The end of the year often provides time for reflection, and as outgoing Past President I find myself thinking about my tenure on the Board -- what I've accomplished, and what I've learned.

I began my Presidency with a vision -- that ASTD-Orange County should be the destination for training and development professionals of all experience levels to come together to develop skills which they had no opportunity to develop at their day job (or lack thereof). ASTD-Orange County would become a community of practice, and those who participated within that community would add skillsets to their professional abilities and experience to their resume. It was a bold vision, and one that I still believe we can achieve. We didn't get there under my Presidency -- too many things were in the way, too many resources were not at our disposal.

I agree that I'm one of my own harshest critics. That said, I believe that my Presidency had floundered trying to figure out how to accomplish my Vision. Thus, as Denise Lamonte transitioned into the 2011 Presidency, our discussions focused less on where the Chapter could go in the future and more on the gaps within the Chapter's organization.

This is an aspect of Denise's Presidency that I believe I learned the most from -- Organizational Leadership. While Denise and I had both identified several areas within the Chapter that needed to be developed before my Vision could be realized, the Chapter needed to strengthen its community overall.

Denise's skill as an Organizational Leader allowed her to address systemic challenges within the Chapter that I had been unable to.  Denise established clear expectations, action plans, consequences for not meeting those expectations, and follow-up for inaction. She created a structure in which the Chapter Leadership reported to and worked with the "Three Presidents" (myself, Denise, and Rhonda) in order to achieve strategic chapter imperatives.  Establishing expectations, creating accountable management structure, these concepts were not new things to me. But they were things that I had never worked on creating before my turn as President. So in my tenure, attempts at creating such a structure had either failed or backfired. Under Denise's Presidency, I experienced how best to accomplish these vital leader tasks.

In fact, many of the successes that I've seen the Chapter celebrate this year - and I'm going to try not to sound too hubristic here -- have some foundation in ideas that I'd put forward two to three years ago. Structures that had been proposed, yet not adopted until today. Technology that had been but tampered with, now embraced as we reach out to the younger generations of trainers.

To get a sense of what I mean, consider the changes to our website over the past few years. Our website had needed upgrading for some time, but how the site should be upgraded was a matter of discussion that was visited, then revisited, and revisited again. Our new site that had been created by the beginning of 2010 -- the Joomla-based site -- was a result of a Vision of what the Chapter could be - that vibrant Community of Practice, both online and real-world. The current website is reflective of where the Chapter is now, and will be for the near future -- a smaller community in need of a sustainable member resource, both in man-power and expense.

Perhaps one of the biggest ways in which Denise's Organizational Leadership efforts have come to initiate the Community of Practice I had envisioned can be seen with the number of volunteers who have willingly and openly shared their "lessons learned" after completing a project.  Damion Donaldson was was quite public about his "lessons learned." Pamela Coca has shared her lessons learned with Chapter Leadership, in doing so building a strong, emulatable Technology and Training SIG.

I look forward to seeing how Rhonda Askeland shall lead the Chapter in the coming year. Where I see myself as having been a "visionary leader," and Denise as having been an "organizational leader," I see Rhonda serving as an "inspirational leader." She is nothing less than a positive force of nature, one who will inspire the 2012 Chapter Leadership (both Board and Managers) to accept the organizational challenges that we face and the vision of what we seek to achieve, and address them together.

Looking back, I believe this was one of the great strengths of our Board: that the Three Presidents held such diverse skillsets: Visionary, Organizational, and Inspirational. Thus armed, we were able to address the Chapter concerns from a variety of perspectives. Just as the trainer cannot train only for the visual learner without alienating those auditory and kinesthetic learners, so does an organization's leadership suffer from having only Visionaries at the helm, or only Organizers.  Having a Board with strong Vision, Organization, and Inspirational leadership may be the key to its future successes.