While this is the golden strategy for maintaining all sorts of human relationships, it is especially vital in promoting positive performance by board members.  Unfortunately, so much of what we want board members to do remains unsaid, doesn’t it?  And if we don’t actively strive to state and continually reaffirm expectations, then board members are free to fill in those blanks with their own assumptions of what they should be doing.

This simple yet profound dynamic is the source of much frustration and disappointment among board members, their leaders, organization staff and even members of the community.  This is the reason behind all of those painfully blunt documentation practices, such as board job descriptions (that include fund raising expectations, participation on committees, etc.), codes of conduct, conflict of interest statements and all manner of other policies and procedures.

Take a moment and reflect:  are the expectations clear on your board?  If not, how can you initiate a discussion of what expectations should be to do what needs to be done and how to gently migrate, from where you are at, to where the organization and the community need you to be.

The issue of board involvement in collaboration came up recently in a workshop.  Primarily, when is the board informed and when must board permission be obtained?  A further question is:  why do we want to the board to know of our attempts to establish or operate a collaboration? 

To answer the primary questions, think of collaboration as any other strategic endeavor or even any other operational decision.  Here are three conditions where board approval may be appropriate:  if significant resources are involved; if a significant departure from an approved plan/budget is involved; or if additional or significant change in organization accountability is involved.  At minimum, collaboration entails a sharing of goals/outcomes and resources between two or more organizations.  The best policy, of course, is to keep the board of significant exploration of collaboration and the involvement of members with negotiations over any adoption of a formal agreement is vital.

Why else bother the board about this?  There are many positive promotional activities that board members can share in with collaboration:  leveraging scare resources and expanding impact in the community is good news and motivational to board members.  Familiarity with collaborative activities is necessary for confident and passionate ambassadorship.  Sharing this information shows trust and indicates that members are valued.  Why would we not want this to be the case with any board?

Spring is around the corner in the northern hemisphere and a consultant’s fancy turns to thoughts of retreats.  Actually, it seems that many nonprofits think during early spring about putting that annual extended planning meeting together if they haven’t done so closer to January 1.  Today’s thought involves an alternative to that extended forced one-day-only event:  planning incrementally over several months or even an entire year rather than one Friday or Saturday.  Here are just two ideas about how  such an approach could work?

One way, would be to take each goal and revisiting that goal at a regular board meeting as part of the strategic meat or main course for that meeting.  This way, if an organization had three goals (there would never be more than five, right?), it could cover most of its planning over three months.  Now this could be a more complex activity beyond just talking for 60 minutes about a goal at a full board meeting.  Staff could send out some planning indicators or summary of activities and accomplishments under the umbrella of that goal during the previous year in advance of the board meeting.  A governance or planning committee could even meet with staff and help prepare this information package or even process it on behalf of the full board.

Another way to approach “planning in pieces” would be for staff to circulate some kind of evaluation of previous year’s activities along with some planning indicators (demographic, economic and regulatory trends plus an assessment of the competition concerning primary service delivery programs, for example) in advance to a committee or to the entire board.  A board agenda item would then be a discussion of the implications of this planning data for confirming or adjusting course during the upcoming year.  In this case, all the decisions need not be made in the first meeting.  Staff could present their recommendations and the board could respond with more questions, concerns and alternatives that the staff and/or a board committee would then research and process prior to the next regularly scheduled board meeting.  This type of activity would continue as long as needed to reach consensus on a suitable adjustment of planning for the coming year.

These are just two approaches and there are certainly more that could be envisioned. The point is, one needn’t wait for that one special day to do organizational planning.  There is certainly no need to allow difficulties with recruiting adequate attendance for a special one day meeting to cause an indefinite postponement of needed planning activity.

In tough financial times, the quickest path towards budget balancing is cost-cutting.  While staff leadership may be entrusted to maintain this balance, it is important for boards to ask the hard questions, to assist staff with strategic thinking around the implications of cuts, to think of long as well as short term impacts on creating community value.  It may be that certain cuts, while perceived as exceptionally painful in the short term, actually preserve more opportunities for growth in the long term than some other cuts. 

It may seem that, when faced with the pain of budget cutting, no energy can be found for examining growth opportunities, for making investments to locate and obtain new funding sources.  Looking at the revenue side during a budget crisis, it seems expedient to make increasingly desperate requests for assistance from existing sources or to force asks upon new sources that are not quite ready to receive proposals.  Innovative cultivation may become a lost art during these times.

It is very difficult to consider a thoughtful approach to growing revenue in the face of a crisis.  Even so, a great board will find ways to engage staff, themselves and their networks in the identification and examination of potential new sources.  As always, there is no time like the present to try to move the organization forward financially.  And without enough forward movement, an organization’s budget may slide irrevocably backward.  It is exactly at a time of high desperation and competition that those organizations that choose to survive and stand out will make the effort of time AND financial investment to generate a wider and more sustainable array of funding sources.