Leading by Design

OKAY, I'VE BEEN OVERTAKEN BY THE 2012 OLYMPICS, hence the title for this post.  As I watched the men's marathon today I couldn't help draw some parallels between the long race and my own relatively new service on a nonprofit board.  People who know me know that I'd have trouble running up and down my driveway, but this comparison helps me grasp what I've been feeling lately about living up to my board's expectations even when it was hard for me to do so. Respect:  The first parallel has to do with why any one of us decides to join a board.   Jason Karp writes about marathoning, " Tackling 26.2 miles is a long way to run. Respect the distance and prepare for it. Confidence comes from being prepared."  Most  of us take on board work because we believe we bring some talent to the table -- we have a passion for the cause, our knowledge and skills complement and strengthen those offered by others, and/or we provide access to needed networks and funds. ...

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 2011 report, 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...

IS IT ENOUGH FOR A NONPROFIT BOARD'S primary focus to be protection of the status quo ?   It's expected that every board will take care of the organization entrusted it.  There's a definition for what care means in this instance -- it's commonly expressed as the duty of "care that an ordinarily prudent person would exercise in a like position and under similar circumstances."  Many will argue that in times of economic or societal stress, the best defense of a nonprofit is to hunker down and shepherd the resources -- to, in fact, take extra care .  By this definition, taking care is an active and positive (indeed, critical) quality of a vigilant board. The benefit of a board's prudence gets lost when that board slips into passive management of an organization's affairs.  This board -- the caretaker board -- has become comfortable with the safe harbor of complacency.  It's best at protecting its past achievements and preserving the reality it has cr...

IF YOU WERE BUILDING A BOARD RECRUITMENT program from scratch, what would you make of it?  I think I'd start with two pieces of information:  a board job description and a criteria list for the skills and attributes I need around that board table. The job description would give me most all the information I'd need to approach a prospect to discuss board service.  I'd consider it my script for the conversation.  It would include all the expectations my organization would expect of a board member and it would include what the board member could expect from the organization. The criteria list would be my road map to the people I'd be sharing that job description with.  As I've written about in other posts ( here , here and here ) it's knowing what I've got to work with and what I need that sets me up for my search of the who's.  Without this data, I could just ask any passing stranger if she or he had interest in joining my board.  I could just paper t...

BOARD RECRUITMENT IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.  Or it should be.  Now more than ever, our nonprofits need engaged, forward-thinking leadership.  Our nonprofits need board members who are willing to use a continual loop of strategy and feedback to define and shape mission, relevance and community connectedness.  To be content with board members who are ONLY interested in slices of an organization's mission is not enough.  Board members have to want to embrace the whole enchilada, because they understand that a nonprofit's impact is more than the sum of its parts. Nominating or board development committees need to sharpen their recruitment skills to laser-like precision.  Recruitment no longer begins with the question, "who do we know?", but with "what skills or access do we need?"  If you don't know what you're looking for, you're liable to accept any who .  That worked decades ago when boards were merely extensions of wealthy social clubs.  There's n...

I KNOW THAT MANY OF US, MYSELF INCLUDED, ARE LOOKING for ways to encourage and maybe even inspire boards to take an active role in their own leadership and decision-making growth. It's not easy. That's why I thought the following from Hildy Gottlieb, President of the Community-Driven Institute , in response to a question on LinkedIn about board learning was one I wanted to share with you. Hildy's suggestions for creating a board learning environment can be used by organizations of any size, with staff or not. So, go for it! I have been encouraging boards to actually begin doing their work as learning communities - with generative discussion being a big part of each meeting, focused on the things that matter most - vision, values, making a difference, measuring that difference. Focusing on the "intentional" part of your question, some strategies I've seen work well. • Have the generative discussion be the first item on the agenda, to set the tone for the...

The informal poll running on the blog lately asked readers to characterize their board recruitment processes.  The poll follows up on my posts about board recruitment  here ,  here  and here . Here's the breakdown: 33%   Loosey-Goosey:  informal and sometimes unpredictable 25%   A Last-Minute Scramble:  could be anybody's game 41%   Targeted:  we know who we want and we work hard to get them 1%   Multi-layered or Rigorous:  a full-blown, vetted process The good news is that 42% of respondents put their recruitment process at the structured end of the spectrum.  A structured process matches institutional criteria to individual skills, which, in turn, fulfill mission, values and vision. Nearly 60% of respondents, though, put their recruitment efforts at the unstructured (or nearly so) end of the spectrum.   An unstructured process may seem the more user-friendly for some; it can be anxiety-producing for others. I suspect that a larger polling sample would even out the percentages...

I'm sure we all know people who serve on more than one board at the same time. You may be one of them. Makes sense. Most of us have multiple interests and, if we're committed to involvement in our communities, some of us will volunteer in ways that wed our interests to our desires to make better the places where we live and play. And, it stands to reason that, over time, we could be recognized by more than one organization for our strengths, our talents, or our connections. Don't you marvel, though, at the number of talented people you know who would never consider serving on a board? Or they don't quite seem to make it on any organization's radar screen to be asked? When you think about it, it's no wonder so many organizations seem to be begging for board members. Well, there are two (at least) sides to that issue and today I want to explore the side that deals with the person who does make it onto the radar screens and into multiple board rooms. Here...

A colleague of mine was asked to participate in a discussion this week about her experiences as a board member.  Knowing that I've worked for and with a good number of boards, she wanted to get my take on some of the questions the discussion was going to be structured around. Her first question to me was, "What do you think are the characteristics of a great board member?"  Funny she should have asked me that as I've been thinking about that recently myself.  I ticked off a few characteristics -- passionate about the organization's mission, forward-thinking, optimistic, etc.  "What about skills -- like financial acuity or a legal background?" she countered.   Skills are good, too, I agreed, but I was thinking about a retired history teacher who was on the board of a local history museum.  Sure, the guy knew A LOT about history, but he monopolized conversations and dampened the group's ability to generate ideas.  You wanted to say to this fellow, ...

Since a governing board is first and foremost about group decision-making, frequent absences of board members undermine the basic tenet of what a board does.   Yet many boards turn a blind eye to the situation, often ignoring their own rules regarding attendance. If board members have difficulty making meetings, then it seems to me that there must be easier ways to keep them engaged in the work of the organization without holding the board and senior staff hostage to their attendance.    Chronically absent board members make it difficult for boards to achieve the quorums they need to legally accomplish business, thus thwarting decision-making. If that weren’t enough, the organization loses out on the benefit of their input at the times it might most be needed and, in turn, absent members lose out on the benefit of their peers’ points of view.   Thoughtful work to bring cohesion to a board can be undermined by the frequently absent.   The morale of those board members who faithf...

I taught the first webinar in NYSArts’ board development series last week.   (There are two more webinars left in the series and you can sign up for them by going to www.nysarts.org .)   The focus of the conversation was on board recruitment and training.   The lesson I hope I successfully transmitted was that bringing great talent to the boardroom is much more than that – it takes planning, skill identification, networking for the right person, lots of communication once that person is identified, followed by a support system that enables that person to do their best job should they agree to join the board. Far too often, especially for smaller boards or boards that are simply disorganized, the new board member recruitment process is an afterthought, hurriedly undertaken just before elections are held.   This method may fill board seats, but does it facilitate the matching of talent to the changing needs of an organization? It strikes me that board recruitment should be more a...