Lowering the Age of Board Service

At your next board meeting look around you. What would you say the average age of your board is? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? You’re not alone. Almost three-quarters of nonprofit boards are comprised of Baby Boomers (those age 46-64), according to BoardSource's Nonprofit Governance Index survey. Only 2 percent are younger than 30, with almost 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 49.

In a recent Nonprofit Times article, Scott Leff of the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management says that attracting young men and women to board service is “fundamental to sustainability.” Indeed, if an organization fails to do so, the board will age itself out putting its future in jeopardy. And given the fact that the vast number of current board members will be retiring from board service in the next decade, the nonprofit sector is facing (some argue we're in it right now) a talent drain that, just in sheer numbers, will be difficult to replace.

One of the big obstacles is that boards need younger members at just the age when these folks are building their careers and families. There’s generally not a lot of time to engage in traditional board and committee work. But that doesn’t mean that Gen Xers and Yers don’t want to be engaged at some level. And the ball is in the organization’s court to figure that out.

It may be that many boards need to reassess how they do their work. Typical meetings, assignments and communications need to be scrutinized, chunked up into smaller pieces and strung together by electronic dialogue. When was the last time your board took a hard look at how it works? And whether how it works really works for the people serving on the board? This sounds like a great summertime project for a board task force (that includes younger supporters).

Here are some random thoughts:

Younger board candidates need to be recruited by younger board members.
Board learning curves can be great; mentoring opportunities need to built into the recruitment and training processes
Trouble getting started? Put together an advisory group of younger folks and ask them to help inform your board (possibly on a whole range of issues)

Photo: AIGA Portland Board meeting at PopArt - March 2009 by Portland AIGA

Comments

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

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

Back in the Saddle

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

What Would Make You Turn Down an Invitation to Join a Board?

THERE'S SO MUCH WRITTEN ABOUT RECRUITING BOARD TALENT, I thought I'd spend a little time thinking about it from the prospect's point of view. Clearly, there are boards where the line is long to get on them. But what would make you turn down an invitation? Here's a short list to get the conversation started: 1. You've had no prior exposure to the organization. Your immediate reaction is "did you pull my name out of a hat?" (Is that lady in the picture the head of the Nominating Committee?) Seems as though there must be a hidden agenda at work (like you're rich and once you become a board member you'll pour all your resources into the organization) or the organization is simply looking for any warm body to fill a seat. 2. The organization doesn't have a good reputation. There's something to be said for street cred. An organization that's floundering may be strengthened by your participation or you may find yourself sucked into

Leading by Design

Search This Blog