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The plenary meeting of that organization immediately devolved into
one board member verbally attacking another and explaining why certain
things were not done that apparently should have been done. About 15
minutes later, things had gotten so bad, that a general member made a
motion to adjourn the meeting and the meeting was adjourned shortly
thereafter. As a visitor to that organization, I was incredibly annoyed - I
spent money/time traveling to come to this event, chose it over another
event that I could have attended, and it was a waste of my time. It turned
me off to the organization that people would act that way for such
objectively silly and selfish reasons. It also turned other people off to both
of those board members – the board member being accused AND the
board member making the accusations.

(2) I was serving on the board during the largest general meeting of
another organization toward the end of the academic year. This was one
such organization where nearly every year this large meeting usually
devolves at some point into rudeness by general members. Not fully
understanding the impact of his comments, a board member, with whom I
had served for the better part of a year and with whom I had a great
professional working relationship, stated words to the effect of “how do we
know the votes are legit”, both the question and his tone of voice led
everyone in the room to believe that he was implying that I hadn’t done my
job as the relevant board member in that situation. What he actually meant
was that he thought that he observed members “cheating” when it was time
to count votes such that one part of the organization had more voting
power than others. However, even without the alleged cheating, this part
of the organization would have had more voting power anyway as more
members from that part of the organization showed up to the meeting. In
that situation, I wish that he had first discussed it with me. First, it really
doesn’t matter if one part of the organization has more voting members
than the others- people do not always vote the way you think they might or
even objectively should. Some members vote for personal reasons, ones
that no one else will ever know about. Other members have voted
for/against some things for very superficial reasons like the person with the
idea/motion happens to be physically attractive or because their
friend/acquaintance voted for/against and they feel like they need to vote in
the same way so as not to anger that friend/acquaintance, or simply
because they want to end the meeting, so on and so forth. And with all due
respect to that board member, who cares?! Sure, the ideal is to have a
more equal proportion of all types of members to the organization but as
leaders, you must go with who showed up to the meeting, provided that the
board has properly notified members of the meeting and the numbers
coincide with your organization’s governing documents. Secondly, his
comments, tone, and particularly since he was a fellow board member,
gave some general members the go-ahead to be rather rude to me and it
wasted a lot of time at the meeting. Time that could have been used to

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