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.

Like the bulbs of spring.

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 that could put their organization ideologically too far in front of the constituencies and communities they serve. I’ve seen boards wisely put the kabosh on ill-conceived public policy actions that could threaten public good will.

When conservator = ill-conceived road block

Too frequently, however, the conservator role of boards holds back innovation.

Staff often find themselves far ahead of their part time leadership volunteers when it comes to mission implementation. As the professionals, they interact with their peers and seek out new research and best practices. They are immersed every day in the work, thinking what comes next, how can I do this better (or at least we hope they are).

But their board members aren’t. They have other lives, other jobs, other concerns that take precedence. Few, if any, are traveling in the same professional spaces. They only know what is, and may have no clue about what might be and why that is important. So when staff bring forward these big new concepts, it takes time for board members to digest them.

Many years ago I was Director of Development and Communications at Plan International USA. During my tenure, we launched a soul searching strategic planning process. For a number of reasons that included maintaining our standing among our peers and funders, a commitment to fostering better international understanding, and our need to deepen the global understanding and thus the retention of our donors, staff were interested in expanding our fledgling development education programming and making it an important, though always small, part of our program mix.

A small cadre of academic board members were extremely resistant to the idea that we could educate donors through such a populist (for lack of a better word) approach to development education. After many frustrating conversations, the Board chose to delete development education from the strategic plan, sending it back to committee for discussion and reconsideration at a later date. Needless to say, staff were extremely frustrated (angry?). Ultimately, after many more months of give and take, we finally found a compromise that enabled us to proceed forward, albeit in very tiny steps. (Outcome: Our new, grant-funded development education program was hugely successful and achieved the strategic objectives that underpinned our initial reasoning).

Now, more than ever, we need our boards to look forward with vision, radical rethinking, insatiable curiosity, and the judgment to know when conservatism is called for and when disruption is essential.

While more organizations are ripening to the idea of doing business somewhat differently, I’m still finding too many boards oblivious at best and resistant at worst to newer ideas — like  joint ventures with other nonprofits. While due caution is needed for big changes like mergers or subsidiary relationships, others –like outsourcing financial management or the case I described above of co-directors — seem to be resisted for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately, these dynamic and perilous times require us to reconsider all historic assumptions and brutally question every aspect of the way we do business. Now, more than ever, we need to maximize the energy and resources that go into serving our communities and constituents. We can no longer assume that something that worked well enough in the past has any hope of surviving the future.

I don’t know if this is possible. Do you?

One of the conditions I always query for is whether the board has any clear objectives for what it plans to accomplish over the coming year (or longer).

Board meetings are not in and of themselves meaningful work. I’ve attended a lot of meetings where I’ve left thinking “really, did they need me here for that!” Usually all I did was listen to reports where there was no action required. And any decisions before us were pretty inconsequential and didn’t really rise to the level of board work. A year of meetings like that and I’d be surprised if you had any attendance at all.

Every board can benefit from a set of annual objectives. I’d put the usual suspects on that list:

• providing performance feedback to your Executive Director
• setting with your Executive Director his or her goals and objectives for the coming year
• reviewing and approving the audit and other critical monitoring of the health of the organization
• recruiting and electing a high quality board

All of these are important fiduciary obligations of any board.

But what is the added value, the real difference that your board will make?I’m not talking about the volunteer contributions of individual board members, but the collective entity that is The Board (that corporate entity that sits around the table at a board meeting).

If you’re at a loss for value based objectives, try framing your board work around these questions:

• What questions about our organization’s future and its societal impact must we answer this year?
• How will we demonstrate our accountability to the community in whose interests we are acting?
• To whom are we accountable now? Is that whom we should be accountable to?
• How do we know that our organization is really making a difference?
• What will truly shift the landscape for the problems we address?
• What might we imagine on the horizon that we should already be preparing for?
• What is our ideal relationship with other community partners? What do they want from us? How do we know? What are we prepared to do?
• Do we have a clear definition of organizational health? Are we sufficiently resilient?

In our Toolbox, you’ll find a sample Board Meeting Plan and a sample set of Board Objectives to help jumpstart your thinking.

Even better, who about devoting a major agenda item at your next meeting to answer these questions: What must the board accomplish this year? What value must this board bring to our organization?

Congratulations! You’ve just joined the board of directors of a charitable nonprofit.

If this is a new experience for you, you are in good company. Many businesses today encourage their staff to serve on nonprofit boards. You’ll share the experience of board service with individuals from all walks of life.

A few of your fellow board members may already be old hands at nonprofit governance. A rarer few have attended workshops or studied some of the literature on nonprofit board governance.

Many, however, are learning on-the-job…just like you.

… Perhaps your organization provided you with a comprehensive orientation to help you start your work on the board

… Maybe you were teamed with a more experienced director who is serving as your mentor?

With luck, you joined a superb board that’s filled with great role models.

It’s not unusual to feel a little unsure of yourself at first.

You should find the reception welcoming, as most nonprofit staff and directors relish the opportunity to benefit from the business savvy, strategic mindset, professional connections, and access to resources that directors from corporate backgrounds can contribute.

Yet, I frequently hear complaints that all of those desired qualities seem to evaporate as soon as a business person is elected to a board. And I often hear business people describe their frustration with their board service.

So here are a few insights about nonprofits that I’ve realized over the last 30 years — and a few tips to help make your board service more rewarding.

Let me start with the insights.

Nonprofits have a different bottom line.
In business, the bottom line is easy to understand – it’s all about profit. Even if your business advocates a dual bottom line (social responsibility and profit), profit doesn’t take second place.

In a nonprofit, there is no private inurement. The bottom line is the delivery of a public benefit – for example, an artistic contribution, environmental protection, or health promotion.

Determining what that public benefit is, how to deliver it and how to evaluate performance isn’t always easy. Imagine you are on the board of an organization dedicated to the promotion of practices for good mental health. Can you concretely define what success looks like? What evidence would you point to? What changes would your small agency claim responsibility for? These are the challenges that will face you as a director of a nonprofit board.

Nonprofits are valued for their prudence, commitment to service and fiscal restraint, yet are expected to produce significant community benefits.
In the for-profit world, business owners are rewarded for taking risks – usually with other people’s money (venture capital). Under-capitalization is warned against. And a personality like Donald Trump is lionized for his opulent lifestyle and forgiven for past business failures.

Not so in the nonprofit world. Here, individuals are expected to make sacrifices for the common good in the name of service. Making do with less is a familiar mantra. Pick up a business publication, and the virtuous charities are the ones with the lowest overhead.

Meanwhile, nonprofits are being admonished to “act more like businesses.” In reality, most nonprofits are extraordinarily small, much more comparable to “micro-enterprises.” According to data available through the National Center for Charitable Statistics, over 80% of registered US public charities had annual revenues below $250,000 in 2004.

At these smallest of nonprofits, nominally-paid staff or their volunteer leadership often have limited experience in nonprofit management and resource development — yet they are expected to operate as efficiently and effectively as multimillion dollar, professionally staffed organizations.

It’s surprising that these tiny organizations get anything accomplished at all. But they do! From the neighborhood soup kitchen feeding the hungry to the volunteer land trust preserving hundreds of acres of open space to the volunteer ethnic organization staging an annual cultural festival for 20,000 participants, many tiny nonprofits are making significant and valuable contributions to their communities.

Nonprofits are expected to consult with their stakeholders and to collaborate with their colleagues.
It’s not unusual for business people to comment on the pace of decision-making that occurs at many nonprofits. Change may happen more slowly than they are used to.

Because nonprofits are accountable to their community for doing good, stakeholders (like consumers, funders, politicians) expect to have some say in their functioning. If your nonprofit depends on public generosity for a sizeable portion of its revenue base, you need to ensure that your constituents understand and support the actions you take, or you put at risk their goodwill and continued financial support.

Decisions and actions both big and small often rely on volunteers.
If a nonprofit has no or limited staff, volunteers are performing much of the work. The biggest decisions of all – where to dedicate resources, what community needs to focus on, and what strategies to deploy – are made by volunteers, you, the board.

Imagine your business self managing a motley crew of unpaid staff with varied levels of expertise, skills and experience. Family and work demands always take priority over their volunteer commitments. Managing volunteers requires all of the skills and tools you would use with your paid staff, absent one obvious and highly motivating reward – money. Get the idea of the challenges you face?

Despite these differences, there are many experiences that nonprofits and businesses have in common.

• Whether for- or nonprofit, all enterprises need to be responsive to their marketplace.
• All enterprises need business acumen and effective operations to be successful.
• Quality research and information are essential for good decision-making.
• Ethical behavior and accountability ensure the goodwill of the public.
• Every enterprise needs the structures, systems, people, skills, strategy and self-reflection that are essential elements of success.

So, as a nonprofit board member, how can you best put your business experience to work?

Here are a few tips to get you started.

Focus on the bottom line – the mission.
As I said earlier, in a nonprofit, the mission is the bottom line. If you think of your community as your shareholders, achievement of your mission is the shareholder value that you’ve promised to deliver. However your nonprofit has committed to making the world a better place – by filling an unmet need, solving an important problem, creating new knowledge, or by increasing the level of joy or beauty for the people who live here – everything your nonprofit does should be measured against how well it is fulfilling that mission.

Don’t undercapitalize.
Successful nonprofits also need the financial and other resources to get the job done. So while you focus on the mission, don’t forget to ensure that your organization has a well-developed capacity to obtain the resources it needs to keep moving forward. The fewer staff you have, the more likely that you, a leadership volunteer, will play a critical role in obtaining those vital resources.

Do your homework.
You wouldn’t think of starting a new company or making a major business decision without quality research to inform your decision. Yet, many nonprofit board members are tempted to make decisions based on their personal feelings or individual experiences. Do your research. Don’t conjecture. Seek out best practices and benchmarks. Keep up-to-date on issues affecting both nonprofits and your charitable mission. Ask for time at board meetings for education as well as action.

Share what you know.
Just like your business, your nonprofit needs your skills as an entrepreneur, a resource-getter, a strategic thinker, a people-motivator, or an organization builder. That’s why they recruited you. Apply those talents to your work on the Board.

Ask board leadership for your job plan and annual performance measures.
Just as you provide your employees with job descriptions and clear expectations for performance, you should expect the same of your board. What is it that you have committed to? What will you achieve during your term of office? What are your personal priorities? What resources do you have to work with? What relationships are critical? What are the limits of your position? How will you be evaluated?

Be serious about legal matters.
It’s tempting for volunteers, especially in all of those tiny organizations, to think – “those rules don’t apply to our little local agency.” Whether you are a $100,000 or $100 million nonprofit, you are similarly bound by federal or state statutes. Do you know your legal responsibilities as a director? Do you understand the federal, state and local regulations governing your nonprofit? Be vigilant about these matters. You may expose yourself to personal liability if you are negligent or willfully violate the rules.

Hold core values of stewardship and ethical behavior.
The nonprofit sector depends on the trust and confidence of the public for its existence. When a nonprofit violates that trust, it places the whole sector in danger of losing the unique privileges afforded to tax-exempt organizations. Nonprofits survive because they have promised the public that they will use their resources wisely for the community good and not for personal gain – the essence of stewardship. It’s easier to be ethical when you’re committed to wise stewardship.

Combine an entrepreneurial attitude with patience.
In their study of high performing boards, the international consulting firm of McKinsey & Company report that nonprofit leaders tell us that “when boards… devote time to providing expertise, helping managers get access to people and resources, and building managerial capacity, their organizations benefit the most.” At the same time, McKinsey and Company stated in a report on nonprofit capacity building that “almost everything about building capacity in nonprofits (and in for-profit companies) takes longer and is more complicated that one would expect.” Entrepreneurship and patience are important virtues.

Last, but definitely not least, be courageous.

It is not easy to be a good board member. It’s hard to rock the boat or risk offending business colleagues by asking questions that everyone else seems to be dodging, or by insisting on right but difficult courses of action. Even setting goals takes tremendous courage. But nonprofits need, no, they require the courage of board members.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the time is always right to do what is right.” It’s just not always easy. Good luck. Enjoy your board service.

This article first appeared in Nonprofit Boards and Governance Review at www.CharityChannel.com.

• Wednesday, Sept 30th:  Gayle will be co-presenting on Annual Giving Campaigns at the Boston Fundraising Summit at Simmons College. Our session runs from 9:30-10:45 am.
• Thursday, Oct 8th: Jon and Gayle will be presenting “How to make the most of your year end appeal” for the RI Land & Water Partnership from 5:30-8:30 pm. The session will take place at Audubon Society of RI headquarters in Smithfield, RI. While the session is open to all, first dibs go to watershed associations and land trusts.
• Tuesday, Nov 3rd: Gayle will be leading a lively discussion “Building Board Leadership: The role of board officers” at TDC’s downtown headquarters in Boston, Mass.
• Monday, Nov 9th: Gayle will be presenting “Funding your work in these times” at the YES WE WILL Conference at the Crowne Plaza, Warwick RI. Her workshop is from 2:45-4:15.
• Friday Nov 13th: Dig deep into board self-assessment at Gayle’s workshop “How are we Doing? Using Self- Assessment to Jumpstart Your Board Improvement Plan” at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network/Associated Grantmaker’s Conference at the Sheraton Framingham in Framingham, Massachusetts. Session runs from 1:45-3:00 pm.
• Thursday, Dec 3: “Strategic Planning and Succession Planning” will run for the last time in 2009 at the Rhode Island Foundation/ Fidelity Investments Board Development Program. This one is an early morning session from 8:30-11:00 at Fidelity’s Smithfield, RI campus.

See you there.

Your founders most likely shared powerful dreams…

They saw people who were hungry and set out to feed them.

They saw people stricken by disease and were compelled to heal them.

They were outraged by the burning river and resolved to make it clean.

They saw a community without spirit and promised it art and music.

They saw their heritage at risk and vowed to preserve it.

Imagine those founding days of your organization.

Can you picture the founders, conspiring around a kitchen table? Can you hear them talking? Passionate, outraged, inspirational? Can you see them working tirelessly, day and night, in service to their cause, despite overwhelming obstacles, hungry to make a difference?

If you polled your board members today and asked why they serve, would they echo the passion of your founding vision?

Or would they describe their purpose in more mundane terms — attending meetings, monitoring finances, raising money, creating policies, supervising the CEO?

While these routine tasks are important components of the Board’s duties, they only have value as they enable the means to achieving the greater vision.

It’s not enough to outfit and command a tight little ship. That ship has to deliver its passengers to their desired destination or you’ve failed your mission.

Ultimately, your performance as a board isn’t judged by the health of your balance sheet, or the sparkle of your facility, no matter how important these may be.

The real measure is the difference you make in the lives you save, the natural resources you protect, the beauty you create, or the spiritual comfort you provide.

Whether you describe it as a vision, a mission, or just your promise to your community, achieving that vision is what truly matters.

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Adapted from the opening chapter of Gayle’s book How Are We Doing? A 1 Hour Guide to Evaluating Your Performance as a Nonprofit Board

• A critical mass of directors, including key leadership, perceive a need for change.
• The rest of the board is willing to go along.
• Directors find an inspiring new vision to rally around.
• Directors are actively involved in and agree with the “diagnosis.”
• Directors believe that the change is possible and will make life significantly better.
• Directors are open to trying new ways of acting.
• Directors believe that the benefits of change outweigh the costs.
• Directors are willing to, and learn, the new skills needed to perform the new behaviors.
• Directors believe that they personally can do it differently.
• The Board itself supports and reinforces the change over time.
• Directors are willing to commit the time to working on the change and to changing over time.
• Directors trust each other (and the change agent).
• Directors are willing to commit resources to support new ways of behaving.

What else have you found necessary to enable major improvements in your nonprofit board of directors?

And if you are thinking about launching board development, you might want to start by assessing just how many conditions for successful change are already in place.

For more about behavioral change and organization development, check out this helpful summary of Change Theory courtesy of University of Twente, Netherlands.

You remember the fairy tale. A poor miller’s daughter is locked into a room by the king and told to spin straw into gold upon penalty of death. She is saved by the appearance of a odd little person called Rumplestiltskin who offers to spin straw into gold for her but only on the condition that she give up her first born child.

Has your board imprisoned your Executive Director?

In surveys conducted across the U.S., most nonprofit executive directors report that they love their work. Yet they also lament how they’re subject to constant stress, never ending days (and evenings and weekends), and financial and personnel worries.

If there is anywhere in an organization that the buck truly stops, it’s in the office of the executive director. Yea, the moral authority of the organization is on the shoulders of the Board. But the reality… it’s the CEO responsible for success or failure.

According to a survey done by The Urban Institute ” more than a quarter of CEOs [of mid-sized organizations] rate their boards as fair or poor when it comes to evaluating the CEO, planning, monitoring programs and services, dealing with the community, and educating the public about the organization.”

Time after time, I hear from the executive directors of very successful nonprofits how alone and unsupported they feel. “I appreciate the vote of confidence of my board, but I don’t feel completely comfortable steering this ship without some direction from the Board.”

Certainly boards hire their chief executives for their leadership and with high hopes for great outcomes. But like the poor miller’s daughter, few mortals have gold-spinning powers. Most need some support to achieve great results.

CEOs need a strong partnership with their Board. They want to find a collegial, dedicated and self-managed team that employs the right amount of monitoring while at the same time offering support and wise counsel.

Too often they get micromanagers instead, or equally bad, uninterested and unreliable directors the care and feeding of which just squanders precious time.

How do you know what your CEO needs from your board (beyond meaningful work, reasonable compensation, a healthy workplace, and opportunities for professional growth)?

There are two ways to find out:

1. Put yourself in your exec’s shoes. What would you want from the board if you were in that job?

2. Ask. You can learn a lot through direct conversation.

Don’t make your CEO strike a Faustian bargain with some funny little man. Supported by an effective board, many CEOs actually can spin straw into gold.

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An earlier version of this appeared in Chapter 12 of Gayle’s book How are We Doing? A 1-Hour Guide to Evaluating Your Performance as a Nonprofit Board

These words emerged from a workshop I facilitated this morning called “boards that lead.” To get us started I asked everyone to think of a great board experience they have had and then to share one word that characterized that experience.

In just a few minutes, the 40+ board members, executive directors and staff who attended shared the words above. Together, they described the perfect board experience. What a gift.  Thank you.