A Culture of Understanding

The French have a great expression, almost onomatopoeic, especially if it were in English:  coup de foudre.  Literally, it means a bolt of lightning.  And, with the emphasis on the “fou” it can sound just like a crack of lightening.  Figuratively, however, it means love at first sight.  It is nice to know that at my ripe old age, I can still fall in love at first contact.

I was interviewing a board member of an organization with which I am currently working and I just wanted to crawl through the phone and hug her.  Instead, I asked her if I could take her with me whenever I had to speak with board members.  When I called her, I knew that in addition to the board with which I’m working she is also on the board of an organization whose executive director is one of my favorite people.

The ED already told me she was a great board member, but I had no idea just how great.  Early in the conversation, however, I learned that she is on the board of not two, but six nonprofits.  My gasp and effort to resuscitate myself conveyed my amazement – and bewilderment – that anyone could do that and do it well.  But she quickly disabused me of any thoughts I might have had of her being one of those board members in name only for some of the six.   She told me that she was fulfilling her current term on each board and then getting off all of them.  Tired, you might be thinking, as I thought; can’t blame her.  But that was the wrong answer!

She told me she believes in governance.  Think about that for a minute.  A board member who actually believes in and, more importantly, as became increasingly clear through our conversation, understands governance.  Amazing!  Sadly, she is finding “board service” – her words, not mine – “unsatisfying”.  Her dissatisfaction does not result from the usual complaints:  executive directors who just want a puppet board; board meetings that are boring and unproductive; dysfunctional boards and/or organizations loving the dysfunction more than the problems, an overly empowered executive committee with a rubber stamp rest of the board, etc.

No, she is finding board service unsatisfying because “fewer and fewer other board members are willing to do the work.”  Honestly, she said that!  I’m not making this up!   There is second contributor to her growing dissatisfaction:  executive directors who come out of the corporate world into the nonprofit world and “don’t want a board.”  Thus, she contends, they make board meetings boring with lots of reports, no discussion of “exciting issues or ideas,” and more.  They only want a board, she says, when they get into trouble.  (Sadly, we see those kinds of board meetings happen, not just by the design of the crossover executive director, but also as a result of other executive directors and board presidents who fail to know better.)

Finally, a board member who understands her job, wants others to understand and embrace that job, and we are losing her through absolute fault of our own!  Having retired from a long and successful career, she took on the job of “full-time community volunteer.”  No slacker this woman.  She has the energy, passion, time, and desire to do the work and we have chased her away.  And we have failed her, for on six boards she cannot find a critical mass of people who want to join her in doing the work that is the purview of a nonprofit governing board.  How very, very sad.

Yes, it is our failure, those of us who toil in the sector day in and day out.  We who work full-time in the sector know – and shame on you if you don’t – what is the job of a governing board.  We know what it should be and we either know how to try and make the “should” the reality or we know to whom to turn to help.  Yet despite this, we accept mediocre; we settle for what we can get, as opposed to what we need and deserve.  (This is a complaint I lodge against board members when, too often in looking for a new executive director they settle for what they can afford instead of identifying what they need and figuring out what should be done to come up with the salary to secure it.)  As a result, board members serve on one nonprofit board never learning the truth, and go on to the next thinking they know what they are supposed to be doing and act accordingly.  No one told them any different.

True, it is not staff’s job to recruit board members; nor, ideally, is it its job to school its boss.  But it is our responsibility to share the knowledge that we have gained through our years of being immersed in the sector.  One of the things any smart wanna-be boss does is learn as much as s/he can during the recruitment process from those already in the organization about the organization, and then reinforces that during her/his first several months on the job by learning from all those in the organization who may actually, at that point, know more than s/he.  No different with a board:  staff generally knows more about what a board should do; learn from the staff.    One benefit with a board, however, is that over time, this cycle of educating the boss doesn’t have to continue with each new addition to the board; rather, once grasped, the board then creates a culture of understanding and responsibility that it perpetuates with each new class of board members.

As players in the nonprofit sector, our responsibility isn’t just to our own organization, but to the sector as a whole.  One organization’s failure to secure board members who understand their job and execute it well has a ripple effect throughout the sector.  That ripple grows to a riptide allowing the strong ones to survive and get out, while keeping to itself the weaker ones.