Building Cohesion Among Board Members

AS WE WORK TOWARD GREATER DIVERSITY ON OUR nonprofit boards, more and more boards are being made up of people who may not know one another well or at all. They don't run in the same social circles in the community, they may come from a wide geographic area or spend just a part of their time in one community. The result is they may only see one another at your organization.

Moving a group of relative strangers toward a cohesive team requires that each person shifts from an individual to a group mindset where the success of the whole is the goal. Successful teams care not only about the organization, but care enough about each other to ensure that everyone is able to meet their responsibilities. To get to that point, team members need to have opportunities to get to know one another just enough to foster mutual trust and respect. After all, it is just those two behaviors that get groups through stressful, even difficult, times.

So, how can board and staff leaders build cohesion within a board whose members scatter to the four winds after each board meeting, or at the least, have few points of intersection outside of the board room?

This question was posed recently to a board with just this kind of makeup. Here's what the group suggested for itself:

Add breaks during board meetings where folks can mingle
Offer dinner or cocktails after board meetings to enhance social interaction
Meet over dinner or over lunch, again to interject a social element
Meet more frequently? (for example, if your board meets six time a year, would eight times a year up the cohesion?)
Lessen amount of information on agenda, therefore giving more time for discussion and breaks
Relook at how committees are used (are task forces a better way to foster a greater variety of board member interactions?)
More assigning of tasks from board discussions for members to work on together (again, a variety of interactions being the key)

The goal here is cohesion, not group-think. Opinion-sharing and healthy debate are key elements of board and organizational vitality. A cohesive group allows for and even embraces differences of opinion because underlying values about the organization's vision and mission are respected and shared.

Photo: Committee Meeting from voteprime

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

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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

Leading by Design

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