Skip to main content

Current and Former Employees on Your Board

I believe strongly that the core of governance is informed oversight. In order to do this well, a board must balance a clear understanding of mission and program with the discipline of ongoing objective evaluation. A board must be able to know when to exert leadership, when to seek and accept leadership from executive staff, and when to seek and accept outside expertise.
But, above all, a board must act to the best of its ability to preserve the well-being of the institution with which it has been charged.

There must be a clear line drawn between those who govern and the governed. Boards frame the mission, determine compensation levels, approve human resource policies, evaluate the director, often take some role in the hiring process of key senior level staff, and set benchmarks for organizational performance.

When current staff are elected to their boards it removes the clear line and truncates the ability of boards to objectively fulfill their most basic fiduciary responsibilities. These staff are both governors and the governed. Where's the sense in that?

I'm also uncomfortable with former staff serving on boards. Even the best former staff members can have a stultifying effect on current staff. Former staff are a tangible tie to the organization's past and they can have a way of dampening future-focused perspectives. There will always be some board members who will routinely look past the current staff to seek the expertise of former staff members, now their peers. Why would any board sabotage their current staff in this way?

I also think that electing current or former staff to a board sends a public message that the board is unable or unwilling to reach beyond its innermost circle. The best boards are diverse and representative of the organization's community and constituencies. They reach out for talent, not in.

Great former staff can certainly make terrific contributions via committees and task forces, but keep them off the governing board.

Comments

Laura Roberts said…
I am also worried about the new trend to make EDs, CEOs, etc. voting members of the board. It's part of the corporate style governance trend that started with the shift from "ED" to "CEO" or "president"... at first I thought it was just about language, but this second phase of the shift is more troubling... not that I think EDs should be subservient, but they do work for the board, which has a critical role as fiduciary stewards. The paid staff's role is not lesser, just different.
I agree. It seems so obvious to me that it's a conflict of interest -- even in the corporate world.

I've noticed that the directors of many performing arts organizations sit on their boards -- this seems to be a long-standing "tradition", probably mostly borne from the fact that these directors were the founders and they're doing double duty. Not healthy.

Popular posts from this blog

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

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

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 .

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