September 24, 2010 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Thanks to all of you who helped the first two posts of Against the Grain rank among the most viewed and commented-on pages on The Chronicle‘s Web site. We’re off to a good start, and I appreciate all your great questions and words of encouragement.
Although I do appreciate all the questions, I can answer some kinds of questions better than others.
Simple questions about board size, committee structure, and frequency of meetings—which get asked all the time—are surprisingly hard to answer. Asking me those questions is like asking me how you should arrange the furniture in your living room. Without seeing your house and knowing how you use the room, I just don’t know.
Without knowing what your organization needs from the board at this stage in its life, without understanding your board’s culture and past practice, and without knowing anything about your organization, I wouldn’t presume to say how often your board should meet. Or how many members it should have, or whether an executive committee is a good idea. But because those things come up so often, I thought I would provide my stock answers now so we can get that out of the way.
On size: Your board should include enough people to get its work done, but not so many that meetings become cumbersome or that it’s difficult for the executive director and board leadership to be engaged with every member.
On committees: You should have the minimum number of committees you need to get the board’s work done. Start with a blank slate. What committees would be absolutely essential? Keep those; get rid of the rest.
On the executive committee: Maybe you need one, maybe you don’t. They are neither inherently good nor inherently evil.
On frequency of meetings: The board should meet often enough to keep board members engaged and to enable the board to exercise responsible oversight. And not so often that it’s a burden to board members and staff.
That’s all I’ve got on those topics.
If your board is ineffective or dysfunctional, it’s probably not a result of being too big or too small, or having the wrong committees or meeting too often. And to improve your board, you need to ask some more fundamental questions. Such as:
- Are we clear about the job the board needs to do? Not the generic basic responsibilities of any board of any organization, but the specific things that your organization needs from its board at this moment in time.
- Do we have the right people at the table? Not quantity, but quality. Do we have people with the right skills and connections, who are passionate about the mission, and who have time to be good board members? How many you need will depend on what the board’s job is.
- Do we have the right structures and supports in place to help the board do a good job? All the questions about committees and practices at meetings are really part of this question, which can’t really be answered until you’re clear about what the board’s job is.
Improving your board boils down to answering those three questions, then designing “interventions” based on the answers. This can be more difficult than it sounds. In later posts we’ll discuss some of the reasons why.
Your comments also raised some more basic and fundamental questions, which don’t get discussed often enough. One of the most important ones showed up in the very first comment to the first post: Do boards really work?
This was already slotted for a future post, so I’m not going to give my two cents just yet. But to get started, I’d like to hear what you think.
