One of the big time commitments in my life right now is my role with the Nevada City Downtown Association. This fledgling organization was formed for the purpose of enhancing the economic and aesthetic vitality of Nevada City’s downtown commercial district. I’m in the second year of a two-year term and was elected Vice-chair (or am I the chair of vices? ha ha) last September.

My arrangement with the Chairman of the organization is that I develop the agenda and run the meetings. My job is to keep focused on the subject at hand, make sure everyone is heard, and get us out of there on time.

Last night’s meeting ran half an hour over. Thinking about what I could have done differently, two things come to mind. One was that the agenda was too ambitious.

The other has to do with the situation that I’m still figuring out how to best run the meeting. The context here is that we had 5 new directors join the Board. It’s an active, engaged, fun group of people. Since they are new, discussions can take longer when filling in the history of a subject. And I’ve noticed that this new group is consistently coming to board meetings–attendance has been up at 11-12 people which is better attendance than before so there are more people to be heard.

Another part of the context is that one of my goals is to allow fun and levity to happen. I’ve seen that this helps people stay engaged–and really, we should have fun in community involvement! I don’t mean fun at the expense or distraction of the purpose at hand, but if an ongoing evening’s banter about Bob’s hat is going to weave throughout the evening, I’m not going to stop that. And I want the meetings to adjourn in two hours.

In order to have completed this ambitious agenda within two hours, I’d have had to be really strict about digressions and people making their points quickly. While there are a couple of situations in which I think I could have spoken up sooner, in general, people weren’t repeating themselves, or each other. People need to be heard. Winded people need to make their points more succinctly. Managing this with smile is important. Just how much of my inner control freak do I let loose in the meeting? Still sussing that one out.

Everyone was still lively and engaged at the end of the meeting. That to me is a sign of success even if we did go over time. =)