Board Membership is a Team Sport

One of the members of a board president’s peer learning circle I facilitate recently asked, “What tools are there to help keep a board president motivated?” I confess that in all of my years of facilitating learning circles of board presidents and of one-on-one conversations with board presidents, that question has never been asked.

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There are really two questions here, the first being how does a board president stay motivated about the mission?  If direct engagement with the mission—seeing it in action, participating in delivering the services (if possible), spending time talking with clients—doesn’t do the trick of keeping a board president passionate about the mission, it is simply time to move on.  That means step down from the presidency and the board and take a break from board service, or find another mission that will excite your passions and join the board of that organization (but not as president).

The second issue addresses how a board president stays motivated to do the incredibly hard and thankless work the role demands?  Contrary to what too many think, being a board president comes with no more power than that which any other board member has; it just comes with a heck of a lot more work that too many board presidents magnify even further.

Being a board member is a team sport that is far too often played as an individual one, sometimes by design, but more often by default.   For reasons that I cannot verify, members who are not the president think that the president should do it all.  Could that be part of the reason that so many boards struggle with finding good candidates willing to be board president?  But the board president’s job isn’t to go it go it alone, to bear the burden of the full board solely on her/his shoulders.  It is this aspect of being a board president that wears presidents down and prompted the original question of what tricks or tools are there to keep board presidents motivated.

There are no tricks.  In fact, tricks, subterfuge and sleight of hand may just be what has put too many board presidents into this very predicament, and not necessarily because they promulgated the tricks, but because others before them did).  In desperation to get people onto nonprofit boards, too many boards aren’t honest and upfront with people, letting them think (if not telling them directly) that the job consists of nothing more than attending infrequent board meetings.  Only after they have begun serving does the true picture emerge.  And then it is too late, as expectations were already cemented.

A board president’s best friend is careful and intentional board recruitment and education, education, and education.  (To a person, the twenty students in my recently concluded graduate class on governance identified the number one need of boards as perpetual education that begins with the on-boarding process and ends with board members’ departures.  And they aren’t alone in identifying this as a crucial need.)  The board president can play an important role in making both of these happen by ensuring, first, the “right” composition of the Governance Committee and, second, that the Committee understands fully its role and responsibilities around on-boarding and education.

With the right and well-educated people on the bus, a board president can easily assume one of his/her key responsibilities:  being the head cheerleader, inspiring the rest of the cheerleaders who, collectively, encourage the players.

Success won’t come when enthusiasm for the mission and job of being a board member resides just with the board president; it must be embraced by all board members.  Nonprofits will never be successful if just the board president understands what needs to be done and does it.  No one person working alone can do the work that a board is supposed to accomplish.  S/he needs the full complement of board members involved.  With good people who understand the true expectations of boards and a conscientious nudge modeling the behavior while cheering them on, the job of board president becomes much easier and, dare I even suggest it, more enjoyable.  And the best news?  Boards can actually accomplish good things for an organization’s mission.