7 Best Habits of Effective Community Association Managers

Is your career aim to be a great community association manager?

Many do hope for greatness in business, yet the complexity, details and demands of it all get in the way.  Are you using a successful process for building skills, managing expenses, and maximizing availability and guidance for staff, volunteers, community members and your board?

In this post, we discover a series of 7 key steps to mastery so you can then help everyone else. As you learn and practice them, you’ll see improvement in your community management results — operationally and financially.  Your spirit will lift and business will improve.

Going back to school for an MBA really isn’t necessary if you build great leadership habits and use an excellent association management platform. Keep in mind that not all traditional association management practices can be fixed. You may be wrestling with things that simply won’t be remedied. 

This is why your new organizational skills and the new automation and self-help tools help you switch to a new channel — to eliminate manual work and member resistance, and optimize revenue collection.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

You might be familiar with Stephen Covey’s bestselling book on the 7 key habits of highly effective people. Millions have read it and still use its simplified plan to develop habits of success.

The main point of his book is the specific, influential daily habits which determine how effective people will be. And of course, this would apply to community managers and staff as well. You can improve both personally and professionally by simplifying specific aspects of how you manage every day.

Here are the 7 Best Habits Stephen Covey Cited:

Habit 1: Be Proactive (taking responsibility for your role as leader, with no excuses or casting off)

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind (begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination).

Habit 3: Put First Things First (prioritize the most important tasks and act on them)

Habit 4: Think Win/Win (the habit of working in collaboration with others and not competitively to create the best from all relationships)

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood (the habit of listening to other people’s ideas and feelings and not ignoring them)

Habit 6: Synergize (the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork, open-mindedness, and the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems)

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw (preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have—you)

Property managers of all kinds have their own unique array of responsibilities and goals, as they work closely with the association board to manage their association’s operations.

However, for a community association manager, those habits are more specific and management-focused.

The 7 Habits of Successful CAM Managers

For a CAM manager, the focus is on organization, efficiency, and providing leadership for staff and community members.

And these 7 Work Habits prioritize your most vital responsibilities:

1. Organize CAM Key Objectives and Administrating Efficiently – knowing what successful operations are, what needs to be done, and to ensure a system is in place to accomplish all objectives. Top CAM systems such as ManageCasa™ help with that overall challenge.
2. Be Knowledgeable and in Control – Being on top of all community issues and work tasks and ensuring you have backup support from staff, thus leaving no gaps and misses with the board or community members. ManageCasa keeps you informed and alerted on time.
3. Optimize Personal Availability – being mobile in the communities and using digital communications tools to be visible and available when necessary. ManageCasa helps you be everywhere, anytime.
4. Communicate Clearly and Responsively – preparing mindful communications/messaging and engaging with board members and community members to respond to their questions. ManageCasa’s communications capabilities keep everyone on the same page, the first time.
5. Support Staff – being proactive to engage with employees/volunteers with recognition of their best efforts, provide resources and assistance, and help them improve, feel engaged and grow.  ManageCasa lets you deliver a supportive tone in every message, and help staff recognize the value of their work.
6. Be Operationally and Financially Transparent and in control of the Association Budget – transparency is an asset which elicits understanding and support from the community. Excellence in community association accounting gives you awesome control of all financial activities.
7. Be Actively Engaged in the Community – building membership through events, parties, board meetings and activities in the community every day. ManageCasa’s community association websites help you get your message out clearly, consistently, and generating spirit for community events.

A good attitude and a respect for success is the hallmark of any great leader. With that as your starting point, your daily habits are easier to understand and execute.

Conferences & Trade Shows

And speaking of excellence in execution, your association management platform is vital in helping you deliver consistently on all of the 7 habits discussed.

From member communications to transparent financials, to payment automation and insightful management reports, ManageCasa’s association platform is designed to make you even more effective.

Take some time right now to discover the features, tools and benefits modern association managers are receiving with ManageCasa™.

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