Why Are So Many Boards Dysfunctional?

Baltimore

If your organization’s board was a TV show or movie, which one would it be?

Lost? Survivor? That 70s Show? Dumb and Dumber, perhaps?

Those were among the suggestions made by fund raisers at a session on nonprofit boards led by Nancy Axelrod, a consultant, at the Association of Fundraising Professionals conference here.

Ms. Axelrod, the founding president of BoardSource, discussed why, when so many people in the nonprofit field know what a good board looks like, so many boards are incompetent.

Is it because our expectations are unrealistic? Ms. Axelrod asked. Or perhaps because there is always a certain amount of dysfunction when you bring a group of people together? Or are the nonprofit world’s governance models simply out of date?

Ms. Axelrod discussed some of the assumptions that guide her thinking about boards:

• There isn’t one model when it comes to a board’s structure. She recalled a comment a friend made to her once: “Remember, when you’ve seen one board, you’ve seen one board.”

• Good boards can always be better.

• Boards are often reluctant to change.

• Getting “the right people on the bus” isn’t enough; you can have a board made up of dynamite individuals who don’t work well together.

Asked by Ms. Axelrod what they would ask for if they were granted one wish to change their boards, fund raisers in the audience talked about finding board leaders who actually take control, set agendas, and discipline other trustees when necessary.

Participants also said they would like to see their boards properly assess the chief executives’ performance, “listen to the staff and let us do our jobs,” and tackle the big issues first, before the minutiae.

Ms. Axelrod talked about the characteristics of good boards that BoardSource has identified. Chief among them, she said, was “a culture of inquiry.”

Drawing from a 2002 Harvard Business Review article by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean at Yale School of Management, she talked about how high-performing boards are willing to share information openly and on time, without discussing information first with an executive committee or smaller group of trustees.

Members of strong boards are willing to challenge each other and are committed to assessing the performance of the board as a whole as well as that of individual members.

“The culture of a board — the DNA, the social fabric — is one of the most critical elements of good governance,” Ms. Axelrod said. “There’s a lot of dysfunctional politeness on some of our boards.”