If you’re a board member, you’ve likely heard what I consider one of the lamest rationales out there for your giving. And if you are… Read More »The problem with giving as a proxy for board effectiveness
Serving on a CEO/presidential search committee is a weighty assignment. Constituent hopes are high. Inquiring minds want to know. And employees wait impatiently for a… Read More »The proof of a CEO search is in the post-selection “pudding”
Should you get big names and deep pockets on your board? This question from a LinkedIn discussion group left me scratching my head. What’s the alternative — a… Read More »If I had a rich board, deedle, deedle, dum
“Leadership,” as James MacGregor Burns wrote back in 1978, “is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.” But that hasn’t stopped… Read More »Minding the governance gap in leadership
“Noses in, fingers out.” I’ve come to despise this time-tattered bit of advice to boards. The smug certainty with which the four-word adage is usually… Read More »All hands needed on the governance deck, and noses, too
We nonprofit types tend not to look in the direction of corporate governance for advice, which is terribly short-sighted on our part. As governance guru Richard Leblanc illustrates in a hot-off-the-printer white paper, despite obvious differences in the raison d’être of the sectors, there’s cross-over wisdom aplenty. Good board work is good board work – regardless the profit motivation.
Leblanc addresses wide-spread concern that company boards are too focused on compliance-related responsibilities and only inadequately addressing value creation and company performance, are thought to be not sufficiently independent from company management, and often lack industry knowledge and relevant experience.
Swap out “organization” for “company” and Leblanc’s summary of corporate governance woes mirrors short-comings I regularly encounter within the nonprofit sector.Read More »10 proposals for upping your board’s value-added quotient
As part of prepping for a workshop with a nonprofit board that’s new to me, I asked the chair to name his must-be-addressed topic for the day. Almost before the question was out of my mouth, he shot back his answer. “I need help in structuring meetings so that the board stays out of administrative detail.” He went on to describe the tedium of agendas dominated by staff reports and the frustration of never enough time to focus on the future.
If misery loves company, this chair has it – in droves. Or so suggests a long-running exchange over at the BoardSource LinkedIn discussion group. The conversation began in June 2011 with the question, “Does anyone have an example of a board agenda that helps steer the conversation towards strategy and away from operations? A year later that starting query continues to generate comments (more than 600 to date).Read More »Strategies for avoiding meddling by meeting
All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my service on the board of MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) International. Six… Read More »Reflections as a newly former board chair
“Despite years of claiming the contrary, donors still don’t really care about nonprofit performance or impact.” In fact, as blogger and student of philanthropy Tim Ogden reports, a majority of donors believe there “isn’t much difference between nonprofits, that any giving is good, and performance measures are a waste of time and money.”
For all the calls for proof of impact, for most folks, a touching story trumps facts most of the time. It’s what Ogden refers to as the “Lake Wobegon problem: the idea that all the nonprofits I give to are above average” so don’t bother me with dry details. Read More »Donors may not care about results, but boards should
Once upon a time, minding your board’s fiduciary P’s and Q’s consisted of dotting organizational I’s and crossing legal T’s and little more. But no longer. Or so say the members of an august panel of governance veterans featured in the March/April 2013 issue of Trusteeship magazine. As they tell it, fiduciary stewardship stretches well beyond the board’s attention to the bottom line. Read More »Two strategies for improving your board’s fiduciary behavior