President - acmwumn/admin GitHub Wiki

Duties

  • Keep your officers and members alive and healthy
  • Lead officer meetings
  • Serve as an example and a source of knowledge
  • Communicate
  • Monitor and delegate primary tasks and projects to appropriate officers or committee heads
  • Probe members for potential officers and volunteers

Advice

TLDR: Take care of officers. Delegate, but stay involved. Make all officers enable Slack notifications. CC your clubs Google Group for all emails. Update the group's wiki and Drive regularly. Set deadlines. Request status reports. Uphold transparency. Take care of your officers and members.

Take care of your fellow officers. This includes their physical, emotional and mental well being. Of course you should understand and enforce safety standards for officers and members, but that is only a start. Emotional and mental health are much tougher tasks. Most importantly, check in with your officers. It's common for officers to become overwhelmed or depressed. When officers are unproductive, especially suddenly so, these are two likely reasons. So keep an eye out for signs of both. When discussing task status make sure your officers fully understand their responsibilities. Ask specific questions about what they need to know instead of just asking if they have it under control, and encourage them to ask you questions.

Delegate literally everything unless the well being of officers, members, or the organization require otherwise. You should be doing as little as possible directly, but keeping in frequent contact with committees. Why Delegate?

Keep communication transparent, active, and easily available. Require that all officers enable desktop notifications from Slack and CC all club related emails to the Google Group on every email response. Excessive emails can get annoying, but clubs are vulnerable without transparency. Why is transparency so important? Update this wiki constantly, and repeatedly encourage your officers to do the same.

Foster a healthy environment. Pizza, donuts, or home-made snacks are a cheap way motivate during mundane workshops or meetings if you can afford it. If it's an official event, permits are required for food. Calling out members on inappropriate behavior is important, even if it doesn't officially break any club rules. If anything escalates don't be hesitant to call on other officers to help resolve the situation. This is typically the job of the group Adviser, Membership/Outreach Officer, and Community Ambassador. Any and all serious mediation should have all three of these officers in attendance if possible.

Get members involved. Groups are much easier to maintain when more members volunteer become officers. It's a good idea to have a generic "Officer" position to help involve members who regularly volunteers, without scaring them away. Having too many volunteers or officers is rarely a problem.

The Student Conflict Resolution Center A great resource for training as well as maintaining healthy relationships among officers and members.

Boynton provides mental health resources API Training Shop Blog About

(President duties referenced from https://github.umn.edu/USTEM/Officer-Resources/wiki/President)