The ad reads: “Car ‘phones. They’re no longer the privilege of the chosen few.” In 1982, I actually had one of these Vodaphone babies. I was climbing the corporate ladder of a Fortune 500 company in Chicago and got one installed in my company car. Yes, the company provided me with a personal car (every 50,000 miles I got a new one) and all the gas and maintenance (those really were the good old days). My employer was on the cutting edge of management effectiveness and efficiency. I was part of testing the technology.

My “mobile” car phone was the size and weight of a very large brick. And it was truly a car phone because the base was mounted to (and used power from) the car. I didn’t need to go to the gym to lift weights because the handset provided a good deal of dead weight training. Those of us testing the Vodaphone used to joke that if it quit working, it would make a great boat anchor. I’m surprised I never got whiplash from lifting the handset to my ear while driving. Okay, so yeah. If using your cellphone with your bluetooth is a driving hazard, just imagine how dangerous I was on Lakeshore Drive!

Now here’s what I carry around today: a phone that is not tethered to anything (except maybe my hand or earbuds). It’s about the weight of a pair of scissors and about the size of three packs of dental floss laid side-by-side. And it doesn’t merely connect me by voice-to-voice over cellular. It’s my personal data assistant, office manager, and personal entertainment center. It also responds to my whims. (Siri is my new love, but don’t tell my husband!)

So why do boards of all types and sizes still run with 30-year-old technology? Yes, the basics are still sound. Compare today’s smart phones with my car phone 30 years ago. Why would you choose to carry around a big, old brick that doesn’t do much versus a small, sleek device that caters to your every whim? Is your board functioning with a mindset from 30 years ago? Before you say no, consider this.  Nonprofit organizations proliferated in the 1980′s (Board Source, 2003). Much nonprofit regulation did too. Not surprising that governance structure, culture, and practices emanated from that period. Businessmen populated boards and they brought their management expertise to the boardroom. Unfortunately, management expertise does not necessarily translate to governing expertise. In the management mindset, governing is typically viewed as “management one level up” and tethers a board to the past instead of creating the future.

Why does it seem like transformational governance is still the privilege of the chosen few? Board members and executives, please throw the 30-year-old+ mindset out the window. C’mon now. Don’t say that you don’t know what I’m talking about. At association and nonprofit organization conferences, I still hear the same complaints that I was hearing 20 years ago. Here’s the chronic complaint: why does my board micromanage (i.e., get caught up in administrivia)? Because they don’t have anything more important to do. Because they haven’t found a way to delegate effectively and know their wishes for the organization will be fulfilled. Or, the board recently had a crisis that involved a major financial risk (e.g., embezzlement, lawsuit, the ED who was the “rainmaker” just left). The list goes on and on. People tend to revert to old, dysfunctional behaviors when they feel unsure or threatened or are just plain bored. Governing from this mindset is like picking up the Vodaphone and expecting to have Siri grant your next wish. Remember the implication when you expect different results from doing the same thing over and over again.

The magic of smart phone technology did not happen because Steve Jobs said, “Let’s redesign the Vodaphone!” The magic happened because Steve Jobs had a vision of something sleek, powerful, and ready to go to work for you out of the box. Why would you buy 30-year-old technology when you could have an iPhone?

Unleash the power of your board and explore how you can best use the collective wisdom of all those smart minds in the room. Don’t make them sit through one more staff report or approve one more budget until you think about why you’re asking them to do it. What is the value added? What magic could they envison if given the time?

Defining governance is not easy. If you google “definition on governance,” you will find over 500,000 entries. Governance is a generic term with applications in information technology, Website management, research, corporations. I’ve found that how the term governance is applied in various disciplines is somewhat confusing. That’s why a simple definition for nonprofit board governance may not be enough to gain clarity and understanding.

For nonprofits, relating the process and practice of governing to a familiar or commonly shared experience helps. In my post “On board service“, I use ships. In April, I wrote an article for the Charity Channel Nonprofit Boards and Governance Review. In this one, I use the train analogy. It seems I’m attracted to transportation analogies when describing governance!

From the review in Charity Channel:

Executive Directors who dump a pile of financials in front of board members, expecting them to have the background and expertise necessary to make heads of tails of them, are not meeting their obligations to the board, according to the latest NBGR article by Sherry Jennings. Taking the point of view of a new board member, she writes, “Most of the financial information was incomprehensible to Martin. What was nagging at Martin was that he didn’t feel like he had a complete ‘picture’ of what was going on. The information he had plodded through last night seemed like a box of spare parts.”‘
In If I’m Not Running the Train, How Do I Know We’re On Track? the author uses a down-to-earth story-telling method to drive the point home and offer up the solution.

Caroline Oliver (brilliant author and consultant on governance) likens practicing good governance to riding a bicycle. You need to take the appropriate steps and practice to do it right. She said that the traditional approach to governance is okay but it’s a bit like pushing the bicycle along rather than riding it. Riding a bicycle is difficult at first. One needs to learn a new way of balancing and may fall a few times. But once one is confident and dancing on the pedals, it feels effortless and like flying (another transportation analogy!)

From Caroline’s reflections:
“Most of us want practical solutions and would prefer to skip the theory bit. However, the boards that tend to excel in the way that they practice governance are the boards that have an idea of what they are doing and why – in other words – the ones that have a good theory!”

I would add a good process and good balance.

See Caroline’s article on Creating a Board Dashboard, also at the Charity Channel and her new book Getting Started with Policy Governance

Culture in an organization is comprised of shared values, goals, norms and processes. One overarching theme uncovered in studying organizational culture is that leadership creates and reinforces culture. A traditional organization operates in a hierarchical model with an authoritarian culture that seems to foster privacy or secrecy. An open culture is the foundation for creating a high performance organization. An open culture within an organization fosters transparency and accountability to its customers and the public. If management doesn’t have a culture of open communication, then that culture suffers.

One of the best practices of high performance organizations is for leadership to nurture a culture that allows for people to question openly and have honest dialogue. A leader’s beliefs and values create the direction and the boundaries that people need to perform well. In “Good to Great” (2001) Jim Collins asserts, “good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system.” This is Policy Governance in a nutshell.

When organizational leaders have an authoritarian culture where people are afraid to question decisions, diverse viewpoints cannot be heard. When people can raise objections when they think they need to, it paves the way to better decision-making. If an organization follows Policy Governance principles, it will find that Policy Governance creates a “safe” way to have meaningful dialogue around an issue (instead of a personality), and largely, reduces organizational barriers to having the dialogue in the first place.

Warren Bennis is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Bennis cited by Koestenbaum, Keys, and Weirich says, “Exemplary leaders create a climate of candor throughout their organizations. They remove the organizational barriers — and the fear — that cause people to keep bad news from the boss. They understand that those closest to customers usually have the solutions but can do little unless a climate of candor allows problems to be discussed.”

Dear Association Executive:

Recently on the American Society of Association Executive’s (ASAE) Executive Section listserv, there have been many questions about how to get the board out of the minutiae in order to find time to work on strategic direction or Ends policy. The board’s focus on the day-to-day is not their fault (entirely.) Board members want to to a good job. But most have learned the traditional approach of board service — showing up at meetings, approving staff work and debating whether or not the office can afford a new copier.

When your board is busy with staff reports, committee reports and working on day-to-day operations, they don’t have the time to focus on strategy or governing. Board members come to your meetings with dozens of other competing priorities and thinking about their own business or family decisions. Once they get to your meeting, the agenda is full of operational (staff) reports or decisions. Is it any wonder board members default into operational mode?

Hildy Gottlieb at Help4Nonprofits.com says it’s like running a ship. You, dear Association Executive, are the captain. You manage the crew, read the charts, navigate and ensure the safety of crew, ship and cargo. You make sure the cargo is delivered. The board’s role is representing the owners of the ship. The board decides what kind of ship, what cargo it will haul, where that cargo will go, to what customers and at what cost. They monitor performance based on how well you deliver. Too often, the board thinks they’re supposed to be captains. When you have nothing but captains on a ship, you have anarchy! (Plus, you sacrifice some much needed crew.)

The board’s job isn’t to run the organization. That’s what they hired you (the captain) to do. The board actually has its own job and it’s not an “extension” of yours. Their job (and their added value) is to represent the owners of the organization (people who expect certain outcomes or results.) This can be the community at large or a specific, defined group of stakeholders such as a neighborhood or micro business owners. In other words, they represent a subset of the community and sit at the board table on behalf of those who are not there. They are representatives.

My point is that, most board members don’t know that their job is representing and governing on behalf of those they represent.

if board members don’t know what their constituents think, how can they represent them? How do stakeholders have a voice in where your organization is headed? How does the board know unless they ask? Their job is to provide that vital link to the owners or stakeholders or their constituency.

Most board members don’t have a clue that that’s what they’re supposed to do. And, that’s what makes your job more difficult.

John Carver (author of Boards that Make a Difference) describes a traditional nonprofit board of directors as a group of competent individuals who get together to do incompetent things. Nonprofit board members tend to think that a nonprofit is a different animal than a for-profit. This perception is to the detriment of the organization. A nonprofit is an artificial entity created for the purpose of some pursuit — a corporation. The law gives corporations a great deal of power. For-profit corporations recognize this.

For some reason, nonprofits seem to think they have little or no power. Nonprofits have as much power as the board believes they have.

You can unleash that power by helping your board see a vision of what they can become when they’re not busy swabbing the decks and running the crew. Good board members are hard to find and harder to keep. Let’s not drive them away with mind-numbing operational matters.

Very sincerely,

Sherry

Assessing Organizational Ends Starts with Questions – Not Answers

In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins offers this wisdom for CEO’s:

“Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.”

This wisdom applies equally to a Board of Directors.

Boards need to be a disciplined as they expect their staff to be in gathering information. Good information gathering starts by crafting the right questions prior to conducting an environmental scan to assess whether your organization is meeting the needs of the community.

An environmental scan should insure that a board’s Ends consider the needs, concerns and demands within the community it serves. An organization should exist to create change. It should be the change itself that drive the Ends.

External Environmental Scans

The “value add” of a board as trustees of the owners is to be the link with the external environment and bring that information to the organization. This linkage needs to be regular and periodic. The information gathered will help a board assess whether or not its Ends are relevant and current.

Just as a for-profit corporation conducts an environmental scan to assist with the strategic planning process, a governing board should periodically conduct an environmental scan and ask questions for which it doesn’t already have the answers.

Open meetings, focus groups, surveys, and presentations from third party experts are all dynamic ways to gather information. In addition, a board could consider:

• Board-to-board meetings

• Researching community needs assessments and demographic data

• Breakfast or lunch meetings with groups in the community (one of my clients found this to be so successful that it launched a new entity of like-minded organizations who have similar funding needs)

• Open forums

• Town hall meetings

• One-on-one meetings with community leaders

• Board committees to gather intelligence

WHAT’S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT GOVERNANCE?

We Need “New” Solutions

People seem to believe that the status quo still isn’t working because they are still looking for “new” solutions. I’ve been in the nonprofit world for over 17 years and the same problems keep coming up. The spectrum runs from “my board is micromanaging” to “my board members are disengaged.” CEOs continually tell me about the need for their boards to become future-focused as opposed to functionally operational boards. Why, after all these years, are CEO’s still seeking solutions these problems when a perfectly good one has been there all along? It’s called Policy Governance®.

Muddle is an Acceptable Way of Life

Most boards and CEO’s don’t have a good grasp of governance. Governance is not management although nonprofit boards have a tendency to think of themselves as “uber managers.” Among those who are aware of Policy Governance®, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about what Policy Governance is and is not.

(Download a concise description of Policy Governance — go to http://www.policygovernanceassociation.org/index.html and click on the #3 Quick Link.)

The term governance is used very broadly in the nonprofit world. CEO’s tend to become focused on tactics to manage board behavior – instead of seeking a system or process of governing. That’s why CEO’s are as frustrated with board politics, meddling, micromanagement* rubber stamping, etc. as ever. One CEO summed up this frustration by saying: “We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can set up a process [that is sustainable.] Living in chaos is normal.”

Reflections from a PG Perspective

As Policy Governance professionals it’s clear we have a lot of “undoing” to do. We need to overcome the perception that Policy Governance is a “cookie cutter” approach which causes it to be dismissed out of hand without any dialog on how it can lead to eliminating the chaos and creating an effective board of directors. In part, my fellow consultants and I think this is due to the perception that a model is a die-stamped, rigid structure.It’s unfortunate that the term governance is being used as a generic term to describe everything from organizational development to operations and web content management.

The term governance is used so generically, this is going to be a tough one for Policy Governance. It may be like trying to preserve a brand name like Kleenex and differentiate it from other tissues, but is worth some discussion. Give me your thoughts.

*(for a great article on micromanagement go to:http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_Bd_MicroManage_Art.htm

Sherry Jennings of Sound Governance (www.soundgovernance.us) embarks on the wonderful journey through the blogosphere. This writing was originally published in the International Policy Governance Association newsletter for board leaders and governance consultants.

Board Leaders: Do You Know Where Your Members Are Lurking?

Prior to a presentation on global trends and challenges for associations, I had the opportunity to speak with the presenter Rohit Talwar (a leading international futurist). I’m always interested in what books these folks are reading so I asked him, “What are you reading these days?” Imagine my shock and surprise when he said, “blogs.”

Huh? I have a 20-year-old college student and a 17-year-old high school student in my life. Aren’t blogs just a lot of personal (sometimes too personal) diaries a la “Myspace” or Facebook? Well, yes and no.

According to Wikipedia (a free content, multilingual encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors around the world), a blog is “a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.” What Rohit Talwar helped me discover is that the blogosphere is so much more than journals – it’s a journey. To get me started, Rohit recommended that I take a look at these:

• openBC – the world’s largest truly global networking platform for professionals
• LinkedIn — an online network of more than 7.5 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries
• Ecademy – a social network for business people
• Spoke – world’s largest online business-to-business prospect database of its kind

In John Carver’s book On Board Leadership, Carver poses the question: “Has [the board] heard from the bold, the radical, the unthinkable – whatever opinion challenges the wisdom of the day?” Carver says that “a board should strive for a wisdom that is not driven by safety or ordinariness, even though it is planted firmly in reality.” Are we board leaders, really challenging our current wisdom?

Thanks to my futurist guide, I now know that the blogosphere can help us scan for and assess the impact of trends, external forces and ideas that shape our owner communities or markets. Blogs can help us research issues and find new ideas. Blogs contain information and insights on emergent and convergent trends to help us determine if those trends are taking us toward or away from our desired End results.

Do we board leaders, know where our owners and clients are lurking? (A lurker is a peripheral participant – someone who doesn’t post ideas.) Blogs are major social networking platforms. It is practically certain that many of the people that matter to us are at least lurking out there. Do you need to do a better job of finding out where they are? How about your board considering blogging as a new channel for ownership linkage? Why not subscribe to two or three blogs that serve the needs and interests of your owners and create postings to encourage input and convey information? Finally, consider creating your own board blog to facilitate an online connection with owners or owner collaboration or to tap into owner expertise and trial new approaches. Membership associations are already well into this new game and you might like to get started on your journey in the blogosphere by visiting some of their blogs such as the following:

• Acronym
• Association Inc.
• Association Renewal

On each of these blogs, you’ll find recommendations for other blogs as well as recommendations for good old-fashioned paper-and-ink books. I warn you – it can be highly addictive!

On a personal note: My friend and professional colleague Robert Ballantyne provided the map for this blog journey. Patience as I get my bearings, please! To read about Robert’s own journey through the blogosphere go to http://howesound@wordpress.com and click on Blog Site Development.