Management Partnership
What your Community Manager Wants You to Know
Nearing in on 10 years in the industry, I have experienced a variety of Board-to-Manager relationships. Some have been great and some have been, we’ll say “unsuccessful”. One of the biggest reasons for an unsuccessful relationship between a Board and a Manager or management company is a disconnect in expectations. A Board can have big expectations for their manager while the manager does not have the same expectation of their role in the Association. Conversely, a Manager may have been hired only to find out the Board behaves much like a self-managed community and much of the information is still withheld from the management company.
Here are four things your manager wants you to know to have a successful management partnership:
Trust is Imperative
This seems obvious but it bears repeating. Trust is the foundation on which a relationship with a community or property management company is most sound. Without trust, everything else begins to break down. With a relationship based on trust, a manager can thrive working with the Board and the community. Distrust is a time-management killer. Without trust, emails and meetings begin to sound more like an interrogation than a productive meeting. Managers begin to spend more time back-peddling to find out why something happened and whose fault it was, regardless of the seriousness of the accusations. This ends up destroying progress towards projects and events rather than rebuilding trust. The lack of progress then piles onto the already disgruntled feelings of the Board or homeowners.
If you have a relationship that is starting to look like this, don’t spend time backpedaling. Instead give the manager some future goals for clarity and transparency to rebuild the trust AND continue progress towards a project or an event.
Use Your Manager
This might be controversial in the Management world as I have worked for companies that try to minimize the work the Manager provides to a Board. However, I will always recommend using your manager liaison to the full extent of your management agreement. First, an HOA Board position in the State of Colorado is a volunteer position. Board members cannot legally be paid, incentivized, or otherwise compensated for their time. You are paying a management company to offload the majority of the time-consuming work of managing a community. If your management agreement provides for a task, delegate that task 100% of the time. As a Board member, you are ultimately responsible for those tasks, but the bulk of the work should be delegated.
The more your manager is involved, the better they can manage. If your community manager is involved, even in a limited sense, with committees or projects, they will have a better understanding of the budget, communications, and other projects relative. For example, if you have a separate architectural review committee that does not involve your manager, homeowners may receive both an approval and a violation for their construction project.
Your manager may not always voice frustrations with withheld information, but another way to quickly frustrate your manager is delegating a project to them only to complete the project without them. Again, use your manager. If there is a good reason to have two people do the same project separately, discuss it beforehand (such as budget comparison, accountability work, etc.).
If your Board does not wish to involve your Community Manager, you may have either a trust issue to address (see #1) or a control issue. You will want to address any control issues within your Board to find out what the root cause is. Most control issues are stagnant trust issues.
Your Manager Is Not Your Employee
I have been in a handful of meetings in the past 10 years in which a Board member has told either myself or their manager, “You work for us, not (insert: contractor, vendor, or other industry entity).” In truth, your community manager does not work for your Board. They work for their management company. The management company works with your Board. If you doubt this, take a look at your management agreement. You will never find the name of a specific manager in the agreement. (The only exception would be if your Association truly has a W2, employed manager. Then yes, they work for the Board.)
As a Board member, you want your relationship to be a partnership. You want your community manager to speak to you as an advisor, not as an employee. Your community manager is not just there to do the Board’s bidding, they are there to provide guidance, education, support as well as accomplish the agreed-upon tasks of the Board.
If your Board is starting to treat your manager like an employee, perhaps your not using your manager to their full extent.
Understand Your Management Agreement
If trust is the foundation of a management relationship, then the building’s frame is your management agreement and scope of work. This provides the boundaries to the projects your can ask of your manager. If your management company provides boundaries to protect their manager’s time, you will need to respect those boundaries. And many companies will provide for additional time spent at an additional hours rate so you can still accomplish those projects.
On the other hand, if you find a specific project or task that is consistently skipped by your manager or management company, you have grounds to request some sort of compensation or the additional time to get said task or project done without any additional charges. Your management agreement is just that - an agreement. Both parties can lean on it for clarity and expectations.
I recommend keeping your management agreement handy for all Board members to review annually.
Whether you have a successful relationship with your current management company and have faced some recent issues, or you are looking for a new management relationship, review any issues you have faced to determine if there are any actions your Board can take to create a successful partnership. You may find that the best solution is to rebuild your existing management relationship.
If you are looking for a management change, Candor Community Management can assist. We manage communities local to Summit County, but we offer support for management changes to Board members throughout Colorado.