must be cc:ed on all correspondence, etc. But understanding the role of the
Board is not to do the work for the committees, carbon copying allows the Board
to follow progress and make recommendations if necessary, while also ensuring
that the work is being appropriately shared between committees.
7. Date of report: July 10, 2004
8. Submitted by: Marilyn Ochoa mnochoa@ ufl.edu