Supporting Regions, Divisions, Tribes and Teams
The past couple of months have been formative for the Board of Directors.
We voted to put Stan Snow in as president a couple of months early, as he was ready and Sandy Peisner was ready to complete. In December, we approved the annual operational budget.
We have been reviewing the Organizational structure for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because we need to put a better legal structure in place for our Canadian men. Secondly, we needed to sort out some insurance issues. Our Treasurer, Gerry Holowachuk (Eastern Canada Region) did a terrific job making sense out of the insurance issues, and we now have insurance in place for Canada that equals that of the United States side of MDI. We still need to sort out additional legal issues in order to ensure that we operate in Canada similar to the US. This will be resolved before the middle of the year.
The Board is spending its time looking into the future to plan what MDI will look like and what we will be doing 4, 5 and 10 years from now. We face a changing world, and we will have some real challenges understanding how to work the new generation of men. We need to ensure that we continue our mission and we remain relevant and growing. We have begun a strategic planning committee that will not simply set new targets, but will look at how we will face future challenges. We want to honor our culture and traditions and also become more flexible and adaptable. Some of these challenges may require MDI to evaluate our structure to see how we can improve our effectiveness in creating successful teams.
One of the things where we haven’t done a very good job is finding out in a systematic way, what we are doing right and what we are screwing up. We have lots of opinions from our members, but not a methodical way to measure how we are doing as an organization or how are members are doing over time. We have developed a Key Performance Indicators committee to look at what we should measure, and how we should measure it.
We are forming a Technology Steering Committee to look at how we can use other technologies to communicate and stay connected. I know that many of our man are using Facebook, social media and other means to stay in touch, organize meetings and reach out to the world. Our communication is changing and technology is here to stay. We can screw this up if we don’t understand how to use this effectively (and when to not use it as well!)
Several Board Members’ terms expire in June. (Southwest, Western, Southeast Western Canada) Your representative might be recruiting other men to run for the Board. This is an important position that will have impact on the future of MDI. If you have the experience and commitment to make a difference at this level, please talk with your RC or your Board rep to find out more.
The MDI President, Stan Snow, is doing a great job running the organization, and this Board intends to stay out of running the day-to-day operations. Snow has that handled. We support him and help him when he requires it. Instead, we are looking far into the future, and are excited about the opportunity that lies ahead. The Board of Directors are engaged in creating the framework for long-term success.