I want to tell you why I love my job.

For new readers of this weekly column, I am the executive director of the Southern Midcoast Maine Chamber, which is the regional chamber of commerce representing Topsham, Brunswick, Bath, Harpswell and a dozen more communities, as far north as Richmond and as far east as parts of Wiscasset.

I have been in this position for 20 months now since taking over for the beloved Carolyn Farkas-Noe who, from all accounts, is enjoying her well earned retirement after over three decades at the chamber.

Before coming to this chamber, I ran the Skowhegan Area Chamber of Commerce for just under a decade.

My job is to represent the business interests in the 16 communities we serve by initiating programs that connect business owners to one another, keeping businesses informed of legislative issues that may affect them, creating community events that bring new dollars from tourists to our community, and, in general, being a broker of information.

When people are looking for recommendations on various amenities, or they are looking for relocation and vacation information, the chamber is typically a place they will contact. The doctrine I work from is “if it affects one of our members, then it affects us” which is to say that we are here for our member businesses.

Whatever they are facing, whatever help they need, we should do all we can to serve them. For instance, lack of workforce is a problem with many local businesses, and so in response last year we went from one hiring fair in the spring to adding a second hiring fair in the fall. The fall hiring fair also included schools who are members and were looking for substitute teachers, so we adjusted the event to include them. Need identified, solution provided — that’s what we do.

All of that is well and good, but that doesn’t tell you why I love my job.

Sure, I love helping people, but you can help people in a lot of different industries. The reason I love my job is because of how I am treated by my bosses. Like all not-for-profits and nonprofits, my bosses are a board of directors.

This volunteer leadership team of the chamber is comprised of individuals who are employees of chamber member businesses. Their job is to oversee what the staff (me) is doing on a weekly basis, and they help set the direction for the organization. The board plays an important role in deciding which projects and programs the chamber pursues, by evaluating from their point of view as a business leader, whether a project is good for the economic growth of our region or not.

Many boards of directors are risk-averse. The directors are the stewards of the organization and have a fiscal responsibility to make sure the organization is solvent — thus being risk-averse is often seen as a positive.

This leads to a common error in thinking with many boards though, as they get stuck in a rut of doing the same projects and activities year after year and not wanting to change them for fear that people won’t like the change. “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” is the thinking. I understand that thought process, but I don’t believe it’s the right philosophy and here’s why.

Every organization should be constantly re-evaluating the effectiveness of their programming and asking themselves if the projects and events are effectively reaching the prescribed goals of the organization.

For instance, annually we ask if the Chamber After Hours and 12 @ 12 are still effective chamber programs, and we have decided that for the networking opportunities those events afford our members that they are effective. But each of those programs has been tweaked in my tenure to make them more effective than they once were.

For the After Hours we have opened up the meeting section allowing any attendee 30 seconds to introduce themselves to the group, and we have opened it up to non-members to attend. For the 12 @ 12 lunch series, we went from hosting the monthly event at our chamber office to allowing businesses to host them at no cost, other than providing lunch for 12 people. Both changes have been a huge success.

That’s why I love my job. My board of directors lets me take ideas I come up with and implement them to see if they will work. They empower me by trusting that they hired someone who has good ideas and they allow me the space to experiment with those ideas.

That empowerment makes all the difference for me as an employee, and I think it can for any business owner’s employees as well. Smart businesses don’t hire employees to only agree with them — they hire them because they think they have the skills and the knowledge to make the organization better. Trust your employees, and be open to their ideas — and you may just find success you never saw coming.

A few years back, a colleague of mine gave some great advice when he said: “If you don’t fail at least once per year, then you’re not trying hard enough.” There is great spirit in that.

I’m thankful to work for a board of directors that trusts me and allows me that opportunity to take a chance and help us grow. Because of that trust, we changed our Big Night Out to a board game-themed event last year. We added the second hiring fair last year and we are keeping that for 2018. We are overhauling our guest guide into something not seen before. We are planning a new workshop event called RBT Con (Relevant Business Topic Conference) for late spring which will replace a profitable but ineffective event. We are launching a new women’s group on Valentine’s Day and more.

This momentum is building because my board trusts me — and that makes all the difference.