Healing and Building
At the Solid Waste Association of North America, interim executive leadership strengthened trust and introduced strategy-supporting association management practices.
The kickoff point for a new strategic plan was a fortuitous time for a change in executive leadership that would advance the goals of the Solid Waste Association of North America, an individual membership association of more than 10,000 professionals and 47 chapters committed to advancing the discipline from solid waste management to resource management through education, advocacy, and research. However, the timing of the transition meant that hiring an interim executive to lead the staff while the search for a permanent CEO took place was an urgent, important way to gain strategic momentum. Enter interim chief executive Richard Yep, FASAE, CAE, a thoughtful association management professional who had served as CEO of the American Counseling Association for 24 of the 33 years he spent with the association. Vetted Solutions identified Yep as a candidate for the interim role, and after a thorough selection process, the SWANA board hired him for a six-month engagement.
Making the Match
Vetted Solutions typically presents three interim candidates only after gaining a thorough understanding of the organization’s culture, developmental stage, current situation, and objectives for the engagement. Part of the assessment needed to make a good match between organization and interim CEO, according to Vetted President Jim Zaniello, FASAE, is to understand what the board says it wants and discern what the organization needs. Relatable experience and cultural fit are equally important, and in this case, Yep was a great match. His association management experience, including ability to introduce leading practices, trumped the need for prior industry knowledge, and his even, empathetic nature would prove useful in working with a board that was simultaneously feeling the emotional impact of the prior CEO’s departure and the impetus for advancing the association’s goals.
A good interim CEO listens deeply to understand what the board is saying and why. Exercising this skill, which begins with the candidate interview and continues throughout the engagement, helps the interim understand what persona to bring to the role.
Assessing the Situation
A good interim CEO listens deeply to understand what the board is saying and why. Exercising this skill, which begins with the candidate interview and continues throughout the engagement, helps the interim understand what persona to bring to the role, according to Yep. At SWANA, Yep became a healer and a resource. Whether fully articulated by the leadership or not, attention to board relations and support would be a key part of the interim engagement. Likewise, helping the board and staff process the implications of the leadership transition and communicating in ways that ensure volunteers and staff hear what they need to hear were priorities for Yep.
When he joined SWANA, Yep met a hard-working staff of 23 but observed operations with potential for improvement in comparison to leading association management practices. In fact, the board asked him to “look under the hood” and address opportunities, both operational and human. For example, the association’s budget-preparation and presentation practices could be contemporized, so working with the staff member who manages budgeting, he began introducing an approach that is consistent with leading association management practice. Yep saw his short-term role as planting seeds. “You find out what is valued by the staff, or by the board, and then you can say, let’s build on that.”
“You find out what is valued by the staff, or by the board, and then you can say, let’s build on that.”
Stabilizing operations while supporting transition to a new management model represents a dual management service that well-suits the skillsets of interim executives.
Cultivating Results
Interim CEOs bring fresh eyes—an objective-observer orientation that allows them to home in on deficiencies or opportunities faster than those individuals with history in the organization. At the same time, interim CEOs must exercise discretion in deciding when and in what context they convey suggestions for change. That sensitivity to the situation and its nuances requires an interim executive to draw on keen emotional intelligence, a quality underscored as crucial in the ASAE Research Foundation study The Role of the Interim CEO: Key Insights of Association Executive Transitions and demonstrated by Vetted-placed interim CEOs. Yep capitalized on teachable moments, recognizing when he had developed sufficient trust to share what he saw. With the board, meant helping the leaders see where the organization fell against leading association management practices—a role that the experience of Vetted interims equips them to play. With staff, that often meant helping team members think through change without feeling their jobs were threatened. Yep tells the story of a discussion about an aging SWANA paper-folding machine, which some staff felt should be replaced to support dues invoicing. The conversation, he says, needed to be about modernizing dues invoicing, not about replacing the machine. An interim is in a good position to surface such issues—respectfully. “It’s not that the ways some things have been done are bad, but there might be some better ways.”
Did Yep and SWANA make progress? Some seven weeks into the engagement, Yep saw a sign that they were, when a staff member asked to come speak with him about some concerns in her department. He says that in a less-trustful environment, that probably would not have happened. The aim for the interim engagement? To hand the incoming permanent CEO a foundation of smooth operations and an environment of trust and mutual respect that are critical to the future of SWANA, now in year two of executing its strategic plan. Yep, the staff, and the board were laser-focused on exactly that.
