Tag: condominium

Bored with the Board?

My dearly beloved and I live in an apartment-style condominium. We’ve been here ever since I retired thirteen years ago. The place suits us very well, although we still have stuff in boxes from our downsizing from a house. We bought it with the intention of staying here as long as we possibly could. We hope that any change will be years away, but who knows?

After living here for three years, I had enough questions about the building’s management to seek a seat on the Board of Directors. I spent one year as a Director at Large, one as Vice President, and the last eight years as President. During that time, I developed a solid working relationship with our Property Manager/Building Administrator, and also spent some time educating myself about condominium management and related issues. For most of this time, I found myself enjoying the work, which surprised me. When I was in parish ministry, the issues that I found most tiresome related to property management. And what does a condo board deal with? You guessed it: property management! The difference is that managing a building is the mission of a condo board, but is only tangential to the mission of a parish. Yes, it’s important to maintain a building, but that’s not the parish’s mission — or at least it shouldn’t be!

Life on the board started to get tiresome two or three years ago, when a couple of members started to make the board’s workings more difficult. There’s no point in going into the gory details, but suffice it to say that internal board conflicts meant that we spent more time dealing with them, and less on the actual building issues. Just as building matters seemed “off-mission” to me in the church, inter-personal conflicts seemed off-mission on the condo board.

Skipping past internal matters, I started to find my Board work very stressful. My dearly beloved wanted me to step away from the Board, and I almost did. I should have listened to her! After being re-elected to the Board, and then voted out as President, I found myself in a difficult position, with a new President whose leadership style was much more authoritarian than mine. Could I work with him? I wasn’t sure, but when our Building Administrator resigned, I knew I couldn’t in good conscience serve under those circumstances, and submitted my own resignation.

I don’t regret the time I spent on the board. It had its frustrations, but I leave with my head held high, knowing that I did what I could to help make and keep this place a good place to live. I have some regret about leaving the board, mostly around the events leading up to my decision. But I have no regret at all about not being a board member any more. I was becoming a bit bored with the “same old, same old” nature of much of the work, and increasingly stressed by the conflicts around the board work in the past year or two.

I’m looking forward to being just another resident owner, admittedly one with a history, but who has no reason any more to get stressed out over details of contracts, personal conflicts, and the minutiae of building management.

I had resolved to leave the board permanently no later than age 80. Having just turned 78, I have beaten that deadline by two years, and it feels good.

Honesty isn’t the best policy…

It’s the only policy.

I’m in my first year on my condo board. I said when I retired and we moved in here that I would never do this: condo boards deal mainly with finances, building issues, and complaints, the three aspects of church vestries that I found most tiresome. The missional aspect of church life helps to put these matters in some perspective. Not so in a condominium.

Nonetheless, I found myself drawn to this service, in part because I felt that things were not altogether right in how our building was being run. Somewhat to my surprise, I find I’m enjoying the work, or I was, until this week. Back-story: earlier this year we embarked on a project to revitalize a common lounge by the main entrance. After some months, and an expenditure of a reasonable but not huge amount of money, the project was finished, and many people commented on how much better it looked now. But — boom! — we received a package of 11 letters of complaint at this past week’s meeting. The writers didn’t like what was done, and they didn’t like the way it was done. I can accept that some mistakes were made. I also know that you can’t please everyone in matters of taste. People are entitled to their opinions, and if some feelings were hurt, as seems to be the case, some kind of apology could be made.

Dear_Sir_formal_letter_iStock_000004683049XSmallExcept…

Only one of the letters was signed: the property manager had removed the other signatures at the writers’ request. They apparently didn’t want to be open to recriminations, wanting to keep the building peaceful. For me, this just makes things less peaceful, because anonymous complaints make any kind of meaningful response and reconciliation impossible. It’s a matter of community building, which requires openness, honesty, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions and feelings.

In one parish where I served as Rector, we had a spate of critical anonymous letters, very often placed in the collection plate. They bothered me mightily until I realized that I could not respond to them without being in dialogue with the writers. The trouble was less the (sometimes valid) content  than the one-sidedness of the process. I announced a policy of refusing to acknowledge anonymous communications, inviting people who had concerns to come and see me in person. Over the next several months, I had a number of very worthwhile conversations with parishioners. The dishonest communications stopped and the parish never looked back. We discovered the benefits of openness and honesty.

Why would I call anonymous letters dishonest? Simply because they allow the writer to hide behind a veil, covering up any other matters that might pertain to it. The letter may be the truth, but there is no way of knowing if it’s either the whole truth or nothing but the truth. Lies of omission disrespect the recipient, and are every bit as dishonest as lies of commission.

In another parish, I encountered a more straightforward kind of dishonesty. A parishioner had donated a couple of buckets of soup for a church lunch. Somehow, someone had set them on the back steps, where they were forgotten for long enough that they went rotten, ruining the ice-cream pails they came in. A group of people came to me to ask what they should do. What should they tell the donor, who had a sharp tongue and a habit of holding grudges? They wanted a plausible story which would save everyone’s face, but they were rather taken aback when I suggested they simply tell the truth and suffer the consequences.

It worked. The doPrintnor was annoyed about the waste of her gift, and also about the loss of her pails, but the fact that her friends gave her the respect of the truth served to smooth the waters. Trust had been damaged, but if a lie had been told, further trust would have become impossible.
In the church, even more than in a condominium, we are concerned about the building of community. Let’s remember that true community can only be built on trust, and trust can only be built on honesty. And, of course, dishonesty destroys trust.

Jesus said “…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32)