Leading by Design

Are you a nonprofit executive director in search of a better relationship with your governing board? Is your relationship with your board collaborative, contentious, or non-existent? Does your board drift between non-management and micromanagement? Do you mentally or emotionally check out of the relationship due to lack of time or commitment? I'll be leading a new class for Museum Study starting August 3rd on Leading Together: Working for and With Your Board of Trustees . This four-week course is geared for executive directors and will cover roles and responsibilities, assessing the board-staff relationship, and putting strategic and integrative thinking to work at board and committee meetings, among other topics.  Each week will include readings and assignments. We'll also gather in Zoom chats to explore topics in more depth and problem-solve your CEO-board challenges!  The cost is $400. I hope to see you this summer!

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 ...

THIS SUMMER I'M LEADING AN ONLINE COURSE in museum administration -- a new venture offered by the American Association for State and Local History.  The small band of participants -- most not museum administrators, by the way -- are being treated to the basics of nonprofit organization spanning how museums are founded to issues of leadership.   The most recent lesson explored the complex and sometimes competing roles of the museum director.  A director has allegiances to both the governing board and the staff requiring continual alignment of priorities and mitigation of distances between the two.  A director also has allegiance to her vision for organizational health, sustainability and excellence. Add to that the fact that as an organization develops, its leadership needs will change.  What worked for the start-up may be too informal and inefficient for a more mature organization.  The director's role, therefore, is not only played out vertically and...

A RECENT CONVERSATION ABOUT WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE for ongoing member communications at a nonprofit got me thinking about how boards can, often quite unintentionally, waste their CEO's talent and, in turn, the talent of bright, committed staff.  Boards can waste their own talent, too, but that's the subject for the next post.  In this conversation, some board members argued that it was the role of the board to review and approve every word the organization relayed to its membership.  Others differentiated between "strategic" communications -- issue briefs, advocacy alerts, statements on future organizational directions, for example -- and "informational" communications, such as event promotion, volunteer or donor recognition, and activity recaps.  Clearly, the substance of the communication seemed to be one (if not the ) determining factor in when the board would involve itself in message development and approval.  However, we didn't get to that unde...

IN MY LAST POST, I WROTE THAT CHANGING CAREERS or career focus is a powerful catalyst for shaking up sedentary thinking. It can reveal new professional perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. It can lead to new skills, networks, and best practices.  (It can also lead to sleepless nights, that slow-rising fear you overlooked something critically important that will come back to haunt you, and the trepidation of mastering a new technology. But that's another story for another time.) For me right now, it's about revealing the many forms and pathways that organizational leadership can take.  I've been a staff leader my entire working career. During that time I've learned a lot of leadership lessons, but I've also developed some predictable assumptions about what leaders do and personal expectations about what I, as an organizational leader, do.  Since shaking myself up eight months ago, my leadership assumptions have been tested in ways that often jump out f...

I'M A LONG-TIME CULTURAL ORGANIZATION DIRECTOR, several decades down the road from my first job.  I've been fortunate to have worked for boards that were mostly active and engaged with the work of the organization.  As my experience has grown and my abilities have been honed, I've found also that the boards I've chosen to work for have relied on me for direction as well as expertise.  No longer. Last year I made a conscious decision to switch it up.  I moved to an allied profession, but one I have no formal training in, no name recognition, and little, if any, professional capital to spend.  I'm an unknown quantity in need of proving myself in order to gain the trust of others.  I joined an organization as executive director that is just ten years old -- for all intents and purposes a start-up -- with a very active board that is fully engaged in setting direction, pursuing funding, and undertaking the work.  There's been more...

WHEN AN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR DECIDES TO LEAVE she walks a particularly tricky tightrope from the time she announces her intentions until she flicks off the lights in her office for the last time.  The length of the tightrope is one issue:  some believe that once you announce you need to be on your way as quickly as you can engineer it; others feel it must take several months in order to tie up loose ends or participate in an overlapping transition period.  Then there are a handful of others who announce a year or so ahead of their intended departure for reasons that may have everything to do with finishing milestone capital projects or completing major gift solicitations (and these folks more often than not it seems are announcing their retirements, not moves to new organizations).  So far this year,  colleagues of mine have used (are using) all three scenarios.    Regardless of the length of the tightrope, the tricky part involves the emotions that come...