An association leader can be easily enchanted by one word: more. More products and services, more member groups to reach out to, more sponsors, more advocacy efforts, and on and on. It’s a natural instinct for a mission-driven organization: If your goal is to make sure that the International Widget Society promotes the importance of widgets to every person on the planet, then your widget-y work is never done.

But the “more” philosophy can be self-defeating. More effort means more layers of supervision and management, more stress, more expense—and, quite often, very little payoff. Writing in Fast Company, productivity expert Donna McGeorge puts a spotlight on the toll this can take on leaders. Accumulation, she writes, “gathers layers: inherited systems, obligations that no longer serve a purpose. Often, there’s the comforting illusion that being across everything means being in control. But this is a fragile place to be.”

If 2025 has clarified anything, it’s the pressure points that association members are facing—around their jobs, around travel, around funding—and put the distinctions between wants and needs in sharp relief. An organization’s instinct is often to demonstrate that it’s “doing something” by standing up a new initiative—McGeorge points to a study that demonstrates humans’ impulse to equate “improvement” and “addition.” But the tail end of the year might be a good time to start thinking differently: What are the processes that need to be pared back or abandoned?

McGeorge calls this process “leading by subtraction,” points to the example of the company Shopify, which in 2023 “unleashed a Chaos Monkey” and cancelled all of its recurring group meetings, nuked unused Slack channels, and barred all meetings on Wednesdays. Impressively, Shopify remains a going concern despite this; removing the baggage of “well, it’s a recurring meeting, guess we need to meet” gave employees back meaningful hours and reshifted the company’s focus.

An association executive doesn’t have to think too hard about ways they can similarly streamline processes. Over time, associations tend to accrue task forces and committees that haven’t kept up with the association’s current needs, filled with low outputs and dissatisfied volunteers. There are ill-managed “cross functional” teams with no clearly articulated purpose, weekly check-ins that could easily be biweekly or even monthly. And that’s not even thinking about the bigger challenges—the regional event that isn’t taking off but consumes a lot of the meeting staff’s time, the membership-tier system that’s overly complicated and forbidding to new members.

Doing less can sharpen an organization’s focus, and give the leader some breathing room. As McGeorge writes, subtraction is “a conscious act of leadership that requires courage, restraint, and trust. Doing this requires us to believe that we can create results by doing less. By releasing what no longer serves us, we create the capacity to serve better.”

One suggestion, though, that isn’t addressed in the piece: Avoid the temptation to offload the disliked tasks, or the plan to address them, to AI, even for preliminary ideation. Leadership is a creative act, and figuring out what doesn’t fit is a job that requires attention, not outputs. Every AI task requires a human-in-the-loop anyway, so that alleged time-saver may just become another process. Successful association leadership means doing big things. But it also means doing the right ones, mindfully.