We’re doing weekly calls for the ERC (election review committee) and we seem to be making some progress. This past week we came up with a good outline of what we hope to see as the process for selecting the nomcom (look for a post from Bill Graziano for details), and you can from that guess that we plan to retain the nomcom as part of our recommendations back to the Board.

My focus has been thinking about what matters when evaluating candidates, because to a degree we’re trying to predict success. I’ve got about a 50% average on picking employees, so I’m not sure that I can do much better with picking Board members. But skill or not, there’s merit to making it clear which attributes we value, and giving the nomcom very clear guidance on how the attributes are scored and weighted. What I hope we’ll wind up with is a process that:

• Allows potential candidates to easily self-assess if they meet the minimum qualifications (and yes, the hard part is describing those)
• Allows us to score candidates in a close to objective manner in most areas. For example, if we include education we might award 1 point for High School, 2 points for two year degree, and perhaps cap it at 3 for a 4 year degree or more. For things like leadership it might be 1 point for each 12 months in a management/leadership position, with a max of x points, and it must have been within the last x years.
• Allows our nomcom to add a portion of the overall score based on their impressions during an interview. Not everyone shines under stress, not every nomcom member will see everyone the same way. Maybe this is 20% of the score, but it’s not 80%.
• Takes the scores and then puts the top 3*slots on the slate

That’s not a huge change from last year, but I think it’s really going to add a lot of depth and structure to the “process”. What we want is for the Board (and by extension, the members) to tell the Nomcom the attributes it values and how they want them evaluated. It’s got to be more than “pick the ones you think best”. Even with these changes it’s really important that we get a diverse Nomcom that’s vested in the health of PASS overall, and I think we have good ideas for you on that.

There are two places where I’m pushing for change. The first is that we need a safety valve, a way to bypass the Board and the nomcom to a degree, to make sure that if the members want change, they have a way to do it. My proposal is that of the candidates who passed the minimum qualifications but did not make it to the final slate we’ll have a vote by the members (I don’t know how else to do it) to the slate. It’s essentially a write-in, with the pre-requisite that you have to meet the minimums and do the work to fill out the application, which makes sure that we get candidates that are interested and viable.

The other one is removing the requirement that sitting Board members go through the nomination process for re-election. It takes time, and if they were qualified before, reasonably they still are. It’s both their time and the time of the nomcom, and it’s tough to imagine a time when the nomcom would not put a sitting board member on the slate. Then they get to run on their record and the members decide. Is this right? I argue with myself on it! I’ve been through it this past year and didn’t mind paying my dues, but was it worthwhile? I don’t think it was, but I’m sensitive – perhaps overly so – to the perception that we’re trying to make it harder to change by making it easier to maintain the status quo, if that makes any sense.

We’ve got a lot more ideas than that, and a lot of discussion, none of that is set yet. Doing it by phone is slow and mildly painful. Good discussion, great differing points of view, but no problems working together. I just wish we’d been able to work it out to spend a weekend working on this in one room. The hard part is that some ideas need time to grow, so doing it all in a weekend would have been unlikely.

As we talk about our ideas for recommendations I’m trying to look at the entire stack. It’s not enough to just fix one thing or tweak one thing, we have to try – as best we can – to look at the entire stack and ask if it’s rational. I want it to be clear and simple, if not easy, for someone to look at the requirements and decide to become a candidate, and I want them to be able to clearly understand how we evaluate and rank them. In the end we may not satisfy everyone about why we value x more than y, but we’ll have it up on the board,and we can revisit each year and tweak as we learn lessons. In fairness we’ve tried to do that the past two years, but never with the big picture view we’re trying to do this year.

I’ve probably left you with more questions than less, but wanted to let you know we’re working on it and I think that we’re making progress. Post questions if you have them and I’ll do my best to answer!