Board Time Investment = Executive Director Satisfaction

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HEARD THAT BOARD RELATIONSHIPS MATTER? If you're an executive director reading this post, think about how much time you spend each month interacting with your board. If you happen to serve an organization whose board meets monthly, that's probably at least a couple of hours right there, plus another couple of hours prep for it that could include agenda review with your chairman and check-ins with various committee chairs. Maybe you attend one or two committee meetings or conference calls every month. So, what are you up to -- 6-10 hours per month? Sounds like a lot.

According to the CompassPoint and Meyer Foundation Daring to Lead 2011report, which surveyed 3,000 executive directors, you'd be in the majority of respondents -- 55% report spending 10 or less hours per month focusing on their boards. (That's just 6% of a full-time executive director's time -- even less if you routinely work more than 40 hours per week.) Now, maybe it doesn't sound like so much, right?

The report further reveals that there is a direct correlation between the satisfaction executive directors have with their board's performance and the amount of time they choose to invest in their boards. Makes sense. But, this finding ultimately underscored a couple of paradoxical things for me: 1) as executive directors, we have the very real potential to get as much as we give when it comes to building our board relationships, and 2) the quality of time you give is more critical than the quantity.

Let's face it: if the main focus of your interaction is board and committee meetings, which for many organizations are too often focused on the relatively limited outcomes of reporting and short-term operational decision-making, no amount of your additional time is going to significantly move your satisfaction meter higher. I mean, there's more to your board relationship than crafting meeting agendas and reports, right?

In her 2008 report of healthy board chair-executive director relationships for the Journal of Nonprofit Management (2008, Vol. 12, No.1), Mary Hiland shows us there's much more. She discussed the levels of working together that build trust and ultimately add value to an organization. The more trust the ED and board chair built together, the potential for moving as a pair from managing to planning to leading increased. "The leading pairs worked together, with engaged boards, on issues of organizational vision, mission, and strategic focus. They described energy and synergies in their relationship, and with the board and the staff, that catalyzed organizational productivity and engagement with the community."

Investing the 'right type' of time as well as the 'right amount' of time with your board needs to be part of every executive director's strategy for not only achieving professional/personal satisfaction, but for creating organizational capital.

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

Leading by Design

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