I love participating in the day because each time I get a fresh business person’s perspective on the nonprofit sector.
This past Thursday, during a discussion about board roles and responsibilities, one of the participants asked if the following situation was typical:
“I went onto the board of a few nonprofits as part of the expectation of my job. It seems it wasn’t enough that I was attending board meetings, and bringing with me a pretty significant corporate gift and my own personal donation. In no short order, I started getting all kinds of additional requests from the staff … like attending events to requests to help open doors or solicit others. They acted like all of this was expected of me.
“I was overwhelmed by the hidden expectations of serving on a board. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
I’d say, unfortunately, that this was the norm, wouldn’t you? Obviously the organization failed to disclose to the board member when he was being recruited what they expected of him. But even if they had, I’ll bet that he still would have received many more requests than he bargained for.
Why is it that once an individual joins a board that staff feel that the board member has made an open-ended commitment to their organization? “It’s their job to…” I hear staff say all the time.
While I love my board members to be thinking 24/7 how their daily contacts might also benefit my organization, realistically, I get it that my organization is likely 2nd or even 3rd on my directors’ priority list for their time, with family, work and maybe even play, ahead of me.
It’s time for our sector’s staff to stop acting like board members are indentured servants and remember them for the volunteers that they are. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter how much time they do put it, it’s never enough.
Take the board member who just did a full sprint on a project you gave them. I’m sure they’d like to take a deep breath before jumping into something else. If you immediately go after them for another time-consuming project, you’re very likely to make that board member feel that the time commitment is too much… and the risks of losing that board member are pretty high.
So what to do? Here’s a tip that the New Directions exec offered. Read More >>
“If you are really stuck, you can ask people who know people to help you brainstorm (more about that in a later post).”
As promised, let me say a bit more about asking for help.
It’s ideal to have your next board recruits ready-to-pick from an in-house farm team of committees volunteers, and donors. But most boards that find themselves asking for our help to build a stronger board haven’t created that team (if they had, they probably wouldn’t need our help.)
Even if you have built a farm team, it may be pretty homogeneous, lacking the rich diversity of backgrounds, ethnicity and experiences that you desire.
So, many boards can benefit from recruiting members beyond their inner circle. Here’s an example of how one organization went about it.
I’m working with a neighborhood scale organization that through a series of circumstances, has a board of just a few members. With very few paid staff, this organization needs a true working board willing to take on a number of projects itself. So it is interested in recruiting board members and also volunteers to roll up their sleeves and take on some very practical assignments.
Once we clarified the work ahead, we developed ideal candidate profiles and translated those into a “Call for Board members.” Knowing who we were looking for helped us think about who we wanted to ask for help.
Who we invited.
We brainstormed a list of everything that we could think of, whether we knew them or not, who might know someone who had the qualifications that we were looking for. We made sure that this list reflected the diversity of perspectives we were looking for. Read More >>
I’ve found that one of the reasons nonprofits have such a hard time recruiting good board members is that they start from scratch every time nomination season rolls around.
Here’s a small tip that can help: Keep an ongoing list of candidates.
Who should we put on the list?
Anyone you have or might ever want to consider to be on your board.
How do we come up with the names?
First, create profiles of the ideal candidates you are looking for. (See the Call for Board Members in our Toolbox for an idea of what this might look like.)
Then, start looking for anyone you think might fit one of those profiles. The best place to start is in your own donor or volunteer base. Usually your best prospects are people who have already shown interest in you.
Ask board members to submit names that might fit the profile. Brainstorm within your governance committee.
Throughout the year, keep your eyes open for others — they might have been mentioned in a newspaper or radio article, or you met them at a networking or other event. Read More >>
I am not a big fan of a board chairperson serving as the direct supervisor of a nonprofit’s executive director.
I’ve seen too much that can go wrong:
An overbearing, micro-managing board chair can make a CEO absolutely miserable, driving many a CEO out of his or her organization.
It’s too tempting for a Board chair to make decisions when asked by the CEO that are rightly those for the full board’s deliberation.
There is something about the elevation of the position that enables a board chair, when asked by the CEO, to offer advice on issues that he or she isn’t really sufficiently qualified to answer.
Executive directors can skillfully use their relationships with board chairs to bypass consultation with the full board.
Board chairs are too willing to set the priorities for the Executive Director, instead of consulting with the full board on where it would like the focus to be.
Executive directors can avoid responsibility for tough management decisions, passing them off to the board chair to make.
It’s hard to get strong board member engagement when important issues come to the board already decided. Or even worse, when the board is kept in the dark on important issues — only to unearth them at a later date.
In my board playbook, the full board and only the full board is the boss of the executive director. But then I’m a big advocate of many aspects of John Carver’s policy governance ® model where the board instructs the CEO only through the creation of policies that outline priorities and frame management decision boundaries.
I believe that we would have much stronger boards if the board chair spent more of her or his time mentoring and engaging the other board Read More >>
In an earlier blog post Abolish the nonprofit Board? What do you think? I told the story of a social entrepreneur who, in starting a new public charity, decided to forgo standard wisdom and ditched his board.
He couldn’t really eliminate the board entirely — most states require board members in order to have a nonprofit corporation. To meet the requirement, he invited two friends to make up a three person board, including himself.
Why did he do this? Because he found as CEO of a previous nonprofit that the board was an incredible time sink for his attention. And that the board seemed satisfied with the status quo (quality programs delivered to a small cohort of needy kids) rather than demanding bolder action to meet what was such a bigger need.
Many of you commented, sympathizing with his plight yet worrying both about the long-term sustainability of the organization as well as the oversight to donors.
I promised I’d weigh in after giving you an opportunity to comment.
I agree with him on two accounts:
Boards can be a real drag on Executive Director time.
Boards are often timid and unclear on what value they create.
And where I disagree:
Boards protect the public’s interests
Nonprofit ownership belongs in the community, not one person.
Last Thursday I was part of one of the most provocative discussions I’ve been in for awhile.
The CEO of a year old start up public charity — I’d say he fit the description of a “social entrepreneur” — was describing his leadership and management framework to a group of top level corporate types. He was confident, brash, passionate about his mission, and business oriented. He referenced Jim Collins and Good to Great in his approach.
The business people loved him. Me too… until…
He explained how in starting this new organization he had learned many lessons from the previous organization he had founded (which had enjoyed both great program outcomes and growth).
Like the need for a clear business model
The importance of having great people in their jobs
A commitment to the mission, including not settling for too small an impact on a big problem
All good, and then..
Getting rid of unproductive time sinks, including the Board of Directors.
Whoa! Like throwing a firebomb into the room.
Hearing the collective gasp, he went on to explain. At the first organization he had founded, he spent 30% or more of his time managing the Board of Directors. A board that was complacent with the number of kids they were serving, which was barely a drop in the bucket of need.
So, this time around, he wasn’t going to waste precious time when there was important work to be done. Though he really couldn’t really abolish the Board (state law does require a board of directors for a nonprofit, usually with more than one trustee), he could make it small and manageable. Which he did by composing the board with two good friends and himself.
I noted that this is all perfectly legal. And frequently done. Think of the typical founder board, usually a family and friend affair.
Needless to say, lots of questions followed:
Don’t you need the Board to assist in fundraising? No, the business model is built on federal funds.
Who decides Executive Compensation? How do you ensure that you don’t get in trouble with the IRS over excess compensation? We do an regular market survey of salaries, I get paid under the top, and I recuse myself from the discussion and vote.
How do you build community ownership? Get contrary advice? We have an advisory board of community leaders and others.
Why didn’t you just create a for profit organization? Because this is the corporate structure I’m most familiar with and to leave open the possibility for philanthropy, even though the business model doesn’t currently depend on it.
What happens if something happens to you? That is a question, but my guess is that the board will find someone to replace me. Plus, as we grow, there will be staff under me who could step into my shoes.
I had lot of thoughts about this. But before I share them, I’d love to hear from you.
Last week I found myself in a very interesting conversation about the “profession” of fundraising.
A colleague was sharing ideas from a workshop she attended. The presenter had described a common situation that many directors of development experience.
You know the one. The development director has just laid out a carefully crafted strategy based on best practices and research. Immediately a board member or other leadership volunteer challenges the elements of the plan.
I’ve found that this scenario is very common when planning events or personal solicitation campaigns.
Usually, the challenge reflects the anxiety of the volunteer at being asked to step outside of his or her comfort zone. The volunteer/board member, fearful of the task ahead, comes up with dozens of reasons why the carefully developed strategy won’t work. Why, another organization he volunteered at just sent out a glossy letter instead of asking him to make phone calls.
So my colleague noted that the workshop presenter made the case that fundraising is a profession. One of the ways to tell a true profession is whether or not it has a body of knowledge that is “unique and specific to its practice and function.” (AFP). She made the case that fundraising does in fact have an established and growing body of knowledge.
The presenter then described a few scenarios of other professions with established bodies of knowledge where it would be unimaginable to find the amateur telling the professional how to do that job. Here are two that came to mind:
Could you imagine a board member telling the chief of surgery at a nonprofit hospital a better way to perform an upcoming operation?
Or a committee chair telling the head coach at an independent school a better way to train his basketball players? (Well, maybe you could imagine that, but you get the picture.)
So why do board members feel they can tell fundraising “professionals” how to do their job?
But here was my counterpoint.
Before we get a little self-righteous about all that profession stuff, maybe we need to look into the mirror.
Perhaps our board members don’t treat us as the professionals we are because we act like amateurs can do our jobs.
Case in point:
Why do development directors and executive directors act like their board members rose from the primordial ooze as trained fundraisers?
I find way too much agony and even anger in this profession at board members about fundraising. I’ve written about this time and again (see Banishing your expectation of board fundraising). How, if we believe that fund development is a profession, can we expect good-hearted people with no fund development background to spontaneously do our jobs for us?
We can’t both complain that we aren’t respected for the professionals we are and then simultaneously gripe and moan when the amateurs on our boards don’t act like professional fundraisers.
Find the willing, equip them with compelling cases for support, train them, and hold their hands all the way through the process. In essence, put those professional skills to work.
For the last week, every time I leave my house I step out to a front yard radiant with spring bulbs and flowers. A few years ago we ripped out the sad looking front lawn and replaced it with raised beds filled with summer perennials, spring bulbs and ground covers.
While I love all of my flowers, I think I love the spring bulbs most of all.
Last fall, as the flowers were fading and the temperatures falling, I dug the holes, dropped in the bulbs, a little organic bone meal, a little water, and waited for spring.
I plant the bulbs knowing that it will take months before I’ll reap the rewards. Yet I do it anyway, craving their beauty and anticipating their arrival throughout the coldest and snowiest months of winter.
And voila! here they are. First the crocuses, then the tulips and daffodils to take their place. I’m rarely disappointed (having learned to select varieties that the squirrels won’t eat).
Monday I was facilitating a planning meeting with some board members and staff of a nonprofit that I worked with on board development the previous year. Before our work together, the board was tired and ineffectively turning in circles.
We began our work together in in the fall, right around bulb planting time. In June, we elected five new community members who have been an incredible addition to the board, bringing hope, energy, new friends and growing commitment.
As I arrived at the meeting Monday, I stopped to say hello to one of the staff. He looked to the room where we were meeting and smiled, reminding me of the renewal of the board.
With the extremely poor financial condition that states are experiencing and the coming wave of dramatic cutbacks in state and local funding of services delivered through nonprofits (one colleague noted close to 15 nonprofits on the financial brink in her Florida community), one would think that boards would crave new thinking around program delivery, organizational structure, partnership or cost reduction.
But a conversation yesterday brought back to me a dynamic that I’ve been observing for many years: the role of boards as conservators.
A little background.
Yesterday I made my bi-annual trek to life portfolio company New Directions to discuss life in the nonprofit sector with their clients. New Directions clients are accomplished people in business or the professions who are designing the next stage of their life journeys.
My portion of the conversation was “The rewarding and confounding world of the nonprofit sector,” which is partly nonprofit 101 and partly DEEP THOUGHTS.
A fellow “interpreter of the sector” was the Executive Director of a capacity building (smallish, $500K budget) nonprofit. He mentioned that for the last two years he had been a co-executive director, a leadership team that resulted from a merger. He mentioned that the other ED was winding up his term and he would soon be the sole ED. When I asked how the co-directorship worked for him, he shared he really liked the arrangement, but his Board just wasn’t comfortable with the shared leadership model.
Boards as Conservators
At first a bit surprised by this tale, it reminded me that many boards are naturally suited to their role as conservators.
Here I’m using conservator in its definition as someone who conserves or keeps safe. Like a custodian, guardian, or protector.
The words we use to describe board duties — like prudent, loyalty, care, fiduciary — imply moderation and caution. Another word I might use would be “conservative.”
In my experience, most Boards of Directors are loathe, and rightfully so, to take big risks. In their conservator role, boards put the breaks on reckless spending. Because boards usually reflect the mindset of the communities they serve, they often restrain choices, decisions or actions Read More >>
