October 18, 2010 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Last week’s post, Desperately Seeking Innovation, generated so many great comments and provoked such varied reactions that I’m sticking with the topic for another week. Then we’ll move on, I promise.
Comments and questions fell into two main categories:
Defense of the consent agenda: Dave Sternberg, a faculty member of the Fundraising School and a BoardSource consultant, wrote that he could “personally testify that the consent agenda is perhaps the most underutilized governance tool known to our sector.” Dave noted that while it is not a new concept, it is new to hundreds of thousands of nonprofits that “spend the bulk of their board-meeting time debating the absolute wrong things.”
Several people expressed similar thoughts, which made me want to clarify.
I wasn’t attacking the consent agenda or questioning its usefulness as a tool for some boards. Perhaps for many boards. But for the consent agenda to be transformative, a board has to have a fair amount of routine business that can be put on the consent agenda. I’m not sure all boards do.
For those who want to learn more, BoardSource information guru Outi Flynn suggests reviewing this white paper, which discusses the consent agenda more thoroughly and gives a host of practical advice.
Why we need innovation: Although I’m not surprised, no one provided an example of radical or transformative innovation. However, several readers asked great questions or made suggestions that are worth more discussion because they help frame the problems with boards that might drive future innovation. These include:
Too much responsibility concentrated in too few hands. One reader suggested rewriting the board-chair job description so that the chair functions less like a “king” and delegates more leadership to other members. The same reader also suggested adopting a team leadership and partnership model between the board and executive director as the norm rather than a model in which the executive director is subordinate and follows the board’s lead.
Both these comments point to a larger issue. Whether the executive director is subordinate or not, prevailing board practice concentrates a great deal of authority and responsibility in the hands of the board chair, the executive director, or both — with a host of negative consequences. Sharing leadership more broadly would be an innovation worth exploring.
Lack of clarity around the fundamental purpose of the board. Raising money, overseeing finances, representing the perspectives of the organization’s constituents, reaching out in the community, and monitoring programs are each fundamentally different tasks.
By itself, any one of these is a big job. And each core function might suggest recruiting different types of board members for their knowledge and connections.
The current governance model, which insists that the board is responsible for everything and needs to assemble all the expertise needed to perform all those functions around a single board table, produces boards that often carry out their responsibilities unevenly and are thin on certain types of expertise.
Simply admitting that a single board can’t usually do everything it’s supposed to do and experimenting with alternative ways to handle some functions — such as fund-raising councils or program-advisory groups — could produce useful innovation.
Thanks for everyone who contributed to such a robust conversation. I hope you help it continue.
