Skip to main content

A Few Basics for Board Recruitment

Image
By

Like many of you, I'm responsible for working with a board of directors to identify and recruit candidates to board service.  Armed with a dynamic strategic plan, a strong board already in place, and a track record of activity, recruitment to this particular board has never been difficult.  (Tip: you must have these three elements (at least) in place to attract bright, thoughtful people who want to be engaged with your organization.)

Identification of candidates is proving to be especially challenging, though, and it's due largely to some very straightforward discussions the nominating committee is having about what our board needs to look like if it is to support our vision, mission and plan.  We typically recruit for gender, racial/ethnic, discipline and geographic diversity.  We're now also talking about folding additional criteria into the mix to create a balance of emerging-mid-career-veteran voices, specific expertise (finance, marketing, etc.), and leadership attributes.

That sent me to the Web to search for samples of board development matrices.  The matrix is a great starting point for determining who a board already has sitting around its table.  And it's an indispensable tool for a nominating committee to use to identify the additional talent a board needs.  
The criteria from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence's matrix includes: Community Connections - corporate, social, philanthropic, media, professional, etc.,; Qualities - leadership, willing to work, commitment to mission; Style - collegial, visionary, practical; Expertise - accounting, law, technology, etc. 

Another matrix focuses on "competencies" of current board members, i.e., conversant with public policy issues affecting members; involvement and connections with organizations related to mission; knowledge of organization goals and activities; demonstrated leadership role within organizations or in other professional organizations, etc.

A third matrix divides criteria into three major sections -- knowledge, skills, personal characteristics -- each of which includes 7-10 specific attributes, such as "can work to build consensus", "promotes openness and honesty", "knows the organization's current financial position".

That's just three examples.  Head spinning yet?

Here's the take-away:  The person filling a board seat should fill more than a demographic ideal. Competencies and attributes are just as critical to successful board performance.  Many of us learn the hard way that subject matter competencies without group decision-making skills can be just as detrimental to an organization as a board that does not reflect the constituency/community served.

Identifying board candidates based solely on demographic criteria is far easier than identifying board candidates based on their abilities to care about an organization enough to work in concert with others.  Yet, it's necessary to organizational health, don't you think?

And to be successful, a nominating committee needs time to learn about its potential candidates, to assess their attributes, to see if there is a match.  This requires conversation on several levels and it may well require employing a variety of opportunities to engage them in the work of the organization -- attending a board meeting, for instance.  This period of assessment is also a time of cultivation.  It requires a strategy and time to do well.

So, here's where I am with my own nominating committee work:   recasting the board matrix to incorporate competencies, skills and demographics; taking the revised matrix to the full board for discussion and assistance with identification of potential candidates; creating a strategy for cultivation and recruitment; and implementing it through the remainder of this year.  (Tip:  if the nominating committee takes all these steps, the strategy may be good for several years.)

Photo: egg line up by mixtasy
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back in the Saddle

By
MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin.  We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week.  If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014.  It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog.  I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs.  Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management.  Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu
14 comments
Read more

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

By
If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for?  This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.)  Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although
27 comments
Read more

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

By
WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .
Post a Comment
Read more