Toxic Meetings

Roberts Rules, Chapter 11 - Officers; (summarized) 

The President: Presiding at Meetings
This section focuses on the president's responsibilities as a presiding officer and the rules that the president must follow when presiding at meetings. The key duties of the presiding officer are to: 

- Keep order;

- Be fair and impartial;

- Protect the rights of all the members;

Keeping order 

To keep order in a meeting, the president should be thoroughly familiar with the bylaws, other rules of the organization, parliamentary procedure in general, and the organization's selected parliamentary authority in particular. The president has the following specific responsibilities: 

1) The president should be familiar with the basic rules of calling a meeting to order; how to establish and follow an agenda or order of business; the proper steps in making, debating, and voting on motions; and the different classes or types of motions and how they are ranked. 

2) Protecting the rights of the members 

A truly effective president protects the rights of the members by personally following the laws. The president upholds the bylaws and other rules of the organization and enforces them by informing the members when bylaws are ignored or disobeyed. The president's duty is to serve the wishes of the entire assembly, and he or she should not allow any personal feelings to affect his or her judgment. The chair should know the procedures for calling to order a member who is unruly and disruptive. To call a member to order, the chair can say:

President: The member is out of order and will be seated. 

If the member continues to misbehave, the president can ask the secretary to record in the minutes the objectional behavior or language. If the member does not quiet down or apologize for his or her behavior, the next step is to name the offender, which is called preferring charges. The president should use this option only as a last resort. If the president prefers charges, the president should state what the member has done. The assembly must then decide what action to take. If members do not readily come forth with a motion that sets a penalty, the president can ask: 

President: What penalty shall be imposed on the member? 

The membership must now propose a penalty. The motion is debatable, and the member facing the potential penalty has a right to speak to the motion. This motion takes a majority vote unless the motion takes away rights of membership, in which case a two-thirds vote is needed. 

The president should try to resolve difficult situations without resorting to this procedure. If the conduct of a member gets out of hand, the president can always declare a recess and talk with the member during the recess to try to resolve the problem.

A key point: A president’s most important duty is running respectful and productive meetings. Blaming directors who ask tough questions, or attendees who engage in disruptive behavior for long or contentious meetings, or for low owner attendance, ignores Robert’s Rules and best practice. It's the president’s duty alone to address unruly or discourteous directors and attendees. Poorly run meetings can lead to uninformed decisions, lost staff time, member apathy, and polarized communities. These all raise the cost of doing an association’s business, which results in higher dues.

* Credit to davis-stirling.com

* Credit to the CotoBuzz Journal