Nonprofit Leaders Seek Guidance in Building Rapport With Boards

Mark Slocum, head of the Heart Connection Children’s Cancer Programs, a charity in Des Moines, has endured his share of uncomfortable board meetings.

“I’ve found as executive director that, a lot of times, board members kind of look at you like you have a hidden agenda or are trying to slide something past them,” he says.

He also notes, with some frustration, that he is sometimes invited to make presentations to other organizations’ boards, and invites others to speak to his board, because “an outside person seems more credible,” he says. Some trustees, he says, think that if a speaker is “from someplace else, they must know what they’re talking about.”

To help relieve his frustration — and enhance his ability to communicate with his board — last year Mr. Slocum went to Washington to a training workshop sponsored by BoardSource, a Washington group that focuses on nonprofit governance.

He learned a simple technique he could use right away: adding graphics to the flip charts he used to use to present lists during his charity’s board meetings.

“I found that caught their attention,” he says, and that helped pave the way for improved communication.

More important, he says, the workshop taught him “how to develop nonthreatening ways to get board members engaged.”

Training in these very skills is exactly what nonprofit executives and board chairs often need, says Carol Weisman, president of Board Builders, in St. Louis, which advises nonprofit groups on management issues.

Many board members, she says, think that, “if they don’t speak, nothing [bad] happens to them. They are afraid to disagree with another board member because they might be doing business with them next week.”

Ms. Weisman says that training can help nonprofit leaders build their skills in communicating and working with others so that they can draw board members out in a productive way.

Building on Intuition

To help executives like Mr. Slocum and others who seek a stronger rapport with their boards, last year, BoardSource decided to offer one-day workshops on how to run good board meetings, after seeing the popularity of similar workshops held in conjunction with its annual conferences in 2006 and 2007 according to Angela Sakell, BoardSource’s vice president for sales and marketing.

Key to making such meetings strong, says BoardSource, are learning techniques “that are applied in an event or meeting to arrive at results created, understood, and accepted by all or a critical mass of participants.”

Interest in such skills is increasing at nonprofit organizations for two reasons, according to Michael Daigneault, a BoardSource senior governance consultant. One, he says, is the public’s growing interest in whether charities are well run.

The other is that a growing number of nonprofit leaders have designed their board-leadership techniques based on intuition and are interested in building on those techniques via formal training.

Yet another reason for the increase, according to Susan Phillips, president of HospiceCare, a nonprofit organization in Madison, Wis., is that “we in the sector are dealing with more complex issues than we have in the past. And boards are only part time.”

The Quiet Ones

As Mr. Slocum has found, a common problem for many boards is that the conversation is dominated by just one or a handful of members. A simple request by the board chairman for ideas from other people may help, Mr. Daigneault says.

But, if it doesn’t, ask board members to write on an index card their answer to a question the board is considering. The board’s leader can then collect the cards, shuffle them, and pass them back to colleagues. “Then people have to go around and read them out loud,” Mr. Daigneault says. “And since they are shuffled, people are not reading their own card, and they feel free to have a discussion.”

Or a board can try the “five-finger consensus,” Mr. Daigneault says, in which board chairmen ask members to signal their view of a decision by holding up “five fingers if you strongly agree, four if you somewhat agree, three if you can go with it, two if you disagree, and one if you strongly disagree.” Then the board leader can ask those who disagreed with the decision to explain their thoughts.

The five-finger consensus is a “nice, fast, easy way to find out how people feel,” says Mr. Slocum, who adds that he now tells his board members, “‘OK, one through five — let’s put them up.’”

Mr. Slocum says he makes an effort to zero in on more reserved board members, asking them to speak if they look like they might want to contribute to a discussion. A facilitator, he says, has to “softly draw in the quiet people on the board. That’s important because you’ve always got one or two people who are loud. And then you’ve got one or two people who are quiet but have something important to say, but don’t want to offend the louder people.”

But, Mr. Daigneault says, the goal of running a better board meeting is not to clamp down on domineering board members or help boards openly discuss a difficult topic. “We’re trying to generate a culture and dynamic, and I think it is happening in the nonprofit field,” he says.

He adds, “Really exceptional boards have an institutional ‘culture of inquiry’ on their board, where there is respect and candor and board members can challenge each other comfortably. There is robust dialogue. If it’s just a series of staff reports, then strategic thought isn’t taking place.”

Asking Questions

The Rosemount Center, a group in Washington that provides bilingual, multicultural education for young children, operates with a board and an advisory board that includes multilingual members, and the two bodies often must make joint decisions. Jacques Rondeau, the group’s president, says he sought training from BoardSource to learn how he could help the boards work together more smoothly.

The techniques he learned, he says, have helped him allow the groups to basically “talk together as opposed to us problem-solving and telling them what to think.”

Mr. Rondeau adds, “One of the things we needed to do is to sit back and not to put in our two cents’ worth. And the results are better.”

However, he acknowledges, “Sometimes you also have to know when to cut people off.”

He learned from the seminar how to get people to talk from their hearts and include everyone around the table. “It’s a more warm and touchy-feely approach. It’s not for every board,” he says.

But, he adds, “if you’re trying to be forward thinking and structure what the organization should look like, you can ask open questions such as, ‘What do you think Rosemount looks like in 2016? What would you like to see about Rosemount in a headline in The Washington Post in 2016?’”

It is important to ask board members the right questions, he says, noting that that requires a deeper knowledge of the subject matter at hand, as well as knowing more about each board member’s strengths and temperament.

“It also helps to know personality types,” Mr. Rondeau says. “We’d like to do Myers-Briggs personality tests. If you’ve got 10 board members, and nine are introverted, you’ll know they may not be able to have a lot of outward participation.”

Like Mr. Rondeau, Ms. Phillips of HospiceCare also sought training from BoardSource in helping multiple groups of decision makers at her charity work together. Her group has three boards — one for the overall organization and one for each of two supporting organizations.

“Getting out accurate information and getting it so that it is easily digestible is critical,” she says. “How you can facilitate that is what I was most interested in.”

Ms. Phillips says she loved the emphasis on visual information that Mr. Daigneault taught in his class.

Now when she and her staff members are preparing board-meeting packets, “we think more of putting information in charts and graphs and other visuals that present information in an understandable and accurate format, so they are not reading page after page. Our work can be complex and buried in government regulations, since we’re dealing with a vulnerable population, but we can take something complex and do it graphically.”

The Silent Treatment

As for Mr. Daigneault’s push to give boards a “culture of inquiry,” Ms. Phillips says she now always considers what is going on underneath the surface.

“You have to respond to someone who’s commented on something with a secondary question or prodding question, known as a responsive question,” she says. “Then, when you put forward a responsive question, the other piece of that is to be silent.

“Someone may not spontaneously come up with the answer, but you give them time,” she says, by remaining silent until they gather their thoughts.

Ms. Phillips says the participants in her workshop practiced being silent after a probing question, and the eventual responses were “astounding.”

Although facilitation skills can help tame board tensions, Mr. Daigneault does tell workshop participants that total absence of conflict is dangerous, as that means the board is not reaching a deep level of inquiry on a certain topic.

“Most of us don’t like conflict,” Ms. Phillips says. “When you see conflict bubbling up, generally you do see a positive outcome. But it’s the dealing with it that can be uncomfortable.”