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.
Into the blue... 