This is a guest post from Eric Lanke, CEO of the National Fluid Power Association

How do association executives build and sustain the culture of their organizations? Specifically, what is the CEO’s role versus others in the organization’s hierarchy? Conventional wisdom says culture comes from the top, and, in many respects, that’s true. But associations, like all organizations, are systems. And knowing that, are there also decentralized strategies that association CEOs should be leveraging?

This is the topic Jamie asked me to tackle in a series of guest posts, and, as I recently described on my own blog, I’ve decided to accept that challenge through a very specific frame–my own efforts within my own association to build and sustain a culture that actively seeks to understand the world of our members.

For us, that’s no easy task. NFPA is a trade association, comprised primarily of manufacturing and distribution companies in the hydraulic and pneumatic industries. The people in our active membership are company presidents, senior executives, product managers, and sales engineers. Most have engineering degrees and many have MBAs. Most work for (or own) organizations far larger than our association, and they all operate in an extremely competitive environment, where product differentiation and sales growth are among the most essential of performance drivers.

Our staff, talented as we may be, live in an entirely different world. None of us is an engineer. We were mostly liberal arts majors in college, and our professional skills are focused more on communication and consensus building than on customer acquisition and competitive advantage. Although it’s fair to say that our skill sets and those of our members can be combined in some powerful ways, that doesn’t remove the fact that often, when listening to our members speak, we have no concrete idea what they’re talking about.

So what am I doing to change that? I wish I was wise enough to have figured out a comprehensive plan guaranteed to work. Instead, I have lately been conducting a number of experiments, attempting, if nothing else, to push people out of their comfort zones. And one of those experiments has been to start pushing back against the use of the word “member” in the office.

It sounds like heresy, I know, but I’m convinced that the word more often than not masks our ignorance about who our members actually are. I’ll hear people talking about our members, about some program or product that we’re designing or trying to market to them, and I’ll realize that the term is being used in a way that has absolutely no depth to it at all. Evidently convinced that we know all that we need to about our “members,” we have adopted a universal term to describe them that allows us to substitute our own opinions and predilections for any honest assessment of their needs and desires.

“Which member are you talking about?” I’ll sometimes challenge. “The division president of the multi-billion dollar, global motion control and engineering systems company who is trying to help his product innovation team increase their execution score, or the district manager of the distribution warehouse in the southeastern United States who is trying to hire more tech-savvy employees to increase the value-added services he can offer his customers?”

Those are just two examples from our real environment—and they tend to shake people out of their sense of complacency about what they’re doing and the value it might have for our “members.”

But I hope the larger point has also been made on you. When one thinks of the diversity of responsibilities, organizational types, and business objectives that exist within any association membership, the idea of using one simple term to describe everyone should quickly reveal itself as the oversimplified shortcut it truly is.

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Eric Lanke is CEO of the National Fluid Power Association and does a fabulous job of working out loud on his own blog.