When I was elected President of the Kansas City Society of Association Executives in 2021, the organization was in year two of navigating COVID-19.
The board had sharply differing opinions about when and how to return to in-person events. There was no clear playbook. There was no obvious right answer. And there was a room full of capable, well-intentioned leaders —leaders who were also having the exact same conversation in their own associations — who genuinely, and passionately, disagreed.
That experience as a volunteer — the seeing, hearing, thinking through, and feeling all sides of a tough issue among my peers — was invaluable in teaching me what such a position feels like for our own volunteer leadership when they sit in that chair.
Living it is gained insight that will never be replaced by a CAE Exam question or hearing about it from someone else.
The leader’s job in a disagreement is not to have the right answer. It’s to create the conditions where the board can find its answer.
Why Real Disagreement Is a Governance Test
Most boards function reasonably well when everyone agrees or when the disagreements are minor enough to resolve through discussion. The governance test comes when the disagreement is genuine — when reasonable people with good intentions and access to the same information reach different conclusions because they’re applying different values, different risk tolerances, or different models of what the organization owes its members.
COVID event policy was that kind of disagreement.
For some board members, the risk of meeting in person was unacceptable until vaccination rates reached a specific threshold. For others, the organizational and member harm of continued virtual programming outweighed the health risk at that point. For others still, the right answer depended on specific conditions that kept changing. And, apart from those, even, some thought it all was a non-issue and meetings should resume in person immediately.
All of those positions were reasonable, which made such an important decision pretty tough, especially when we had all agreed per board norms that we would be a unified front once a final determination had been reached.
The governance question is: how does a board move forward when real disagreement exists, without forcing false consensus or allowing paralysis?
What Moderating Real Disagreement Requires
The first thing moderating real disagreement requires is creating conditions where the disagreement can actually be heard. That sounds easy, right? Just let people talk?
We know that’s not always the case, and it takes intentional effort to hold that environment in place long enough for it to become a norm.
Sometimes, when that environment doesn’t hold up, boards might rush to consensus and short-circuit the process that makes decisions durable. If a board member’s concern wasn’t genuinely considered — if she agreed to a decision primarily to end the conversation — her buy-in is fragile and probably won’t survive the first complication or pushback.
Making space for the actual disagreement to surface early, even when it’s uncomfortable and slow, produces decisions that hold.
The second is separating the positions from the interests.
In most governance disagreements, the positions are what people say they want and the interests are what they actually care about. A board member who opposes returning to in-person events might be primarily concerned about liability exposure, or about equity for members who can’t travel, or about the signal the organization sends to the broader professional community about responsible leadership. Understanding the interest underneath the position changes what resolution is possible.
The third is being honest about what the decision actually is.
Some governance decisions are reversible: try this approach, assess the outcome, adjust. Others are not, or are much harder to reverse once made. Being clear about which kind of decision is on the table changes how much deliberation it warrants and what the threshold for consensus should be.
What It Teaches About Leading Organizations
Governing a board through genuine disagreement — making committee appointments, establishing policy under uncertainty, building consensus without forcing it — teaches a specific set of things about organizational leadership that aren’t available any other way.
It teaches you that the leader’s job in a disagreement is not to have the right answer. It’s to create the conditions where the board can find its answer. That reframe is significant. It shifts the leader’s role from advocate to facilitator — not because the leader doesn’t have views, but because imposing those views undermines the legitimacy of the decision and the trust of the people who didn’t agree.
It teaches you that the organizations that navigate hard decisions well tend to have invested in the trust that makes those conversations possible before the hard decision arrived. You can’t build the relational foundation for difficult governance in the middle of the difficulty. That foundation is built in the ordinary periods, through ordinary interactions, through being reliably consistent in how you treat people and reliable in following through on what you say.
It teaches you that disagreement, handled well, strengthens organizations. It forces the explicit examination of assumptions, values, and priorities that usually operate implicitly. Boards that have navigated genuine disagreement and come out the other side with a decision they can all support — even the ones who would have chosen differently — are more capable governance bodies than the ones that haven’t been tested.
The test isn’t something to be avoided. It’s where the capability that includes respect and trust, gets built.
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