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January 15, 2009: Chicken vs. Egg of Planning or Recruiting |
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So, here comes your annual retreat, your only extended meeting of the
year. You want to do something big, meaningful, the right thing and not
have to wait 12 months if you get it wrong. Which comes first:
setting goals and recruiting new members to help attain those goals or
recruiting new members who will then develop goals that they will help to make
happen?
Let me see if I heard your concern correctly. You are wondering about the following. Is it a waste of time to recruit using existing
goals to guide recruitment only to have new members cause goals to be
changed? Will changing the goals alienate and devalue the contributions
of veteran trustees? Conversely, do we need to have a new or improved team to
do planning or can we just forge ahead setting the best goals we can and
include guidance for recruiting as part of the goal and strategy setting
exercise?
My answer is: there is no right answer and there is never a bad time
to do something good, whether setting goals, determining recruiting targets or
both. Just keep making the best incremental improvements that you can
with the limited time that is available for this work. Whichever end that
you start with, however, please insure that recruiting priorities and strategic
goals are connected. Don't feel bad if the board changes its mind, even
in a few months, about anything truly important. Changing course is a
natural part of governance. If a boat traveling on a river never changed
course when its captain had new information, then that boat might run off a
waterfall, or go aground or hit another boat or .....and don’t we want to save
the boat, its crew and its carrying and traveling capacity?
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January 1, 2009: Flee or Face Trouble? |
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The demise of previously well-functioning organizations can be exacerbated
by fleeing board members. While it is OK to preserve their own
well-being, it is not OK to do that when trustees have not done all that they
could have reasonably done in their role as mission stewards for the
community. I continue to observe that
many trustees wait too long to act and engage in excessive debilitating hand
wringing before throwing up their hands and seeking the exits. But what
really makes a difference rarely happens: trying something different to obtain a different result.
When the going gets tough, great boards get going. THIS is the time
when trustees may figure out what governance is really about and why they are there: to insure that community
value of continued quality operations are maintained and doing whatever it
takes (ethically and legally, of course) to maintain this continuity.
Bailing out is easy but that is not acceptable behavior according to “the oath,”
so to speak, that trustees took when they signed on for their term of office. Required action may include narrowing focus,
arranging strategic alliances, replacing staff members, replacing themselves, or, gulp, even doing the
ambassador and fund raising work that they should have been doing all along!!!
I want to salute board members who don't cut and run in difficult
times. Those who stay to insure continuity when it benefits the
community, sharing painful decisions and actions with committed staff leaders: these trustees are the real heroes of the
nonprofit world. After saving services
for the sake of the community, it is OK to step away and move on, but only
after care is taken to insure that trustees appropriate to govern in the new
phase of organizational life have been recruited and installed.
May 2009 be truly fine for all those organizations for which we care!!!
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December 15, 2008: Advisors - What's in a Name? |
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I believe that groups of experts outside of the board of trustees/directors
can have great value for an organization. However, these other groups
require similar treatment to policy making boards to be effective:
thoughtful recruiting, adequate staff support, and well defined purpose.
The most intriguing tendency, shared with commercial and government
entities, is that of picking name over capability. That is, going
for star power rather than work effort in selecting members. Name
recognition lends prestige and many organizations use famous names as primary
reasons to attract community support in outreach messaging.
The ability of name recognition to jolt a reader into a pause before
deletion or round-filing of a message can't be denied but I would ask name
droppers three questions. 1) Does your organization's performance
in pursuit of its mission rise to the level of expectation associated with
that big name? 2) If asked, would the named celebrity speak in an informed
and supportive way about your organization's work? 3) Are there
other people serving on the affiliated advisory body who actually bring the organization
useful advice?
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December 1, 2008: Board Thanksgiving |
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The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday gives many of us the prompt to count our
blessings for what is working in our board lives. In this forum, I
usually rant or preach about some ideal way for board members and their staff
supporters to behave. As an advance holiday present, I would like to
offer my readers a couple of reflective questions that help to accentuate the positive
aspects of their boards, looking forward to the arbitrary renewal point of the
new calendar year.
1) What are the tangible significant accomplishments your board has
made this past year? What has been the positive impact on the organization,
staff members and the community served by the organization? 2) What
has the board become better at doing? 3) How has the relationship
between board and staff improved? 4) What stakeholders are now
better connected to the organization because of board efforts than a year
ago? 5) How has the board itself been strengthened - new members,
new leaders, structures, procedures, etc. than a year ago?
Please do yourself a favor. After counting these blessings, be
thankful, not just within your soul but outwardly with other board
members. Be glad that you ARE moving forward, that you have a
fantastic foundation to build upon for further growth in 2009. Take a
deep breath, feel the warmth of camaraderie in accomplishment, bask in the glow
of each other's smiles of satisfaction. Hug each other. You are all
alive and mostly well and so is the mission that you dutifully care for that
means so much to the community. The world is indeed a better place
because of what you do.
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November 15, 2008: All in the Family? |
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A periodic plea must again be made to those we know starting a
nonprofit: PLEASE, if you are trying to establish a sustainable community
institution, don't start the easy way, the way of the family. All too
often, people establishing 501(c)(3)'s think about the requirement to have
officers as a simple bureaucratic hurdle. They don't understand that they
are creating the foundation for governance and community responsiveness
capacity that is dangerously fragile.
The song of the stakeholder must be sung yet again. Please tell all of
the well-intentioned organization founders that you run across that they should
think about whom will be benefited by the success or failure of the
organization AND put representatives of those impacted parties on the board of
trustees. It never ceases to amaze me how people put only people they
know, beginning with their own family.
Even more amazing, is how these same people have immense difficulty
grasping why it is that they experience such great difficulty in gaining community
awareness, credibility, advocacy and funding support. By choosing the
easy route, the path of least resistance and least consideration, founders
frequently doom the organizational manifestation of their greatest passion
to a life of struggle, if not an early demise.
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