An Open Question to Board Chairs: Do You Dare to Lead?

Executive directors have thrown down the gauntlet. In “Daring to Lead 2011: A National Study of Nonprofit Executive Leadership” conducted by CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation, only 20 percent of those surveyed reported being satisfied with their board’s performance. While a few of these executive directors might have a personality conflict with their current chair or have felt particularly frustrated with their board the day they responded, there must be something more significant going on to account for 80 percent of chief administrators indicating dissatisfaction with their boards.

Determining the underlying factor(s) is particularly important in today’s rapidly changing environment where boards must be strong, strategic and steadfast so that their organizations can be responsive and achieve relevant results. Research by the likes of Herman, Renz and Heimovics, Nobbie and Brudney and others have made very clear that there is a relationship between the effectiveness of a board and the effectiveness of the organization for which the board works. While none could prove causality, each found that highly effective organizations have highly effective boards.

I don’t believe that an organization’s effectiveness can be laid at the feet of just one person. Yet, I do believe that you, as board chair, have opportunity and influence that can be brought to bear in ways that you perhaps have not tested. Be honest with yourself. What more could you do to ensure a stronger board, and ultimately a stronger organization?

For instance, research again tells us that highly effective boards use more proven practices than less effective boards. There are a lot of accepted practices out there that are actually based on myth. Are you just propagating these or are you analyzing their effectiveness? Are you making the effort to regularly read or participate in workshops and webinars to learn about governance practices rooted in science? Are you implementing what you’ve learned? If not, why not?

As an unknown sage once said, “Hope is not a method.” You cannot afford to merely come in once a month to chair a meeting, check in occasionally with your executive director and write your column for the newsletter and expect an exceptional board to emerge. Nor can you rely on years of experience with a multitude of boards. The world has changed too much. If you dare to lead, tell us what you are doing differently and what impact it has made.

Summer Reading: The House That Love Built

Yesterday one of my emails included this quote from Jean Monnet, “Nothing is possible without individuals; nothing is lasting without institutions.” The need for individuals and institutions and the potential conflict between them recapitulates one of the themes in The House That Love Built--the story of Millard and Linda Fuller and Habitat for Humanity.

Does it really take individuals? When Fuller was asked about how much money you needed to form a Habitat chapter, he said, “You have to have at least a dollar. It would be fiscally irresponsible to start a project with less than a dollar. But if you have dollar and you’ve got committed folks you can start and God will bless your meager resources…” Today worldwide Habitat for Humanity and The Fuller Center for Housing, which the Fuller’s began in 2005, have over 1,500 affiliates and partners—while it takes a more than a dollar to sustain them, single dollars created the initial foundations for over 350,000 homes these two organizations have built.

While the book is often a treatise in defense of Fullers, the book’s value for the nonprofit leader is the questions it raises about founders and the institutions they create. Might it have been possible for Habitat and Fuller to reach an accord without the public conflict that took place when the board fired Fuller? What might the Fuller have done differently? The Board? When might those efforts have started? How can an organization continue to benefit from the gifts of dynamic founders if and when they come into conflict with organization building? From this example, if you are a board member, what changes will you make at your organization? If you are a founder, how can you help your legacy to continue?

Who Should Facilitate the Exit Interview?

The other day a respected colleague and good friend, Carol Weisman, sent a copy of her latest blog post entitled, “Don’t Just Whack’em and Plaque’em: Exit Interviews for Retiring Board Members.” As all of Carol’s writings, it dealt with an important subject, was informative and had me in stitches – Carol is one of the smartest and funniest people I know. She spoke to the value of doing an exit interview and shared five excellent questions to use in such a situation. My only quarrel was that she put the responsibility for doing the exit interview on the executive director. I have always believed an exit interview should be conducted by the board, in the person of the chair or a member of the governance/board development committee.

She and I went back and forth with our arguments. She felt that the executive director is the constant – the one who will be there after the entire board turns over. I reasoned that there is no guarantee that the executive director will be there tomorrow, let alone years down the road. I know too many organizations that make that position a revolving door. But even in the most stable organizations, a lot of long-time executive directors are reaching the point where retirement is starting to look pretty good. We’re also starting to see a number of less fortunate dying with their boots on.

Carol asked me to honestly examine how many boards step up to the plate and take on this responsibility. While I concede that the job often defaults to the executive director, by accepting that role, the executive director makes it that much easier for the board to abdicate its responsibility in the future. It is the board that benefits most from learning what it could/should be doing differently to maximize, or at least improve, its directors’ experiences. The interviewer should be taking notes that can be kept in a board book for easy referral by future boards. Carol argued that future boards won’t bother to look back. I of the “you get what you expect school” retorted that debriefing should be an expected part of the job. After heating up cyber-space for a couple of days, we agreed to disagree.

However, I was like the store clerk who gets in an argument with a customer. Long after the customer leaves, the clerk is whining about that customer to everyone else she comes in contact with that day. I ran the arguments by another colleague, Jane Garthson. Jane said definitively that it was the board’s job to conduct exit interviews. However – sneaky devil! – she said she understood if an executive director wanted to conduct his or her own exit interview to learn what he or she might do differently in the future. So, this brings me to the question of the day. What, if any, are the arguments that we are all missing? If you even agree that exit interviews for departing board members are valuable, who do you want to see facilitating them? Why?

Creating Clairvoyant Board Members

Do you wish your board members could read your mind? If so, you may wish to read and share an article that appears on Charity Channel’s website this month. It lists a dozen thoughts nonprofit leaders often think during board meetings that they wish their board members knew. It also suggests board members actions.

Here’s one more additional “thought.”
“Listen to the community for us.” Sometimes, as a board member, you learn things no one else knows. Action: Share this information and your insights to help our nonprofit understand the community’s response to our work and take actions to use this knowledge to our advantage.