Secretary’s Report

Lisa M. Finkelstein
Northern Illinois University

The Executive Committee held its annual winter meeting on February 2–4 in New York City.  The EC overlapped its meeting with the Conference Committee’s annual meeting in order to be updated on the proposed 5-year plan of the Conference Program Advance Task Force.

Our initial order of business was to vote on the approval of the nominations for Fellowship in SIOP.  George Hollenbeck, chair of the Fellowship Committee, reviewed each candidate and the committee’s recommendations, and the EC voted individually on whether to support the recommendation for each candidate. Fellows will be announced during the plenary session at the annual SIOP conference. 

We held our joint meeting with the Conference Committee bright and (too) early on Saturday morning, where we heard Steven Rogelberg highlight several plans for improvements to the annual conference as it commences the new 3-day format in San Francisco.  Changes include several behind-the-scenes adjustments to make the programming smoother, streamlining of the submission process, and a host of changes to the schedule that are sure to maximize attendees’ experience.  I’ll leave it to the folks who put such tremendous effort into this plan to have the pleasure of the big reveal.  The EC gave hearty and much deserved thanks to Steven and his committee for all of their work on this visionary proposal.

Our remaining agenda took shape around the strategic planning goals. Members of the EC provided updates on the progress of several initiatives and had some discussion around where to house the continuation of those initiatives in our current governance structure (which many of you may recall is going under intensive review by Kurt Kraiger and his subcommittee, as a result of September’s strategic planning meeting).  Although the details of all the initiatives are beyond the scope of this short report, some of the highlights include the work of the science and practice champions on the master’s consortium, which is shaping up nicely and continuing to expand in scope, and some discussion over initiating work on an occupational analysis of I-O psychologists in effort toward the proposed aspirational statement on the true essence of the scientist–practitioner.  The visibility champions have made progress toward gathering proposals from public relations firms, and the EC approved the plan for a luncheon with the press in New York before the start of the conference.  The advocacy champions have focused their work on promoting advocacy at the federal level, state level, and within APA.  Much discussion ensued in regard to the need for our committee members and the membership in general to be very proactive and clear about what we want from these various sources.  Also related to the issue of advocacy, the EC discussed and approved our continued membership in the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences, emphasizing the need for us to choose just one or two issues important to I-O psychologists on which they can help us focus our lobbying, funding, and public education efforts.  Finally, our membership champions are working on an overhaul to the SIOP volunteer process and to the process for archiving and managing institutional data. They also have several initiatives in place toward the goal of increasing the climate of inclusiveness in SIOP and at the SIOP annual conference.

There were several action items voted on at the EC meeting.  A new financial reserves policy statement was approved to allow for the maintenance of an operating reserve, a technology and equipment reserve, and a special projects reserve, and our current financial principles statement was amended to include a consideration of donations to the SIOP Foundation when a surplus exists in excess of our reserves policy.  We heard a report from Paul Sackett on the progress toward SIOP’s new journal and voted to support the committee moving forward with the publishing contract negotiation process.  Finally, we voted that no committees will go through the regular sunsetting review process until the report from the committee considering the governance restructure, which by its nature is akin to an in-depth sunsetting process.

This brief report is of course a mere snapshot of our 12+ hour meeting session.  For more detail, please see the minutes of the meeting online, or drop me an e-mail with any questions at lisaf@niu.edu.