Good fences may make good neighbors, but it takes a lot more effort for most bar executives to set up boundaries in their professional and personal lives.

Whether it’s deciding if volunteers may communicate work assignments directly to staff, how to handle personal relationships that may affect work, or simply deciding how to balance work life with the effort to have some semblance of a personal life, many execs find it takes planning and flexibility to keep things running smoothly.

Go to almost any NABE meeting these days and you’ll hear conversations and program topics devoted to dealing with these questions. And as interviews with some executive directors show, there isn’t unanimity about the questions or their answers.

Regarding dealings between staff and volunteers, “much of it depends on the volunteers. You have to have a philosophy, but you also have to be flexible,” said Sheree Swetin, executive director of the San Diego County Bar Association.

Swetin prefers that volunteers communicate directly with her if they want something done, and allow her to then assign the request to the staff. “I can’t supervise the staff adequately if I don’t know what kind of work the staff has been given by members of the board or sections or committees. I also have to be able to rely on my staff people to tell me if they’ve got a volunteer who’s assigning work to them to make sure that I know that that’s happening. That way I can take care of it if I don’t want it happening, or can at least factor it into their workload if it’s an appropriate assignment of work.”

Once a project has been assigned, Swetin says she has no problem with volunteers communicating directly with the staff person working on the assignment.

Taking a slightly different approach is Allan Head of the North Carolina Bar Association. While he also doesn’t mind volunteers dealing directly with staff after a project has begun, Head says it’s also OK with him for volunteers such as the bar president to call staff directly to initiate efforts. All he asks is that he be kept informed.

“That places a tremendous amount of responsibility on the other staff, who have to realize that they’ve got to keep me in the loop,” Head said. If a volunteer has an unusual request or one that might seem to present problems, Head also wants his staff to let him know before acting on it.

Drawing boundaries between staff and volunteers when it comes to work assignments is one thing; what about personal relationships that develop between staff and the members? As Swetin pointed out, “As people become more involved in their work and careers, that’s often the place where they meet other people.”

That’s not a problem in and of itself, but it can cause trouble if there’s “a perception that someone is being treated differently because of social relationships,” she said. If that were to happen, Swetin said she would try to take steps to minimize professional interaction between the people involved. “I would try to relegate it to one arena or the other.”

Head said he agreed that a personal relationship of this type would be OK as long as “you make sure you continue business in a businesslike way.”

Whenever bar executives gather, one topic of conversation that’s likely to emerge is how to separate work time from personal time, and enjoy what is known in the rest of the world as a “personal life.”

Head says that while there are times when he is not able to be at family functions because of work, “I have not tried to separate them. My family has been very grateful over the years for all that the North Carolina Bar Association has done for them. My job has been to explain that there may be times when the job comes first.”

Swetin acknowledges that she doesn’t “do as good a job as I should” in setting boundaries in this area. “There are many evenings when I’m not home for dinner or home to put my daughter to bed… Lawyers tend to want to do things between five o’clock and nine, so we have a huge number of section and committee meetings and other events that happen after hours that I feel like I need to be at, both to keep on top of what’s happening in the legal community, and to represent the bar association.”

Coming in later the morning after working late isn’t always an option either, Swetin said. “I don’t want volunteers calling at 9 a.m. and getting voicemail.”

Swetin said she isn’t sure what the answer is. One approach would be to try to educate board members about the workload executive directors face, and perhaps discussing flex time. Executive directors who don’t set some limits run the risk of “burning out and saying ‘I just can’t do this anymore, year after year.’ ”