Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Two honest questions: What’s going to happen at IABC? And should we really care?

06.13.2013 by David Murray // 6 Comments

Trust: It's "the difference between an organization that is profitable and thriving and one that is divisive, superficial and decaying from the inside out."

So said veteran IABC staffer Natasha Nicholson, in the editor's letter for this month's issue of the association's ezine, Communication World.

But like most current and former IABC staffers and board members that I reached out to this week, she wasn't talking about the troubles at IABC. Not directly, anyway.

However, I have spoken to several deeply knowledgeable sources on condition of anonymity, and a coherent story is beginning to emerge, along with a few urgent questions about the future of the organization.

To wit:

Apparently California has especially scary laws regarding employment disclosure, so people are understandably freaked about divulging details of executive director Chris Sorek's departure. It will have to suffice to say that Sorek dramatically didn't mesh with the association's culture during a year of major culture change, and the body rejected the organ.

The bigger question, my sources agreed, is the International Executive Board and its 12 volunteer members, who hired Sorek in the first place. They voted for him unanimously, and former board member Jennifer Wah says that though she had some "niggles" about Sorek from the outset, she doesn't look back with regret. "You go with what your gut tells you and with what's in front of you," she says.

But with many of the same personalities still in place, the board must now replace Sorek less than a year later. Those personalities are that much more important, say my sources, because over the last several years the board has taken steps to increase its governing power, whittling the title of the top top paid staffer from president to executive director and restructuring itself in various ways to consolidate its influence.

While many IABC watchers see the hiring of the next executive director as a make-or-break moment for the organization, insiders worry that the board isn't offering enough salary for what promises to be a very difficult turnaround job, in the expensive headquarters city of San Francisco. Julie Freeman, who was IABC's last paid chief, says the organization is paying demonstrably less than the market rate for top execs at an association its size.

There's also a worrisome lack of consensus about what kind of person IABC should find to fill Sorek's smouldering shoes. Some near the top of the organization think it's essential to have someone with a communication background. Others, including Freeman and IABC Fellow Shel Holtz, think association management is the essential skill set. "It appears there are operations problems, it appears there is turmoil," says Freeman. IABC needs "a seasoned pro" who can handle the logistics and byzantine politics of a 15,000-member association.

(What about Freeman, as an interim cleaner-upper? After all, she ran the organization steadily for more than a decade, she lives in San Francisco and she's as known a known quantity as you could hope for. She tells me, "I've learned never to say never." But another source close to the board says, "No way." There's too much history between Freeman and some board members for the board to bring her back into the fold.)

So who, to rebuild staff morale that by all accounts was devastated during Sorek's tenure? (And with concrete consequences: I'm told the main reason that IABC was initially unable to post on its website the news of Sorek's departure was that all of IABC's IT people had either been fired or had quit.)

Who, to replace the creaky old website that was supposed to be replaced a year ago and still isn't going to be unveiled in time for the 2013 World Conference?

Who, to solidify members' confidence and to implement the dramatic strategic changes Sorek and his board began this year?

Who, to reopen courteous and candid lines of communication with members, media and other IABC watchers? Claire Watson, IABC's new head of external relations, missed a
scheduled inteview with me yesterday, and failed to offer any explanation. Communications director Aaron Heinrich mentioned a town hall meeting that's been scheduled for June 25 at the World Conference in New York, but otherwise refused to comment on any of the assertions my sources made. "We're not responding to anything further until then in order to give the members an opportunity to ask and hear for themselves," he told me by email.

And who, to reestablish that indispensible intangible that Natasha Nicholson articulated so well in Communication World: trust?

No, at this point it's not a matter of what happened to whom at IABC.

It's a matter of what's about to be done, by whom—and soon.

Does IABC's very survival hang in the balance? I don't know. But very much in question is its status as an entity worthy of the voluntary effort and goodwill of good and talented communicators.

"IABC people are generally some of the best people I know: smart, principled, fun-loving, and humane," longtime IABC volunteer Paul Matalucci told me. "The past year has been rough, some bad choices were made, and good people suffered. To move forward, we need to tap back into the good nature of IABC members and staff, many of whom feel rightly pissed off. Some organizational soul-searching about what created the current mess would be wise."

Until New York then, I guess.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Aaron Heinrich, Chris Sorek, crisis, IABC, Jennifer Wah, Julie Freeman, Paul Matalucci

If Chris Sorek were a communicator, would he use “action” as a verb? And other questions.

03.07.2013 by David Murray // 3 Comments

UPDATE: This morning I posted a comment on IABC's LinkedIn page, the main forum for conversation about the association. I linked to this page. Someone removed the comment. This afternoon I posted another comment, noting that my first comment was taken down. That comment was removed too. This is just the latest and smallest example of the goonish behavior that's a smear on the ideals of professional communicators who I have long revered in IABC. If those communicators will stand for this kind of thing, where will they draw the line? As e.e. cummings' Olaf (upon what were once knees) did ceaselessly repeat, "there is some shit I will not eat." —DM

***

I have heard of "action verbs," but I've never seen "action" used as a verb. That is, until I read this paragraph, written over the weekend by Chris Sorek, the executive director of the International Association of Business Communicators:

"MOOCs are here to stay. How do we take advantage the trend? This is one way of providing professional development. And, as we continually look at how we can keep IABC relevant to both current and future members, on-line education will need to be seriously considered as we prepare to action the Career Road Map strategy."

What are you doing in there, Dad?

If you must know, I'm seriously considering my MOOCs as I prepare to action the Restroom Refuse Removal strategy.

But his use of "action" as a verb is only one reason that I fear Chris Sorek is not enough of a communicator at heart to ever satisfy the members of a communication association. 

There are other things communicators do that Sorek doesn't.

Like, Tweet. For all Sorek's talk about the importance of the "digital space," he has Tweeted only 56 times in his life—and hasn't done so since June 29.

Okay, maybe Sorek is old-school, and prefers to have face-to-face or phone conversations. I could respect that.

But then why did he not take up Julie Freeman, his longtime predecessor, on her offer at last year's World Conference in Chicago, to pick her brain any time, on the finer points of piloting the association that she ran for more than a decade? I talked to her; damn if she knows. 

And why wouldn't he call up Freeman's predecessor Lou Williams, who deftly steered the association through its last catastrophe and culture change, a dozen years ago? The lion in winter is available by cell phone, but he hasn't heard from Sorek, before or after the recent IABC crisis broke.

"I think they're in deep shit," Williams told me last week. "They're playing [with IABC] like this is a toy. It's not a toy! Culture is important."

Williams is an IABC Fellow. That's the association's lifetime achievement designation, held by IABC's most esteemed senior statesmen and -women. Williams has heard rumors that they're changing the way Fellows are elected, but he's not sure how they're going to do it. He isn't even sure he's attending the annual Fellows' Dinner at the World Conference in June. He's a woodworker, and there's an American Association of Woodturners meeting around that time, where he knows he's wanted.

Doesn't it seem to you that a communicator—especially one planning on making big organizational change—would have spent his first few weeks at IABC reaching out to Freeman and Williams and all of the Fellows and everybody else who's influential at IABC and outlined his plans, welcomed their advice and sought their support? But the Fellows and influentials I know have felt out of Sorek's loop from the get-go.

And now he wonders why he's having a hard time generating support for his new ideas. And of course he'll blame the old timers, for being resistant to change.

Not that that's new. It's what non-communicators in charge always do.

As opposed to communicators in charge, who amaze people with how much they share, not how little. (Did anyone read Groupon CEO Andrew Mason's resignation letter last week?) Who startle people with the clarity they bring to issues. Who engage critics directly. Who listen hard, and then they impress people with how much they hear and how well they integrate everyone's best ideas into the next round of communications regarding the next round of actions. 

So maybe Sorek's just not a communication guy. That doesn't mean he's a bad guy or even, necessarily, a bad leader; he might be a great coordinator of operations or a brilliant strategist or a great market analyst. Such people have led bigger and better organizations than IABC to great things.

And maybe that's just what IABC needs right now.

But I do wonder how long a non-communicator can lead an association of communicators without running seriously afoul of the sensibilities of the members? I think we're about to find out.

Communicators communicate. Or, as Sorek would say, communicators action communication.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Chris Sorek, IABC, Lou Williams

At IABC, change means never having to say you’re Sorek

02.11.2013 by David Murray // 10 Comments

After more than two months of
growing unrest
among members of  the International Association of Business Communicators,
volunteer chairman Kerby Meyers is apologetic, but paid executive director
Chris Sorek isn’t sorry at all.

That’s what I gathered from an audio
recording provided to me by an attendee of a town hall IABC’s leaders held at
its Leadership Institute meeting, held on Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz.*

“And so it begins,” was the caption
that attendee Suzanne Salvo put on this Facebook picture of Meyers (at lectern),
Sorek (seated, second from left) and a number of IABC international executive
board members.
IABCSalvo

Meyers, who had heretofore been the
chief spokesman for IABC during this crisis that erupted when half the
headquarters staff was sacked in late November, opened in his usual shambling
style. He reiterated that all the changes that seem so vivid and radical to
IABC members now actually came about through years of plodding work in
“committees—surveys—all kinds of things feeding into a big long process.”

Next, Gloria Walker tried to parry
the main thrust of member criticism. She’s in charge of the proposed change to the
association’s accreditation program, and she reiterated that the current
accreditation process is hopelessly labor-intensive, relying on volunteers who
aren’t available. The test is also too difficult, which results in high failure
rates among test-takers “in Europe, Asia, Russia.” So while a plan for reform
was “purely a proposal,” Walker insisted that something must be done to
streamline the process and make it easier for less experienced pros to get
accredited.

And at the end of the meeting, a
video showed off the new digital version of the old print magazine, Communication World and a new website,
whose sharp look and sophisticated portal structure deeply impressed one
observer who I spoke with.

But the main event was the chance for
the approximately 175 Leadership Institute attendees—most of them regional or
chapter leaders or others with more of a stake in the association than your
average member—to finally put their questions to Sorek, the executive director
who they hired last summer but from whom they’ve heard little since.

(Meyers claims he gagged Sorek,
preferring that the executive director focus on making change rather than
communicating about it.)

If the audience expected Sorek to be
contrite—well, they had to settle for barely polite.

Whatever their questions, Sorek’s
responses fell under one of the following four categories.

 You have no idea what a mess I inherited.

“There are a lot of things that have
been going on inside the organization that not a lot of people have seen,”
Sorek said in response to an early question about the bad publicity IABC has
suffered. “Quite honestly, if I were to give you a little bit of an idea about
what we walked into … our website—our IABC website—literally is hanging on by a
thread. If you were to take a look at that website right now—and I’m just
talking about from a technical perspective—if somebody would have taken a plug
out of a socket, we wouldn’t be online anymore. We have no redundancy. The
hardware that’s inside the system is ten to twelve years old. The software is
literally broken, has no future, can’t go anyplace. It’s not sustainable. And
what we have to do is take a real hard look at that. … It takes a lot to get
that done, trust me.”

It wasn’t just the IABC website that
was messed up, it was the culture, Sorek suggested in answers that sounded less
like responses than prepared rants:

“One of the things that I noticed
when I took this job and I was kind of scared about was the fact that the
people in San Francisco [at IABC headquarters] were divorced from the people
that were the volunteers, and the people that were at the chapters. And I still
remember people saying, ‘Well, we do this and they do that.’ Okay? Horsehockey!
I’d say something else, but I could get in trouble for that. The whole deal is
that we’re all supposed to be working at this together.”

He went on to blame, though not name,
his predecessor, longtime IABC executive director Julie Freeman, for creating a
rift between IABC’s paid staff and its volunteer board: “I’m sure some of the
people on this board would say, when was the last time they talked to the
former chief executive? They probably didn’t. And if they did, it was probably
a one-off conversation. So it’s—I don’t want that. I want people to talk to me.
And I think my staff will know that I’m literally in everything, and I want to
be in everything that we do as an organization.”

This association barely exists at all, so what’s the big deal
about changing it?

Describing Meyers’ decision to give
him a voice in the IABC controversy as “kind of like letting the dog off the
leash,” Sorek barked loud, ascribing his lack of patience with the IABC’s
traditionalists to his passion for communication:

“You’re looking at a person who’s
really passionate about this job because I’ve been doing it for so long. And I
feel the pain when you go in and somebody says, ‘Gee, what is communications?
Does it really mean anything to the bottom line? … How do you guys add value to
the bottom line?’ I mean, I’ve added value to the bottom line of 40 different
listed companies, I’ve helped corporates around the world, I’ve built
charities—and quite honestly, when I take a look at some of the campaigns we’re
doing—some of them are absolutely fabulous, and nobody knows about it. Nobody
knows about that, nobody knows about ABCs. Nobody knows anything about IABC.”

Though he joined IABC briefly in the
mid-1980s, he said, he hasn’t been a member for years and never got his ABC
accreditation. “Has it hurt my career not being an ABC? No, it hasn’t. I want
to make it relevant to the profession. I want to make the communications
profession a profession.”

If you only knew how hard I work, how much I care—and what nonsense
I have to put up with.

Sorek implied that his work ethic intimidates his staff and assured everyone
that change is being made “twenty-four seven, three sixty five” at
headquarters—despite the nitwits he has to deal with.

Nitwits from the past, who didn’t
know how to do internal communication properly and who spammed members to the
point that IABC’s email open rate is 14 percent.

And nitwits from the present: “I
think one of the things that really surprised me, that came up recently, was
that one of our lapsed members had written something about the fact that they
hadn’t been notified about their lapsing. And as it turns out—there are so many
problems … that I have to watch over and take a look at—as it turns out, that
person got three emails from us about their lapsing. Three emails. You’re
lapsing, you’re gonna lapse, oh my God, you lapsed. And the person comes back
and says, ‘No one talked to me.’ Well you know, we have 14,600 members as of a
couple days ago. It’s kind of difficult to call up everybody that’s gonna be lapsing.”

(Especially when the association has
a non-renewal rate of 25 percent, an alarming number that was not discussed
during the town hall meeting. Do the math, and you realize that the association
must replace 3,650 lapsed members every year just to maintain its current
membership. How?)

 I’m just your humble servant.

While he was convincing members they
have no idea how hard he has it or how much he cares about transforming IABC
from a backwater into a transformative institution, Sorek seamlessly and repeatedly
inserted the language of servant leadership:

“So if it sounds like I’m a little
bit passionate about what I do—about working for you—I work for you,” he said.
“You tell me what to do. The board gives me my marching orders every day.
That’s who I work for. I’m your servant, okay? As is my staff. We work for you.
So you tell us what you want done. We make it happen.”

For IABC members who feel like telling Sorek what
you want done, he offered his direct-dial phone number, and added: "I'm there all the time."

The question, for this longtime IABC watcher who knows how radically Sorek's communication style differs from anyone else who has ever run this association, is for how long.

* The recording I received was not of
perfect sound quality, so the video recording of the meeting, when IABC releases
it as promised, may differ by a word here or there from the quotes you see
above. I’ll post that link as soon as I have it. Meanwhile, I've obtained a preview of a quarterly update in the new strategic direction, which IABC leaders will issue to all members later today. Interested in readers' reaction to that, too.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Chris Sorek, crisis, IABC, Kerby Meyers

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