Leading by Design

IS 2015 THE YEAR YOU JOIN A NONPROFIT BOARD?  Perhaps you've been thinking that board service would be a great way to give back to your community or perhaps you've decided to give in to your best friend's pleading to join her board.  Whether you're giving back or giving in, don't waste any time in asking these five questions: 1.  Am I comfortable with group work?   Everything you read on nonprofit governance casts it as group work: deliberation and decision-making as a team; working with and through committees; and working to consensus.  If you're the lone wolf type, preferring to tackle problems and projects on your own, you'll find group work difficult, even drudgery.  So, if you're intent on joining a board know that the group trumps the individual.  Yes, your individual skills, opinions, and talents are needed and will be welcomed (hopefully), but when it comes to execution, it is the group that will capture the flag. 2.  Where will m...

MY LAST POST CONCENTRATED ON SETTING the table for addressing the under-performing or non-performing board member.  At any given time, most boards have one or two members who struggle with engagement -- it's a natural part of the ebb and flow of board work -- but if it's a chronic predicament for your board, don't be content to look the other way.  In the long run, it's not helpful to the individual or the organization to do so.  As Anna Tegen noted in her post  here ,  board members run out of steam or lose focus.  In Anna's case, she's taking the initiative to find ways to re-engage.  For other, not so self-motivated people, their fate will be in the hands of their board peers to figure what's going on and what to do about it. The Options:  Stay, Shift, Off Of course you always have the option of doing nothing.  But is that really an option ? Once you've had "the conversation" , you've got several ways to go depending on its o...

MY LAST POST LEFT YOU AT THE POINT OF determining why it's important for your organization to have a fully functioning board. I think that getting very clear on this -- even to the point of writing it down -- as a sort of board mission or vision statement -- will help all board members understand the board's role in leading and protecting a complex system of stakeholders, programs and services. This statement, along with a board job description outlining organizational expectations of board service and the criteria used to identify board talent, form the foundation for evaluation of board member performance. While some boards are more forgiving of extensive absences or cantankerous behavior, these and other idiosyncracies can ultimately affect effective governance and jeopardize "street cred". (I discuss the absent board member in more detail here .) So, another discussion might have something to do with how much a board can/will tolerate. These discussions cert...

How well does your organization orient its board members to their work? I know organizations that do a great job of it and organizations that have never given it a passing thought. Stop and ponder this for a moment: are people born with the expertise to serve on a nonprofit board? Then how does one acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be an effective board member? I suspect that many would say that they learned by watching others and doing the work assigned to them. All well and good, I suppose, if we simply want board members who rubber stamp the leader’s decisions. Now stop and ponder this: the nature of nonprofit work and funding is increasingly complex due to any number of things, including increased professionalization, greater scrutiny from government, regulators and funders, heated competition for audience and dollars, and relentless escalation of fixed overhead costs. This is the nonprofit world as we now know it. It is not for the faint of heart. What ...