Board vs. Management: The Line That Protects Results
A strong POA starts with a clear line: strategy vs. execution. When that line blurs, owners get noise instead of outcomes.
🧭 What the Board should do (and do well)
- Set priorities and guardrails (policy).
- Approve budgets and long-range plans that tie dollars to outcomes.
- Ask the hard questions: risk, alternatives, tradeoffs, and measures of success.
- Hold management accountable through clear goals and consistent review — not through daily direction.
🛠️ What management should do (and be empowered to do)
- Run day-to-day operations and execute the Board’s priorities.
- Build and manage the staff, vendors, contracts, and schedules.
- Surface risks early and present options with recommendations.
- Deliver results — and report progress in a format owners can understand.
✅ What “disciplined oversight” looks like (without micromanaging)
- Dashboards: a small set of metrics reviewed monthly (safety, service levels, budget-to-actual, project milestones).
- Milestones: major projects broken into phases with clear go/no-go points.
- Exception reporting: elevate issues that are off-track, over budget, or higher risk — early.
- Decision logs: what was decided, why, and what outcome is expected.
🚫 Two failure modes I want us to avoid
- Hands-off: the Board becomes a rubber stamp and surprises show up late (or too late).
- Hands-on: the Board tries to run departments, blurring accountability and slowing execution.
- Either way, owners lose clarity — and confidence.
📌 My day-one commitment
- Protect the line between Board and management.
- Demand clear measures of success for major decisions.
- Support management in execution while holding them accountable to results.
🤝 Your input matters
- Where do you see confusion today: policy, operations, or communication?
- If you’ve served on a committee, what worked well — and what didn’t?
🔔 Call to action
- 🔔 Subscribe to Roger’s Ramblings (one email when I post — no spam).
- ❓ Questions for me? Use the website contact/Q&A form.
Roger, can you provide clear examples of what is currently not working. Are the points you are articulating not currently being employed within the current board and management? I don’t think we are getting noise and no outcomes. Is our current board trying to run departments? Do we currently not have disciplined oversight? What part of that oversight should be made available to the homeowners to view? What is confusing to me is I can’t tell if you are providing insight into how things should work vs how they currently are working. I am a school trained project manager and much of what you are advocating is part and parcel to management by objective and project planning. It’s incumbent upon project managers to not become so enamored with the administrative aspects such that they lose sight of the objectives. It’s clear to me that both sides, board and management, would be well served to have certified project managers on staff.
Roger, you mention dashboards, milestones, exception reporting, and decision logs. Are you associating those deliverables with board responsibility or management? Those are administrative tasks with a high overhead in tracking data and reporting on it. Are those tasks currently covered within the duties and responsibilities of the current administration? All of those tasks require a specific set of skills. Those exist in organizations that are fully funded with the required staff. Ongoing projects that span several months or even years require constant monitoring. Continuity is necessary. If you view these functions as a board responsibility then one would assume candidates would need to posses certain skills. That’s a big ask for a volunteer board. If those deliverables are outlined by board policy and provided to the GM as requirements then the board would likely have to fund some additional positions. My hope would be that a GM would already possess the necessary expertise and knowledge to understand those deliverables would be self imposed as a matter of course. How could one not run an organization without those?
As a newly hired GM I would certainly expect to walk into the organization and find continuity binders, physical or online, where I could educate myself on significant projects. There is a fine line between giving the department heads the authority to run their departments and imposing stringent administrative requirements on them. I have always believed that our IT department here has been underfunded. We have certainly made strides over the past few years, but there is exponential value to giving management tools to do their jobs.
As a side note…I detest micromanaging in any form. It sends a message that the person in charge doesn’t trust the judgement of the people who he or she hired to do their jobs. It decreases morale, creativity and productivity. It has no place in any organization.
I have a few observations to share. I was the Director of Sales and Marketing for analytical and design of experiments software at a 3 billion dollar tech company. I understand marketing. I understand customer relationships. I understand data analytics. There are 2 dynamic and complex aspects to our community. We need a robust marketing effort for our amenities to drive revenue so we can pay the bills. We also need a targeted effort to assist all homeowners in providing them the necessary “tools” to understand all the complexities of living here. There is a direct correlation between the education of homeowners wrt community aspects and their satisfaction. We seem to expend more resources on the marketing of amenities than we do on the education end. LBC is great, but it doesn’t reach the masses. There are lots of us who are intellectually curious and want to learn. Information is available, but it’s scattered all over. I have a better chance of making a tee time or a dinner reservation than I do trying to educate myself on policies and procedures and finding any comprehensive documents that afford me the ability to research projects. Asking questions is often met with “attend a board meeting” or “sign up for LBC”.
I think we need two separate marketing and communication efforts. One for amenities and one that serves the purpose of communicating for the all issues that are specific to the operational aspects. Don’t co-mingle the 2 efforts as they are distinctly different. I don’t need pretty pictures or catch phrases, I need robust and targeted communication. Granted as a homeowner I bear some of the research responsibility. I also understand legal implications surrounding certain types of communications. I wish the monthly meeting agendas included links to information surrounding issues that will be discussed. Give me a few days to review what will be presented so I can ask cogent questions. I am certainly not saying we don’t do a good job at presenting information, I just think we need a paradigm shift to more strategic communication. We can do better and we should. I also hope that board members will stop referring to people by their first names. When you refer to someone named Steve, 90% of us have no clue who Steve is. I know Big Canoe is beautiful and I am blessed to live here, but you don’t have to remind me during a board meeting. Let’s just discuss issues and facts. Stay focused on the mission and leave the unnecessary comments for our social hour.
There aren’t many secrets in Big Canoe. There are always going to be people who know something and they just can’t help themselves. Certain aspects of the organization leak like a sieve. Just the nature of the beast.
I find it odd that the current situation with the Amazon deliveries is common knowledge by both the Amazon drivers and the package porch employees. Why was there no concerted effort by the POA to give us a heads up? Help us to manage expectations. What is the status? I get most of my updates from people who attend cocktail parties.
Please don’t view my missive as anything more than observation. I have the tenacity and the ability to get what I need to live here. I have built that over a couple of decades of living here. The people in charge will run the organization based upon their knowledge, skills and abilities. Facebook sucks sometimes, but it’s 2025 and it’s not all noise.