Dancing With the Board

Several years ago, while conducting a workshop on nonprofit boards for a group of 15 or 20 executive directors, I asked them to close their eyes and raise their hands if they wished that they didn’t have a board. More than half raised their hands.

Maybe this was an unusual group. I don’t think so. The truth is, a surprisingly high number of nonprofit executive directors view their boards as necessary nuisances required by law. They pay lip service to the importance of the board, but in practice they do everything they can to keep the board marginalized and out of the way.

Often for good reason. Plenty of boards and board members misbehave. Board members don’t know enough about the organization’s work to have informed opinions yet feel free to offer opinions anyway. They don’t know much about day-to-day operations, yet still second-guess executive decisions. Board members sometimes have pet projects and personal agendas. Is it any wonder that, as one early commenter to this blog wrote, “If there is one thing that execs seem to moan and groan about, it is their board situations”?

Grumbling and eye-rolling aside, a productive partnership between the board and the executive director is essential to having an effective board.

Other writers have compared this partnership to a carefully choreographed dance, a marriage, and an orchestra and conductor. However apt you find these analogies (they work on some levels but not on others), they do suggest several things about the board-executive relationship. It’s complicated. It requires negotiation, practice, and constant attention. And when it works, the results can be beautiful.

When I’m tempted to believe that the board-executive partnership never works, I often turn for encouragement to a series of interviews I’ve conducted over the past five years with exemplary executive directors and their board chairs. As background, in 2006 the Meyer Foundation established the Exponent Awards, an annual leadership-development grant awarded to a group of outstanding executive directors of the foundation’s grantees.

One of the final steps in the selection process is interviewing both the executive director and the board chair about how the executive and the board work together. More than 40 of these conversations have given me a few clues about the characteristics that separate high-functioning board-executive partnerships from the crowd.

In the best partnerships, the executive director:

• Views the board neither as a nuisance nor as window dressing but as a legitimate governing body that is capable of adding tremendous value to the organization.
• Is able to accept appropriate criticism or pushback without becoming defensive or taking it personally.
• Takes a large measure of responsibility for helping the board do its job well—by providing good information, working with board leadership to frame the board’s agenda, scouting out potential board members, and providing administrative support to help the board function.
• Knows when to lead the board (let’s be real—sometimes the executive director is the leader of the board) and when to be quiet and respect the board’s authority and prerogatives.

And in the best partnerships, the board:

• Views itself as something more than a fan club or support group for the executive director but something less than (or at least different from) the executive director’s Dark Overlord.
• Recognizes that it has its own work to do, and is capable of doing it. (One commenter on an earlier post wondered whether staff members sometimes go too far in doing too much of the board’s work, and I agree that if the staff is doing all the work, the relationship is out of balance.)
• Exhibits respect for and confidence in the executive director, while at the same time maintaining the ability to offer objective counsel and constructive criticism when appropriate.

This may sound like a tall order, but many of the Exponent Award recipients have offered concrete examples of how this works in practice: a board that respectfully insisted that the executive director build a stronger management team so she could spend more of her time on strategy and external relations (and helped raise the money to do it). Or the executive director who led cautious board members to approve a major expansion in the depths of the recession.

The Exponent Award recipients haven’t all had perfect relationships with their boards, but they share at least one thing in common: Not one of them said they wished they didn’t have one.