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Your organization elected new officers in November or December. It's now mid-February, and you might have an officer who isn't meeting expectations. This is very typical, and it requires action. An officer who isn't attending meetings, isn't contributing, or isn't fulfilling their job duties either needs to get in shape, or be gone.
As an organization president or chairperson, you have an obligation to make sure everyone on the team is doing their assigned role. Officers who are simply place holders do nothing to move your organization forward. Even if this person is your friend, you need to confront it, fix it, or give someone else the opportunity to lead.
Imagine that you're the boss, and you had an employee with a one-year contract. How long would you wait before confronting poor performance? If it's been a couple of months since your new officer transition, then it's time to do a quick performance review. This can be one of the tougher parts of your job, but it is necessary.
As a first step, schedule a discussion with your advisor. Bring up your concerns and ask for advice on how to proceed. Perhaps your advisor will be willing to help with a conversation to the slack officer. Maybe your advisor knows something about the student's situation that you do not.
Often, leaders aren't performing because they aren't sure what they are supposed to be doing. There's a chance that one good conversation with some goal and deadline setting could solve the problem.
If you have an officer who simply has checked out, doesn't want to do his/her job, is causing problems for others, or who suddenly has dropped your organization from his/her list of priorities, then you might have to act to remove this person from office. Sometimes, you can simply give them a way to exit gracefully. If you can do this in a way that helps him or her save face, it's the way to go. Low drama is a good, good thing.
If they want to argue with you, then you have a more complicated problem. In this case, set concrete short term expectations and give him/her a chance to get it together. If they fail to achieve these benchmarks, then it's time to get the rest of your leadership team involved.
Another idea: perhaps it would be a good idea for your executive council or committee to do some sort of group evaluation. Allow each officer to give a "grade" to his/her fellow officers in some anonymous way, and then share the results in one-on-one meetings with each. Make sure that you, as president or chair, are also being evaluated. Again, work with your advisor to make this happen. Your advisor might even have some evaluation instruments to save you some time in this sort of process.
In any case, by March, you need to make sure your team is operating at its highest productivity. People tend to lose interest and energy as their terms are winding up, so if you aren't getting their best effort this early in the term, it's unlikely to improve. You need to move on it immediately. Time will not fix the problem.
