Skip to main content

Executive Committees Walk a Fine Line

WHEN I READ THIS TWEET "The only board members who like the exec. comm. are the ones who are on it!" I had to admit I agreed with it.  Afterall, what's the point of serving on a board if all the important and interesting discussions and decisions are had by a few leaving the rest of us to suffer through report meetings?  Who wants to be just another pretty rubber stamp?
Executive committees walk a fine line.  Typically consisting of the board's officers, they are often indispensable in times of crisis.  Big organizations with big boards quite rightly find that smaller "steering" committees serve important oversight functions.  In this instance, the make-up may go well beyond officers to include committee chairs and others (and the size of a steering committee could be as large as a small full board).  But as a routine decision-making body acting on behalf of the full board, an active executive committee can alienate or isolate the rest of its board.
I have worked for and with many organizations where the full board meets every other month or quarter and the executive committee meets on the intervening months.  Or where the executive committee AND the full board both meet every month -- how's that for duplication?  Any one of these scenarios begs these questions:  If there's so much board work to be done that the executive committee needs to meet just as often or MORE often than the full board, why isn't the full board meeting more frequently?  Or is the executive committee working on a specific crisis or issue that was not assigned - or could not be assigned - to another committee or task force?  The distinction is very important and must be made clear.
And then there's the issue of burn-out.  Meeting after meeting, particularly if duplicative, is such a waste of energy and talent.  Since great board members are seemingly hard to come by, why intentionally overburden them?
If your executive committee is a stand-in for full board meetings, making decisions that a full board should be making, stop the practice for a few months to see if it makes any difference.  If work gets backed up, that's an indication that the full board needs to be meeting more frequently.  If your full board meetings become more engaging, then you've become the beneficiary of "less is more".  Who wouldn't love that? 

Comments

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