CEOs: Helping Your Board’s Effectiveness

By Virgil Carter

Effective governance is a necessity for every non-profit organization.  Just how effective is your Board and it’s governance?  Can your organization’s governance be improved?  And made more enjoyable?  As the CEO, how can you help your Board enhance their leadership and communications?

One important place to begin is to recognize what a vital resource time is. Recruiting new board members is challenging because volunteers are concerned about drains on their time. Governing well is critical because a board’s time together is limited. Thus, how you and your board use your time matters.

Boards that are forward-looking and focused on strategy, provide the maximum effective (and enjoyable) leadership when time is limited.  Strategic boards spend the majority of their time identifying broadly important outcomes, setting priorities, and monitoring the way the staff and other volunteers implement major initiatives through annual operations.

Here are five steps for an effective, productive, and rewarding board.

1.      Define success. Establish and practice a shared definition of organizational success. No matter how well an organization may perform in any 12-month period, if it can’t perform effectively year in and year out, it can’t really be called a successful organization. Thus, success has a lot to do with consistency and continuity over time.

2.      Understand your core assets. Every organization has core assets.  Typically they encompass:  1) knowledge, 2) community, and 3) advocacy. Organizations vary, of course, but these are the value-added assets common to many non-profit organizations to help accomplish their mission.  Volunteers and staff leaders must be strategically focused on the development and welfare of these assets which cause members and customers to value their organization.

3.      Think the unthinkable. Ours is a rapidly changing world in which we face unprecedented competition.  To remain both up-to-date and competitive, focus on and prepare for the unthinkable—both opportunities and threats. Effective boards consider the one thing that would most revolutionize their organization and the one thing that would most jeopardize it. Thereafter, boards focus strategically to realize the opportunity and head off the threat.

4.      Set priorities and monitor them. Resources are always finite—there are never enough. So develop strategic priorities and communicate what is truly important. To maintain a strategic perspective, boards must think in terms of strategy:  what is important for the organization to achieve, and leave the operational side of the organization to the full-time staff and volunteers who are in the trenches. The staff and volunteers of the organization’s operational side are the ones to be held responsible for planning, budgeting and executing annual operations. 

5.      Establish a respectful staff partnership. The professional staff of an organization offer important resources—so important that it may be impossible for a board to be truly strategic without them. For example, staff members may have access to knowledge, contacts, and resources that may be unknown to a board. The staff is uniquely positioned to help develop and implement a definition of organizational success that’s built upon consistent performance, year after year.

Effective boards are both enjoyable and productive where it matters most:  achieving the organization’s mission.