Leading by Design

AS MUCH AS NONPROFITS NEED FORWARD-THINKING, entrepreneurial staff leadership, they need it just as much in the board room.  Recruiting for it is not unlike recruiting for entrepreneurship in the CEO -- it requires definition and identification of some key attributes around which conversation and questions can be had. My not-so-official definition of nonprofit entrepreneurship -- be it social or cultural -- is an organization's willingness to shift its perspectives to find opportunities and partnerships in unexpected places, reset old boundaries to expand audiences and, in doing so, use the strengths of its mission to diversify and/or grow income streams.  And woe be the entrepreneurial CEO who doesn't have a like-thinking board to support and advance her efforts. Cultural and social entrepreneurs share some or all of the following attributes:   They see and understand the relevancy of the work and the cultural/social value it provides They can make value connectio...

LET'S FACE IT -- IF FINDING COMMITTED, DYNAMIC AND FORWARD-THINKING board members was easy, you wouldn't be reading this post.  And I wouldn't have written about board recruitment as much as I have (see here, here , here , and here to list a few of the dozen or so posts I written on this topic).  I'm not the only one writing about it -- there are dozens of articles and book chapters devoted to it and plenty of workshops and webinars (OK, these are webinars I developed for NYS ARTS) available.  I like to think we might be making some headway on understanding that board recruitment is an ongoing process made up of interlocking pieces.  And, indeed, we are. Nevertheless, I was struck when a nonprofit leader in a focus group I conduct recently declared that, in her community, most nonprofits had no clue what the role of the nominating committee was and no understanding of how important this committee was to the long term health of their organizations.  Several of...

The June webinar I conducted for NYS Arts titled, Fulfilling a Role or Just Filling a Seat? , is available for viewing and listening here .     I think it's full of practical tips, many of them I've written about over the last couple of years of Leading By Design , but the audio and my scribbling on the PowerPoint slides lends a certain animation that I simply can't achieve in my posts. Photo:  Executive Board Room Facility at...from SFO CP

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...

IN MY LAST POST I WROTE ABOUT mapping your current board.  Let's go to the next step and think about how this same type of mapping can be used to identify skills and attributes needed to add to a board.   Your map might begin with a simple list of these skills and attributes -- a list that is drawn from discussions about your organization's vision, mission and values, from your strategic or long-range plan, from a board self-assessment and/or from writing a statement about what your ideal board would look like. As I've written about here , this exercise sets you (and your nominating or board development committee) up for moving your search from the "what" to the "who" -- the people who might fill your skills/attributes requirements. Some of your primary candidates might be found among your members, your volunteers, your corporate underwriters, and any number of people your organization interacts with every day.  But other prospects may be more removed......

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...

IF "YOUNGER MINDS ATTRACT YOUNGER AUDIENCES" isn't your institution's mantra, you should seriously consider making it so.  Not just for staff and volunteers, I'm thinking this needs to be your board's mantra, too.  That's particularly true for well-established, highly structured cultural organizations presenting traditional programming formats. You know these organizations; you may work or volunteer in one. While we read about the graying of audiences for some cultural activities, I'm wondering how gray the board and senior staff are.  Do you think there's a distinct correlation?   Younger minds do more than attract younger audiences.  They keep the cobwebs at bay.  They help us question accepted practice and remix familiar elements to make new connections.  And they are the fundamental bridges to our organizations' futures. Some organizations utilize "junior boards" for folks under 40 to try out their chops.  If you shine there, you...

IT'S SNOWING LIGHTLY IN THE NORTHEAST THIS Presidents' Day morning and I'm hoping that many of you have the day off to enjoy - what else? - cherry pie, a visit to a presidential home, library or gravesite; or settling in to watch Abe Lincoln in Illinois , the 1940 flick starring Raymond Massey. Twice in the last ten years, the folks at C-SPAN have asked presidential historians to rate the effectiveness of our commanders in chief in ten critical leadership areas. The most recent of these rankings was released last Presidents' Day (2009). If you'll forgive the fact that I'm a year late, I think you'll find this list of leadership qualities one worthy of incorporating into your recruitment strategies for nonprofit board and staff leaders. So, help yourself to another piece of pie and enjoy. C-SPAN developed, presumably with the help of their presidential scholars, a list of ten key attributes of presidential leadership: Public Persuasion : Here's a ...

THERE'S SO MUCH WRITTEN ABOUT RECRUITING BOARD TALENT, I thought I'd spend a little time thinking about it from the prospect's point of view. Clearly, there are boards where the line is long to get on them. But what would make you turn down an invitation? Here's a short list to get the conversation started: 1. You've had no prior exposure to the organization. Your immediate reaction is "did you pull my name out of a hat?" (Is that lady in the picture the head of the Nominating Committee?) Seems as though there must be a hidden agenda at work (like you're rich and once you become a board member you'll pour all your resources into the organization) or the organization is simply looking for any warm body to fill a seat. 2. The organization doesn't have a good reputation. There's something to be said for street cred. An organization that's floundering may be strengthened by your participation or you may find yourself sucked into...

THIS QUOTE FROM MAUREEN DOWD'S NY TIMES COLUMN (August 2, 2009) is a sentiment I’ve seen before regarding the interview process: Carol Smith of Elle says she doesn’t hire anyone without taking them out to a meal first because it’s “like a little microcosm of life. How they order, what they order. How are they going to give instructions to a waiter? Are they sending back the meal eight times? Employers are encouraged to go the extra step when hiring their top people. What’s the equivalent for “hiring” nonprofit board members? As I’ve written in previous posts here and here , the recruitment process of new board members deserves a nonprofit’s utmost attention starting from the first hello. Being a board member is serious business and these days a helluva lot is riding on the ability to provide logic and clarity to decision-making in what’s more like a pinball game than a measured exercise of the public trust. I’m thinking that the board recruitment process ought t...

At your next board meeting look around you.   What would you say the average age of your board is?   Forty?   Fifty?   Sixty?    You’re not alone.   Almost three-quarters of nonprofit boards are comprised of Baby Boomers (those age 46-64), according to BoardSource's Nonprofit Governance Index survey.   Only 2 percent are younger than 30, with almost 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 49. In a recent Nonprofit Times article , Scott Leff of the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management says that attracting young men and women to board service is “fundamental to sustainability.”    Indeed, if an organization fails to do so, the board will age itself out putting its future in jeopardy.   And given the fact that the vast number of current board members will be retiring from board service in the next decade, the nonprofit sector is facing (some argue we're in it right now) a talent drain that, just in sheer numbers, will be difficult to replace. One of the big obstacles is that b...

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...

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, ...

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...