@JimmyT said:At the end of the day, your investment of time, money and energy with either pay off or it won’t but, at the very least, you will have learned something about yourself and about other people.
And that’s worth something.
I agree with all JT said. I recently resigned from our EC after being a member for 9 years and treasurer for 8 of those. I had no background in law or finance but I learned quite a bit about both, which was interesting. ‘It is not rocket science’, nor even the kind of science I did for my day job. We had some really big issues and improvement projects that took a great deal of work but we got them done. Owners are generally very happy with what was achieved.
I did conclude that at any given time there will be 5% who are completely resistant to reason and/or seriously lacking in normal social skills. EC members get exposed far more to such people and it can wear you down. I am glad of it though. I learned a lot about people that I had not seen through work or other aspects of life.
I don’t doubt that ECs can end up with such people dominating within the committee too. They can be aggressive, assertive and alternately* diplomatic or unpleasant. The bullies I have encountered have come from high-powered positions and were used to being taken seriously and getting their way. Being very plausible, they could sway more mild-mannered members for a while. The solution is to out-vote and out-lobby them, whether they are in the EC or outside of it, but it takes determination and many would rather walk away. They only have any power if nobody stands up to them using facts and reason. I am pleased to have hung in there and achieved a lot while on our EC but I need a break from it now.
*In one recent example, the guy does seem to alternate between on one hand giving me compliments for various achievements and being genial face to face, and on the other hand presenting written formal-looking reports to the committee that would, at face value, demonstrate that the entire EC and me in particular as treasurer have neglected various serious obligations.
In an earlier example, a different, no longer current EC member had his own rather eccentric interpretation of a particular provision of the Act. His insistence sufficiently unsettled some other EC members that it held up a review of our Rules for quite a while. Common sense, our managing agent, a strata specialist lawyer’s advice, the content of an OCN newsletter article, Rules that had survived Tribunal scrutiny and Rules adopted without controversy by other OCs were all inconsistent with this guy’s interpretation but none of this was enough to shake his confidence that he was right. In the end, I wrote to the Attorney-General, quoted this EC member’s legal argument verbatim and on the other hand presented the usual interpretation. I asked the A-G, whose department had not long previously reviewed the Act, for advice about who was right. Only with that advice in hand were we able to proceed with our internal review. Even so, our guy wrote to the A-G to let him know that he was wrong.
All quite funny in retrospect but stressful and irritating at the time when trying to get on with useful things.