My Experience Creating an Organization
During the Spring 2015 semester of school, when I was a freshman in college here, the Department of Economics started an initiative called “Women in Economics” because they saw a need to form an organization to encourage the involvement of women in the economics field. An email was sent out to everyone and those interested would sign up for committees. With it being my second semester of my first year in college, and not having participated in any RSO or club on campus, I saw this as an opportunity to get more involved and participate in something outside of school work. There were three committees: program and information gathering for developing content for the organization, alumna networking for reaching out to other alumnae, and outreach for recruiting more people and collaborating with other RSOs.
I had signed up for the first and third committee because those were the committees I could see myself be most involved in. However, when the committee leaders for those committees would call us to meet, barely anyone would show up. Soon after, the committee leaders themselves would forget about their role in Women in Economics. I saw a void in the leadership and organizational structure of this group so, in my sophomore year, I met with one of the department advisors and another student to create a solid leadership structure that could make the group blossom. I established the roles of the leadership board to have a president, two committees (internal and external), and two public relations chairs. By consolidating the former three committees into two committees, I saw that since Women in Economics was still a relatively small organization, three committees would be too much. Internal Committee would deal with developing events and content for the organization itself and within the group, and External Committee would deal with reaching out to people and groups outside of Women in Economics, like alumnae and other RSOs, for collaboration.
The applications for these roles went out and I saw another opportunity to make a mark for myself on campus. I applied for the role of “president”. I sat down at a cafe for a couple of hours to work on my application. After a blind election, I won the role of President, and thus began my journey to establish a solid foundation for Women in Economics on campus.
Women in Economics didn’t start out as an RSO; we started out as a small student-led group run within the Department of Economics under the guidance of one of the advisors. Because we weren’t an RSO, we couldn’t charge members dues and a lot of our events had limited funding from what the Department would allow for us, which was very small. This obstacle is what I now know to be a transaction cost. In exchange for the guidance and vision the Department of Economics gave us by providing help from advisors, we couldn’t be an RSO yet. My first semester running the organization wasn’t very accomplishing because our funds, if any, were very tight. My executive board decided that for the future of the organization, and so we can increase our finances, we had to apply to be an RSO.
Fall 2016 was when we finally officially became an RSO. Another challenge I realized was, when starting an organization from scratch, you have to trust that ALL of the other members on the board would work together for the common goal. One of the executive board members would be very slow to respond to messages and didn’t do her job as secretary of taking meeting notes. For each meeting, I would send an agenda of what I had planned to talk about and I would also put together a slideshow to get things going. Her job as secretary was to take note of things discussed that went beyond the slideshow so that we could refer to those later. Instead, she just copied down whatever I had written in the agenda and on the powerpoint, which totally defeats the purpose of taking meeting notes. I realized that either I hadn’t done my job to properly explain her role, or she had misunderstood what her role was. I explained to her that the point of having someone to take meeting notes is to have our discussions on paper so that we could refer to it later. Everything ran smoothly after that, expect she would still be late to respond to messages and would forget to check her email. After a couple of weeks, she came to me saying that she didn’t think she would be able to continue her role in the organization anymore because her priorities were elsewhere. She parted from our group on good terms. Another transaction cost is relying on others to see the same goal as you do. The cost of putting responsibility on others is trusting that they will uphold that responsibility. As a leader, I soon came to learn that you have to be able to trust that your group members have the same priorities as you do to see the organization be successful.
A bit later in the semester I will give the class a theory of how to get committees to function well (many do not). The upshot is that most of the committee work happens outside the committee meeting and one person needs to play the role of "whip" to coordinate things. That is where the transaction costs really are in a functional committee. If meetings become brainstorming sessions, that might work once or twice, but otherwise it tends to break down as people think they are spinning their wheels. It sounds like you've learned some of these lessons the hard way.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, the Economics profession as a whole is struggling with gender and common human decency. If you haven't seen this piece by Justin Wolfers, I encourage you to read it and share with your group. It will probably make you angry. That is not an emotion to sustain, but every once in a while it can be a strong motivator.
Let me get back to your post. With voluntary efforts, in general, people will bring different intensity to the endeavor and failure might be likely because there is a lack of understanding of what is needed to make things work at the outset. You may recall in class I asked one day whether it is easier to be opportunistic in an anonymous setting or where one know one another. If the former is where the opportunism is more likely to occur then a first step would for people to learn about each other before getting to the work of the committee. That certainly should be true for the officers of the group. Maybe it is also true for the group as a whole. You might consider doing something like that this semester (if you are still President) to make the committee function at a higher level.