Leading by Design

JANUARY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER (yikes!) and many if not most nonprofits will be holding their first board meeting of the new year sometime in the next four weeks.  While we might be inclined to fall back on comfortable agenda formats and conversations for this meeting, if you're embracing 2014 as a year of intentional organizational development (see my post about that here ), then I know you're giving serious thought to rethinking what and how business will be discussed. For those of you from organizations that tend to tick methodically through task lists at board meetings before calling it a day, structuring the first board meeting of the new year around an evaluation of past successes and failures coupled with discussion about future directions is in order as one way to move from microscopic dissection to big picture strategy.  For this type of conversation to be successful, it needs to be structured.  One way to do that is with a handful of big questions and ...

I ALWAYS GET A LITTLE SHIVER UP MY SPINE when a I see a board meeting agenda that is nothing more than a pro forma list of reports.  I bet you know what I mean -- after the call to order and the approval of the previous month's minutes we're off and running with a litany of updates from the president, the director, and any number of committees.  You can kind of put yourself on auto-pilot for most of these meetings.  In fact, one (at least) organization I know hands out the same agenda for every meeting.  It doesn't even take into account that a committee or two haven't met -- your committee is on there even if all you have to say is "we haven't met."  (And, yes, that shows up in the minutes!)  Please tell me what would excite you about attending that meeting if the agenda was all you had to go on? The fact is a board is a community -- a community of doers and seekers.  In order for this community to do it must seek meaning not only from facts, but f...

WHO IS THIS GUY AND WHY IS HE SHOWING UP IN MY BLOG? Well, tell me if this board meeting agenda line-up sounds familiar to you: call to order, reading of the minutes, reports of officers, reports of standing and ad hoc committees, director's report, unfinished or old business, new business, adjournment. It's likely that this agenda (or something similar) is familiar to most of you in the US, because it comes from Robert's Rules of Order , Henry M. Robert 's parliamentary playbook first published in 1876 as the Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies. I think you can tell by the General's picture that he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. Robert's Rules moves citizen leaders through the paces of decision-making with military precision. Since most cultural nonprofits are a L-O-N-G way from the top-down rigidity of military convention (nor composed of hundreds of board members), Robert's Rules has been an uneasy fit. I think most organi...