News & Views

by Valyrie Laedlein - The Board of Directors.  Mention the phrase to many Executive Directors, and you’ll get rolling eyes, a sigh, a weary shaking of the head, sometimes an earful.  It’s the rare nonprofit executive who will respond with an enthusiastic assessment of his or her Board.

What is it about Boards that makes them such hard-to-develop, low-yield assets?

Could it be the fact that, within the nonprofit corporate structure, we have an overworked, under-resourced, underpaid executive reporting to a body of players who are volunteers, which means that they attend to the business of the corporation in the margins of their lives?  Is the difficulty rooted in the reality that, within the typical Board schedule of monthly or quarterly meetings, Board members rarely manage to fully grasp the nature of their nonprofit’s services, clients, funding realities, regulatory hoops, staffing constraints, reporting requirements, and so on, even as they retain the responsibility of holding the Executive Director accountable?  Could the source of difficulty be that there are so many alternative views and interpretations of what a Board should be doing and how it should be doing it, that all parties are likely to have their expectations go unmet?

 

In a word, yes – to all of those constraints and many more.  What must the originators of the “third sector” corporation have been thinking when they first conceived this structure?  Distributed power, checks and balances, leveraging the wisdom of the whole – not unlike the distribution of power that was intended with our tripartite governmental system.  (Indeed, the first such corporation was the Massachusetts Bay Colony.)  So, considering what we witness of the interface between the branches of our government at all levels, it’s no surprise that the key parties of our nonprofit corporations struggle with how to optimize their respective contributions, especially those of the Board of Directors. 

CRE has been doing an extraordinary amount of thinking about Boards of Directors these days.  In these uncertain economic times, tapping the wisdom of all parties becomes ever more critical.  Board members are central to thinking about foundational questions related to mission and purpose, what services are essential to provide, and where the resources will come from.  But our Boards and Executives are out of practice.  They are unaccustomed to engaging in generative, challenging and, yes, uncomfortable conversations. 

And too much of the literature about Boards tends to be either an antiseptic treatment of “roles and responsibilities” (as if lack of knowledge were the only problem) or, in the Sarbanes-Oxley era of hyper-accountability, a pre-occupation with policies for Conflict of Interest, Whistleblowing and 990 review.  While I wouldn’t dismiss either body of knowledge as irrelevant, they fall short for guiding Boards or their executives in making the nonprofit governance structure work most effectively.

With funding from American Express and the Carnegie Corporation, CRE has recently launched a “Leadership Caucus for Board Chairs.”  This forum, which convenes 16 leaders in a peer-learning based model, has given us an opportunity to reflect upon our years of work with thousands of nonprofit clients organizations to extract some key lessons to share and discuss with these interested and engaged Board leaders.  In my columns that will appear over the weeks ahead, I will look to share some of those lessons, highlight the thinkers in the field that we have found most insightful, and offer some tools or perspectives that might support Executive Directors and Board leaders in transforming their own Boards into the constructive partner to executive staff that they have the potential to be. 

To start, we need to shift our perspective:  What’s the best that could result from engaging a group of individuals who, by virtue of their service on your Board:
o care about the organization,
o have agreed to serve in a governance role as a volunteer,
o span the divide between the organization and the community, and
o bring an outsiders’ perspective and connections to the tasks at hand?

Then ask:  What do Board members need to know/understand to enable them to leverage their assets to the organization’s greatest benefit? 

Finally, who on the Board can be an ally in beginning to move the Board towards greater effectiveness?  Consider how you might engage that person (or persons) in an honest conversation about what’s possible with your Board, and what would be needed to move your Board to the next level of familiarity – with the organization, its services, its clients, its struggle, its outlook.

Then you’ll have begun to lay the groundwork for a more informed – and, by extension, more engaged – set of Board members.  Look in this column for future postings on leveraging your Board’s contribution to the organization, and consider sharing your own experiences – successful or otherwise - with Board engagement and turnaround.