“The thing I wish I could change is how we deal with each other,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told staff at an all-hands meeting earlier this month.

It’s a tall order. The aerospace company, which has infamously seen its fortunes fall due to high-profile plane failures and stories of management eroding quality control, has had to battle its way back to respectability. At the all-staff meeting, Ortberg said the root of the company’s crisis was its siloed culture, in which teams “don’t work with each other as well as we could.” With a staff of 160,000 people globally, improving communication is essential.

But even an association with a staff the fraction of that size can experience the same kind of disorder. The meetings department might not be aware of changes happening in the membership department, which will impact registration for the next conference—which, by the way, is getting a new website that IT isn’t keeping you updated on, which impacts marketing, and on and on. 

The risks of that disorder may not be as high-stakes at an association as they are at Boeing, but they hobble important work all the same. It can be tempting to see this problem as a long-term strategy discussion—“We’ll get to all that during the next reorg when the new strategic plan is approved by the board”—but it can be done iteratively, and with speed.

Writing at the Harvard Business Review, leadership experts Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss make an argument for speedy change that’s different from the “move fast and break things” ethos that defines Silicon Valley. “The most successful change leaders we know solve problems at an accelerated pace while also taking responsibility for the success and wellbeing of their customers, shareholders, and employees,” they write. “They move fast and fix things.”

If leaders aren’t communicating that they’re responding with care and attention, people are less likely to follow.

Doing that in large part depends on a mindset shift among top leadership. Executives can make the mistake, they write, of assuming that a problem resides with this one department, when the issue may be more holistic. “Don’t assume your take is necessarily right, particularly if you’re surrounded by people with strong incentives to agree with you,” they write. Look outside of your familiar networks to identify places where the real issue is. (For instance: The true issue may not reside with the meetings or membership department, but with an AMS badly in need of updating that’s sowing all this confusion.)

Tone from the top matters here too, Frei and Morriss write; if leaders aren’t communicating that they’re responding with care and attention, people are less likely to follow along with any changes they make. “Low empathy is a big deal, as people don’t trust leaders who seem to be primarily in it for themselves,” they write.

That matters because what an efficiency-minded leader is doing isn’t “making people do things faster.” It’s reducing friction—it’s finding the places where miscommunication and misunderstanding slows down processes and makes it harder to introduce changes. Boeing, with a reputational crisis and host of businesses to manage, has a lot of work to do on that front. Luckily for the usual association executive, the scope is smaller—but the goal no less important. 

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