What I Didn’t Understand About Board Work – Until I Was In Charge

I thought I was so ready to serve on another board. I was delighted to be asked. I knew and loved the organization’s work and believed deeply in the mission. I had seen its transformational power. What a chance to give back. And it would probably be fun, right?

As a former nonprofit staff member and now a consultant to nonprofits, I thought I knew all the pitfalls of boards. Board members who don’t read the packet. Board members who get very excited to go on “pick the napkin” side quests but don’t come to meetings. The ghost board members who show up full of promise and never appear again. The “hands-on” board member who could belabor the purchase of paper towels.

I would simply not be that person. And I told myself I was “just” a junior board member—surely the big governance issues were being handled by the executive committee, and I had plenty of time to figure out where I fit in.

A year later, I got asked to be chair—and discovered how much I didn’t yet understand.

I soon learned a hard lesson. From my work, I knew what a functional board looked like. I knew what a dysfunctional board looked like. The truth was, I didn’t have either one. The board showed up and wanted to do well, but I could feel something was off. I knew I was asking strategic questions and getting tactical answers, but I wasn’t sure why. The truth was that I didn’t fully appreciate how an organization actually builds an effective board. By effective, I mean a board that supports the organization and at the same time is one in which members know they are making a meaningful contribution.

Almost every board member gets oriented. In a lot of cases, this means new board members are handed a giant pile of papers about the organization and immediately plunged into complex financial discussions. Most are unprepared for the hard truth that nearly every nonprofit budget in this country is, to some degree, a carefully educated guess about contributed revenue. Donors change priorities, governmental funding mechanisms that have been rock-solid for decades suddenly go kablooey, and whether Mrs. Gotrocks still has any rocks to give—and whether she wants to give them to you—is always, no matter how thoughtfully relationships have been built, at least a little bit of a mystery. This dynamic can make boards skittish when they have a chance to be bold, or oblivious when they should be really concerned. Most of all, board members don’t want to get it wrong – but they aren’t sure what right really looks like.

It can also be easy for a new board member to feel that they have been brought on solely because of their profession, background, or expertise – for instance, “the lawyer,” the “HR person,” or “the accountant.”  Unless all board members are explicitly invited into the full work of the board and helped to do it well, it can be easy for them to feel more like pro bono consultants than part of the organization’s work.

Having been a nonprofit staffer for most of my career, I found it even more challenging that, unlike being on staff, board members can find it difficult to get close enough to the work to fully understand it. This, in turn, can make board service feel oddly joyless and board members seem weirdly disconnected from the staff.

But even once a board member has grasped all of that background, a deeper question remains: what is board work, actually?

When the objective is unclear, even the most well-intentioned board will drift into side quests because tactics are easy to understand, and strategy can be hard. What I came to realize is that most boards are not struggling because people are disengaged. They are struggling because they have never been given a clear frame for the different kinds of work a board actually does.

I realized I needed a tool to help my board stay in the board zone. Almost always, boards want to do a good job, but they are not always set up to do it.

So I got to work and created a simple guide to help boards understand what productive board discussions should look like and how governance work can take shape. I suggest that leadership organizes each board agenda around the kind of work they are being asked to do:

• Oversight and accountability (think – budgets or program outcomes).
• Support and ambassadorship (think – inviting friends to the gala or advocating for key funding mechanisms).
• Learning and sense-making (think understanding a new program, best practice, or change in the landscape).
• Direction setting (think big, future-focused decisions like participating in a strategic planning retreat).

This decision-making placemat is the tool I wish I had when I first became board chair. It helps boards quickly identify what kind of work they are actually being asked to do, avoid getting pulled into the side quests that drain time and energy, and, most importantly, feel that they are making the right contribution to an organization they care about. It also helps leadership to be clear about what they really want the board to do when they put an item on the agenda – and to do so ahead of the meeting.

Elizabeth Pickard, MA, is a consultant specializing in board and staff facilitation, organizational planning, and program development.