Preparing for an important board vote

Our family's been in politics my whole life and around the dinner table we always had a saying that you never go into an important vote without knowing the expected results of that vote. So that's key in the HOA world as well, just like politics. So this is what I would tell a manager. If you know what the board should do, then you want to get the key facts to a supporter on that board in order to be able to know what the end result is going to be.

So I coach them to contact the other board members one on one so you don't violate the open meeting laws and have a dialogue with the other board members in private before the meeting even starts because you want to get them on board before the board meeting. The experts, if you have any, you want to bring them into the picture as well so the experts can talk to the individual board members, explain the situation and why the ultimate result would be the way you want it to go.

Then also bring the... Expert into the board meeting so they hear from the expert explaining the data and the options, not from you as a board member or a manager. So I'll give you a quick example. You have three buildings that you know have leaks and the other nine buildings haven't been investigated yet. You know that they should be inspected. And your job then is to convince the other board members that they need to vote to have those inspected as well.

And the expert supports that information. So you, the manager, leads them towards making the right decision. Now board members, if you don't know what your fellow board members are going to be doing, then you don't know how the vote's going to turn out and that's going to be bad for the community.