Association Governance Insitute (AGI) logo
American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) logo

Resources

The Journey to Good Governance

Deepak Chopra reminds us, “The highest levels of performance come to people who are centered, intuitive, creative, and reflective—people who know to see a problem as an opportunity.”

We’ve all had days when it’s hard to see the opportunity in every challenge. However, in nonprofit governance, change often begins by recognizing what seems to be hampering a board’s performance. A board member may think, “Something is not right on this board. Why can’t we get more done?”

Awareness is a good start. Next—and harder—is getting the status quo to change.

In Managing Change, Todd Jick writes, “There are no sure-fired instructions for successful change.” Perhaps, but having done the research on governance change, we do find a clear set of options. Our goal with Transformational Governance: How Boards Achieve Extraordinary Change (Wiley/ASAE, 2015) is to help association boards manage the path to a better governance model.

The study is built on focus groups and structured interviews with more than 100 association leaders who represent the full diversity of association life. These individuals were referred by governance experts or participated in the ASAE Foundation’s 2013 Good Governance Survey. When we reapproached them to ask if they would help us understand how they got to high performance, a large and generous group were willing to share their stories.

By collecting real-life case examples and analyzing them in the context of the strategic management literature, we discovered that successful board change reflects several common principles. We learned, for example, that transformational governance change, in many cases, requires profound internal restructuring of bylaws, roles, policies, board meetings, and board member eligibility.

The initial identification of a need for change takes many forms. It follows growth and leadership transitions—some planned, some not—and can be proactive or reactive. Change occurs as a result of internal or external events, association mergers or acquisitions, restructuring or downsizing. It happens in healthy associations as well as those that are struggling.

Regardless of its origins, the process of governance change has some common characteristics. Managing governance change successfully typically involves three key activities: listening, planning, and supporting those affected.

Diagnosis and Learning

Many association leaders described a process of appreciative inquiry to identify the positive qualities they already possessed that would support successful change. They began by acknowledging strong cultures of learning and self-assessment, a healthy reserve of trust between staff and board members, or a culture of adaptation because it was the nature of the industry or profession they were in.

A Sampling of Case Studies

Transformational Governance: How Boards Achieve Extraordinary Change includes 14 original cases that describe the process of governance change as it was related to us by the change agents themselves, all association leaders. Here are three examples.

Taking the Long View

American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc.

When Fred Somers was brought in to address a declining membership, he didn’t realize he and AOTA’s board were embarking on a 10-year effort to ensure the association was aligned with modern legal governance expectations. But that’s what they achieved. In the process, this board not only learned to lead itself, it learned a lot about effective member communication and taking the long view on governance change.

Using Growth to Make the Case for Change

Solar Electric Power Association

Solar power is rapidly gaining credibility in the utility industry, and the young SEPA understood that greater effectiveness and growth was contingent upon having greater representation from the C-suite on its board. Learn how SEPA’s first CEO framed an effective “call to arms” to restructure the board and its membership, transformed the culture of the board to emphasize strategic leadership, and retained the goodwill of former board members along the way.

Accepting Change at the Right Pace

Southwestern Association of Episcopal Schools

This is a story of incremental change built on a realization that the comfort of the status quo was no longer serving the organization’s mission. The board changes at SAES involved no catalyzing events but rather an organic bow to changing constituent needs. But when an unexpected national event polarized the membership and challenged the board to respond, the leaders of the organization found that their evolution to a representative board with a strong culture of respect served them well.—K.K. and B.G.

One study participant described an early but crucial decision point when she relied on her association’s existing culture to move forward.

“I had built a good deal of social capital to take the organization to the next step,” she said. “We had done all the buffing and polishing that we could, and I knew we had to go to the next step [to change our governance model] to really make change. I also knew that we had [the right] board president at the time … to make it happen. When I first presented the ‘call to action,’ it was eerily quiet. I was very worried—I blew all my social capital in one fell swoop. Then the conversation started.”

This comment highlights another important point: that governance change begins when the status quo is challenged but really takes off when other constituents understand its link to larger organizational needs. This sentiment became a consistent theme in our study—governance improvements were about more than board-specific needs. Most often, governance changes were required to secure the future of the entire organization.

Action Planning

A first conversation may be to ensure the majority of stakeholders agree that planned change is desired, even if the objectives are not yet clear. That conversation might include these elements:

Identifying the problems the organization faces. Problems are best expressed as real threats rather than a lack of specific solutions (which come later). Some boards and CEOs in our study reported member dissatisfaction, apathetic board members, missed opportunities, and other real threats to their association’s future.

Developing a clear change vision. John Bryson, an expert on nonprofit strategic planning, emphasizes the importance of clarifying an organization’s mission and vision early in the planning process. Without a clear understanding of the goal, the ensuing planning process may not be productive. This lesson applies equally to change at the board level.

Considering the impact change will have on employees, members, and other stakeholders, and then planning for it. In several instances, boards planned for slower change processes than they truly desired to ensure their “old guard” members felt supported and respected as they adapted to a new status quo.

Committing to manage the process through a thoughtful strategy. This is the stage where board members make a commitment to see through the change vision regardless of circumstances. For example, in one remarkable case, an association’s board committed to seeing through an agreed-on bylaws change that would terminate their roles and create an entirely new board.

Moving from awareness of a need to a plan of action—to planned change—is important because it’s the best way to maintain control over the outcome. Boards can create the change they want by implementing these nine components of planned change:

  • Establish a change leadership team.
  • Document the case for change.
  • Develop a preliminary vision for the change.
  • Define the impacts on those affected by the change.
  • Create a preliminary implementation strategy and action plan.
  • Identify measures of success.
  • Develop a communication strategy.
  • Develop a training strategy.
  • Develop a method for measuring results.

Support for People Affected by Change

Change engenders passion and emotion. Disagreements or conflicts may erupt. Paying attention to these dynamics and actively honoring the human element require commitment, compromise, and work. This takes active management.

Recognizing that a board is a team is a first step. These often relative strangers, who come from different backgrounds and geographic locations and who have varied personalities, come together possibly only four to six times a year. Adapting to complex group dynamics while serving the mission, dealing with operational goals, and making important decisions in a limited amount of time require strong leadership, focus, and heartfelt work on the part of every person involved. Board members who make a commitment at the outset to understand relationships, trust fellow members, and accept a common purpose will find that banked social capital pays off later if and when the board has to change the status quo.

And success comes from a willingness to embrace the journey, not just the destination. Our research saw this happening best when organizational leaders embraced a love of learning. Leaders found enjoyment in the feeling of self-efficacy that came with facing new challenges with a much bigger skill set—that is, through the board’s greater capacity to learn. Doing the background research on governance models, employing outside expertise, and using data to build strong evidence-driven arguments for a better model gave boards confidence along the sometimes arduous journey of convincing others to change.

We also heard from change agents who understood the need to invest in managing people to bring others along on this journey with patience and respect. One leader told us, “Change takes time and patience. I had to get my ego out of it. I could not be defensive. It wasn’t going to be solved with one step.”

The Journey to Results

One surprise to us was that while successful associations ended their journey with clearer agreement on strategies, their collective goals were often not so clear at the outset. Board leaders could tell us at the end that they were now more strategic, representative, nimble, knowledgeable, and able to serve their members better. But they may not have set out with such a clear vision of the goals.

Nonetheless, many in our study found the following were necessary to achieve the smart, resilient, flexible, strategic, and entrepreneurial board of directors they became:

  • They simplified bylaws and relied more on ad hoc task forces to structure flexibility into their decision making.
  • They met more often to maintain the pace of change.
  • They used their time more wisely, with more carefully structured meetings.
  • They recruited and prepared board members more carefully, to ensure board members brought more than representative value.
  • They invested in self-education and self-evaluation.

This journey requires a real commitment of time and energy. Two-thirds of study participants reported a time commitment of three or more years to implement governance changes. Boards often reported spending more time governing.

But that investment produces worthwhile returns. Our research strongly suggests that for those that see the journey through, operating in less rule-bound and more nimble and efficient governance systems will generate greater collegiality, more successful staff hires, and a more successful alignment of mission and culture.

[This article was originally published in the Associations Now print edition, titled “Getting to Good Governance.”]

The Case for Training Staff on Governance

Board work is time-consuming, intellectually demanding, and often rife with interpersonal conflict. So why aren’t you encouraging your best employees to get involved in it?

OK; describe governance that way and the question answers itself. But more seriously, there’s an argument that encouraging your top employees to play leadership roles can benefit not only the organizations they end up serving, but yours as well. That’s the story Credit Suisse staffers Lalita Advani and Julia Chu tell in the latest issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. About five years ago the investment bank’s foundation arm launched its Nonprofit Board Training Program, which is designed to train senior and mid-level managers on the ins and outs of board work.

Decision-making on a nonprofit board requires building consensus, a very different skill from influencing someone who reports to you.

The program, they explain, moves beyond straightforward volunteering opportunities to cover the governance basics: “fiduciary oversight, conflicts of interest, and nonprofit financial literacy, as well as the importance of strategic planning.” But its organizers understood that staffers at different levels have different levels of sophistication on these matters and scaled the program accordingly: “One part of the program would target senior employees, and the other would serve mid-level employees. Recognizing the different skills, motivations, and financial giving potential of these two groups, we believed, was essential to the success of the program overall.”

You may have noticed that you yourself are not at Credit Suisse. Given that, it’s likely you don’t have deep resources to implement such a program. But one valuable takeaway from the article is that the program doesn’t just create board members for other organizations; it strengthens the employer’s staff base as well. Advani and Chu report on people who find that they’re better equipped to apply strategic thinking skills to their jobs that they hadn’t had before.

And that’s ultimately something you want in your own shop. Geri Stengel, writing about similar efforts for Forbes in 2012, points out: “Decision-making on a nonprofit board requires building consensus, a very different skill from influencing someone who reports to you. Learning how to work within a group of equals is particularly useful when the time comes … to form alliances and partnership.”

Which is to say that these efforts are more than just corporate do-gooderdom. Indeed, associations might stand to reap greater benefits from such a program, because their work is driven so heavily by board decisions. There’s no guarantee that employees who understand strategic planning will be better employees. But it may serve to reduce any confusion on staff about the reasoning behind their work—and if it gives them an opportunity to learn how to serve causes and organizations they’re passionate about, all the better.

This isn’t a hard idea for organizations to get behind when it comes to grooming potential members for their own boards: The National Ground Water Association, for instance, hosts training sessions for potential board members well ahead of the nomination process that not only explain what board work involves but debunk a lot of myths about what people think it involves. Even if staff isn’t where you’ll be looking for board members, educating them on how the organization runs can be a low-expense education effort.

But the human connection such an effort may provide shouldn’t be overlooked. Last week, Anna Caraveli wrote about one of the more powerful sessions she attended at the ASAE Great Ideas Conference in Orlando, Florida. At the conference’s Ignite session, she witnessed presentations that highlighted the personal experiences of the professional community, which prompted a question from her: “Why do most of us feel that we have to remove our own ‘personhood’ in professional dealings?” Ignoring that personhood, she points out, has business impact: She describes the experience of working with one organization that struggled with personal interaction to the point where “attrition was mounting and members were mostly unengaged.”

Providing staffers with an opportunity to learn more about the mechanism behind your association doesn’t automatically seem like the path to bolstering their personhood. But if it gives them the ability to serve organizations they’re passionate about and better connect with the work they do in the office, it can be a meaningful step.

What does your organization do educate your staffers about your board structure, or train them for governance work? Share your experiences in the comments.

The Board’s Role in Onboarding a New CEO

New CEOs are often told they have big shoes to fill. But the challenge isn’t really about size, of course.

It would be more precise (if perhaps a bit unappealing) to say that a new association executive has old shoes to fill. Association CEOs tend to stay longer than corporate executives, so when there’s a leadership change, boards have often grown accustomed to the previous leader’s ways of doing things—even if those ways were based on outdated assumptions and are inappropriate for the association’s future direction.

For the board, those old shoes fit pretty comfortably. So when a new chief executive arrives with new thinking in tow, the board needs to reset its mental models as well. But many boards don’t. According to a 2014 Bridgespan Group study, nearly half of nonprofit CEOs say their boards didn’t actively participate in the onboarding process.

That has consequences. “Anecdotally, it’s pretty common for [a new] executive following a long-tenured executive not to last so long,” says Robert Van Hook, FASAE, CAE, principal and chief transition evangelist at Transition Management Consulting, which assists associations during leadership changes. “Organizations get used to one style of leadership, so they tend to like what they have.”

A successful executive transition, leaders agree, requires close attention by the board to its own vision as much as to the CEO hiring process—and the stamina to continue that work after the new leader has been hired.

Close Contact

When a CEO Won’t Let Go
Sometimes boards get comfortable, even complacent, with a longtime executive. But if a board knows that a CEO has become a poor fit for the organization but isn’t budging, what then?Robert Van Hook, FASAE, CAE, of Transition Management Consulting, recalls one situation where a board needed to help a long-tenured association leader find the door. Part of the problem is that as power shifts to a longtime CEO, he or she gathers plenty of supporters that can make change difficult. Van Hook prescribes that strong board leaders recognize their own power and gather the board’s own numbers to present the case to the leader.”It took four very strong, courageous leaders,” he says. “They had a study commissioned, they had to have secret meetings to talk about it with consultants, even a family therapist to even understand the dynamics of what was going on in the organization. Finally, they said [to the CEO], we think you need to retire.”That conflict could have been avoided with better communication and recognition that the board ultimately serves the members, not a well-liked leader. “They’re responsible to the organization,” Van Hook says. “They are the stewards of that organization, and they have to do what’s right for the organization.”—M.A.

When Tad Parker became CEO of Printing Industries of New England in 2012, he had long experience as a printer and had served on PINE’s board, but he was new to association management. That required a lot of getting up to speed, especially since PINE’s previous CEO had been in place for 36 years.

To do that, the board proposed a delicate arrangement: The previous executive would stick around as an interim CEO for a year as Parker got acclimated to the role. Parker says he was grateful for the guidance, but “the downside was that as time moved on, he and I had the inevitable—’power struggle’ is not the right term, but exchange of authority. I had the authority from day one but didn’t want to offend him as we were moving through it. As we approached the point of transition, I didn’t want to offend him by dismissing him summarily. We both wanted to make it as smooth as possible.”

Ultimately, the co-CEO relationship ended amicably a few months before the year was up. Regular communication with the board was essential during this period, Parker says. “There was sustained communication and contact with the chairman at that time. He was interested in what I needed, if there were problems with the transition plan, and, if so, how could we resolve the hurdles that were ahead of us,” he says.

That flexibility can be rare, Van Hook says, because over time power tends to shift away from the board to the CEO, who has often presided over multiple board transitions. New demands on the board can seem disruptive and confusing when the board has settled into rubber-stamping mode.

“When this person leaves, retires, or whatever, it often means the board—which has not been very active because they’ve relied so much on this wonderful executive they’ve had, who’s helped them through all these years— needs some help itself in getting its confidence together,” he says.

An Awakening

When Chris McEntee, FASAE, CAE, became CEO of the American Geophysical Union in 2010, she replaced a predecessor who had been at AGU for 38 years. The board knew it needed to change, but it also needed to empower its new executive to help it do that. A new governance structure had been drafted, “but it was new on paper,” she says. “The board hadn’t implemented it.”

Looking back, McEntee says the board did a handful of important things to get past its old-school mindset. First, it empowered her to lead the board in thinking strategically, including bringing in an outside governance consultant. They were also strong at articulating “what they valued and what they were open to changing.” Most important, they empowered McEntee to try new ideas and committed to letting her lead on the operational end.

But in retrospect, McEntee says, there was one thing she needed more of at the time: guidance about which personalities she needed to know better as she began her tenure. Board members “know who are some of the people that are good to keep in your camp, if there are people who are skeptical, or if there are people who you should really get to know,” she says. “If you’re a new CEO, a board can help that way.”

Before McEntee’s arrival, “we were clueless as a board,” says AGU president Carol Finn. McEntee’s guidance, she says, has helped the association move forward. But she notes much of its success results from the board establishing clear roles and responsibilities and recognizing its own power.

“There was an awakening that the CEO was not in charge of the organization and not the only one responsible,” Finn says. “We were responsible.”

As more boomer executives prepare to step down, more boards are taking on the challenge of thinking strategically about new leadership. Van Hook says he’s seen more boards pursue “transition readiness planning” to tackle that.

“Ultimately, they have to answer the question, are we ready?” he says. “Is the organization ready to take on a new exec? To answer that question they need to have a pretty good idea of where they’re going. And [they need to ask], what kind of leader do we need next?”

McEntee agrees. “A board, even when it’s thinking of hiring the next CEO, has to find the person that matches the organization’s strategy at that point in time rather than have preconceived notions,” she says. “And they have to be very clear about what they want to preserve and what they want to see changed. And then they have to be able to help guide and coach the new person as they come in but also not overstep their bounds.”

[This article was originally publishing in the Associations Now print edition, titled “Are You Ready for the Next Exec?”]

New CEOs: Are You Ready for the Next Exec?

When a long-tenured CEO leaves, the organization’s board members need to adjust their assumptions and strategies to help the new executive succeed. It requires stepping out of a well-worn comfort zone and refocusing on the path ahead.

New CEOs are often told they have big shoes to fill. But the challenge isn’t really about size, of course. It would be more precise (if perhaps a bit unappealing) to say that a new association executive has old shoes to fill. Association CEOs tend to stay longer than corporate executives, so when there’s a leadership change, boards have often grown accustomed to the previous leader’s ways of doing things—even if those ways were based on outdated assumptions and are inappropriate for the association’s future direction.

For the board, those old shoes fit pretty comfortably. So when a new chief executive arrives with new thinking in tow, the board needs to reset its mental models as well. But many boards don’t. According to a 2014 Bridgespan Group study, nearly half of nonprofit CEOs say their boards didn’t actively participate in the onboarding process.

That has consequences. “Anecdotally, it’s pretty common for [a new] executive following a long-tenured executive not to last so long,” says Robert Van Hook, FASAE, CAE, principal and chief transition evangelist at Transition Management Consulting, which assists associations during leadership changes. “Organizations get used to one style of leadership, so they tend to like what they have.”

A successful executive transition, leaders agree, requires close attention by the board to its own vision as much as to the CEO hiring process—and the stamina to continue that work after the new leader has been hired.

For the board, those old shoes fit pretty comfortably. So when a new chief executive arrives with new thinking in tow, the board needs to reset its mental models as well.

Close Contact

When Tad Parker became CEO of Printing Industries of New England in 2012, he had long experience as a printer and had served on PINE’s board, but he was new to association management. That required a lot of getting up to speed, especially since PINE’s previous CEO had been in place for 36 years.

To do that, the board proposed a delicate arrangement: The previous executive would stick around as an interim CEO for a year as Parker got acclimated to the role. Parker says he was grateful for the guidance, but “the downside was that as time moved on, he and I had the inevitable—‘power struggle’ is not the right term, but exchange of authority. I had the authority from day one but didn’t want to offend him as we were moving through it. As we approached the point of transition, I didn’t want to offend him by dismissing him summarily. We both wanted to make it as smooth as possible.”

Ultimately, the co-CEO relationship ended amicably a few months before the year was up. Regular communication with the board was essential during this period, Parker says. “There was sustained communication and contact with the chairman at that time. He was interested in what I needed, if there were problems with the transition plan, and, if so, how could we resolve the hurdles that were ahead of us,” he says.

That flexibility can be rare, Van Hook says, because over time power tends to shift away from the board to the CEO, who has often presided over multiple board transitions. New demands on the board can seem disruptive and confusing when the board has settled into rubber-stamping mode.

“When this person leaves, retires, or whatever, it often means the board—which has not been very active because they’ve relied so much on this wonderful executive they’ve had, who’s helped them through all these years— needs some help itself in getting its confidence together,” he says.

An Awakening

When Chris McEntee, FASAE, CAE, became CEO of the American Geophysical Union in 2010, she replaced a predecessor who had been at AGU for 38 years. The board knew it needed to change, but it also needed to empower its new executive to help it do that. A new governance structure had been drafted, “but it was new on paper,” she says. “The board hadn’t implemented it.”

Looking back, McEntee says the board did a handful of important things to get past its old-school mindset. First, it empowered her to lead the board in thinking strategically, including bringing in an outside governance consultant. They were also strong at articulating “what they valued and what they were open to changing.” Most important, they empowered McEntee to try new ideas and committed to letting her lead on the operational end.

But in retrospect, McEntee says, there was one thing she needed more of at the time: guidance about which personalities she needed to know better as she began her tenure. Board members “know who are some of the people that are good to keep in your camp, if there are people who are skeptical, or if there are people who you should really get to know,” she says. “If you’re a new CEO, a board can help that way.”

Before McEntee’s arrival, “we were clueless as a board,” says AGU president Carol Finn. McEntee’s guidance, she says, has helped the association move forward. But she notes much of its success results from the board establishing clear roles and responsibilities and recognizing its own power.

“There was an awakening that the CEO was not in charge of the organization and not the only one responsible,” Finn says. “We were responsible.”

As more boomer executives prepare to step down, more boards are taking on the challenge of thinking strategically about new leadership. Van Hook says he’s seen more boards pursue “transition readiness planning” to tackle that.

“Ultimately, they have to answer the question, are we ready?” he says. “Is the organization ready to take on a new exec? To answer that question they need to have a pretty good idea of where they’re going. And [they need to ask], what kind of leader do we need next?”

McEntee agrees. “A board, even when it’s thinking of hiring the next CEO, has to find the person that matches the organization’s strategy at that point in time rather than have preconceived notions,” she says. “And they have to be very clear about what they want to preserve and what they want to see changed. And then they have to be able to help guide and coach the new person as they come in but also not overstep their bounds.”

How to Get a Board Past Its Fear of Change

“Expanded threats are attacking the core of why, how, and what associations are founded to do,” writes Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, in her new book, Ctrl+Alt+Believe: Reboot Your Association for Success. Among the reasons she cites: competition from the internet, diminished volunteer time, struggles with clarifying your organization’s mission. You doubtless can list a few more things that are keeping you up at night.

But though Duckworth, CEO of Leadership Solutions International, paints a somewhat frightening picture of an association’s challenges, one of her central arguments is that association leaders and boards succeed only once they get past their fear. How to do that? In the book she discusses stoking a conversation about the organization’s purpose (a subject this blog took on recently), challenging leaders to ask why the organization behaves the way it does, and experiment much more than it’s used to.

Simple solutions, perhaps, but ones that are notoriously hard to execute. Duckworth answered a few questions about her approach to such sticky wickets below.

Leaders must ask why? as the galvanizing force behind every decision.

A running theme in your book is boards’ fear of change. “Organizations die of fear,” as you write. Is there a way that organizations can “test” for fear in advance via the nominating process? Or is there something about the structure of boards that encourages it?

Fear of change or “reboot” in organizations has a micro and macro component. “Micro” meaning that each individual board member will naturally have a little tentativeness leading an organization. The “macro” being that together they may collectively create fear; getting to know the people on the board, moving closer to the mission of the organization and rules of governing. Running a board/organization forces people to look at their strengths, weaknesses, and what they contribute. Until we embrace that individual and collective fear as a positive catalyst for change we may experience stagnant organizations. A test for fear is not as valuable as simply acknowledging fear’s existence.

You recommend that the organization spend time distilling its mission statement into six words. Why is this valuable—that is, how can it help the board be more strategic?

You can determine the success of any organization by asking its leaders what the vision/mission of the organization is. I’ve been asking that question on stages for the past five years. Less than one percent of any audience can answer that question. In most cases nobody in the room can answer that question.

I use the six-word vision statement as a guideline to direct leaders to shorten the vision/mission statement to something that inspires. Your vision/mission needs to be a statement you and your leadership can memorize with your head. And memorize with your heart, meaning you can have each leader articulate what the vision/mission means to them in their own words.

I choose intentionally to use vision/mission together. We can debate all day long what a vision is, what a mission is and if you need one or both. What I know is 100 percent true is that the debate doesn’t matter if nobody is reading and using the vision/mission each and every day as a guiding and inspiring principle.

You write that “as a board member and leader, you must be willing to continuously ask, why?” It’s a good question, of course, but one that can also sow discord. Are there ways of asking “why?” repeatedly that can get to the heart of an issue without being divisive?

Leaders must ask “why?” as the galvanizing force behind every decision. The answer to that why must bring the association/organization closer to actualizing its vision and mission. I think “why?” as a question is only divisive when there are multiple visions of where the organization is going.

One suggestion you have for organizations to shake off the dust is to beta-test new ideas. To make them successful (or identify them as unsuccessful), what kind of structure should a beta test have? Should you set distinct time limits on them? Definitions for success? When do you pull the plug?

Build a framework that serves the needs of your membership. A beta project could be an initial alternate solution that shifts the culture of your association. For example: For one year, set aside a certain dollar amount for a new/beta project and a certain number of volunteer hours. You pull the plug on a beta project at the agreed upon date/time based on the initial beta project goals and objectives. At that time, you can also decide if you want to continue to “plug in” the project. We do not give up the annual golf tournament forever; we might “beta test” for one year a mini-golf tournament. At the end of that you easefully and effortlessly evaluate. Did this work, did it not work, do we do it again?

In a beta project, you set a deadline to in your words “pull the plug” at the beginning rather than the typical association outlook that assumes a project goes on forever. Assume the project has an end and “re-plug” in the beta project only if/when it works in a way that exceeds the needs and desires of your members.

In one chapter, you list a few potentially toxic board personalities—passive leaders, demanding leaders, etc. Can those personality type change within the board role, or must the CEO and other board members work around them? How can you make them a valuable part of the strategic process, instead of a roadblock?

The dynamic nature of new leaders flowing in and out of an association absolutely sets up an organization to have ongoing personality type changes. The key here is to not set an organizational belief that says X personality will only be here in the organization one month, three years, or however long you think they will be in service, then try to wait it out. When you do that, you set in motion a chain of other leaders who will evacuate your board if they do not agree with personality X.

I use the word “one-ness” a lot. In the case of board personalities we must go back to the one thing that connects us all together. In the case of business, that is the vision/mission. Galvanize personalities around that one-ness.

A Fresh Look at Your Sense of Purpose

What’s your reason for being?

Not you personally, though that’s not a bad question to ask every so often. I’m thinking more of the organization you lead. How often do you and your board discuss what the purpose of your association is?

Probably not often enough, association executive David M. Patt, CAE, suggests in a recent blog post. Though most associations have a mission statement, he writes, such statements are vague and may bear little resemblance to the image that stakeholders carry in their heads. “Board members, you may find, often have different notions of the organization’s purpose, and they think, speak, act, and vote in accordance with those notions, usually assuming their colleagues think similarly,” he writes.

“Nonprofits do this all the time: They twist in the wind, chasing money rather than adhering to their guiding mission.”

That’s a problem. Though I’ll argue in a moment that it’s also not.

First, the problem. Certainly, disagreement about the focus of your organization can be a divisive thing. It complicates what you’re focusing your energies and resources on. And when you lack focus, you wind up doing a lot of things you don’t need to do and probably shouldn’t do. That happens often enough that there’s a term for it: mission creep. It occurs for a lot of reasons, but one likely reason it happens is because somebody sees an activity happening over the hedge and thinks it ought to be tried out closer to home. They have a big advertising campaign—why don’t we? They have an office in Australia—why not us? They have a credentialing program/Kickstarter/shiny new member-generating product—etc.

That’s often to path to going somewhere your organization needn’t be. Last week, scholars Mark A. Hager and Elizabeth A.M. Searing published an article at Nonprofit Quarterly, “10 Ways to Kill Your Nonprofit,” that highlighted some key ways organizations fail themselves. Most of those daggers, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved poor stewardship of funds. And one way to mismanage funds is allowing for mission drift. “Nonprofits do this all the time,” they write:

“They twist in the wind, chasing money rather than adhering to their guiding mission. The smart nonprofit will have one ear to the ground and focus on community needs. The nonprofit with the death wish will look only to requests for proposals and chase dollars into a competitive resource niche. If you can get your nonprofit to value resources over mission, you can put at least one foot in the grave.”

A clear vision from the board about what your mission is can help you escape that problem, especially if there’s been a change in your reason for being. The most famous example of this in nonprofitdom, arguably, is the March of Dimes. As Eugene Fram recently wrote at the Huffington Post, the organization was founded to raise funds for polio research; the arrival of the Salk vaccine prompted it to refocus its mission to one about care for infants.

But there are plenty of more recent examples of this in the association space—those that been affected by changes in technology, member needs, and new growth markets. At one ASAE Annual Meeting I recall hearing Enid Borden, the former CEO of the Meals on Wheels Association of America, has talked about how the organization shifted from one that provided meals to one that provided a host of services for seniors given the change in its demographics. (A name change for MOWAA’s charitable arm reflects that change: Where once it was the Meals on Wheels Research Foundation, it’s now the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger.)

Which gets us back to why disagreement about mission isn’t necessarily a problem. That disagreement about the purpose of the organization can be a sign of health; it suggests that the organization has the potential to find new ways to serve its members, and even to redefine what those members are. The trick, though, is manage that conversation about purpose with a healthy amount of skepticism. You’re not just asking what your purpose is—you’re asking whether that’s the right purpose for you to have.

But you don’t get the answers to those questions unless you ask them.

What do you do to get stakeholders talking about your association’s purpose? Share your experiences in the comments.

How to Get a Board’s Trust Early

CEOs often like to remind people that they serve at the pleasure of their boards. Rarely, though, does it seem like they’re eager to discuss that fact as a pleasure itself.

The relationship between staff and volunteer leaders can be fraught. That’s particularly pronounced in the early months of a CEO’s tenure, when the new executive is eager to implement a new vision but has to be mindful of all the things the board carries with it—institutional folkways, firmly held (but frustratingly unspoken) preferences, a general suspicion that the new person who’s arrived is ready to unwittingly wreck the organization. Worse, there’s a disinterest in engaging in such discussions: According to one recent survey, a substantial proportion of nonprofit executives say they received little board support in their first year.

Gaining endorsement from a board for your ideas is rarely unanimous.

Last week Kerry Stackpole, FASAE, CAE, a longtime association executive and managing director of Neoterica Partners, wrote thoughtfully about this predicament. In an extended blog post directed to new CEOs, he stressed the importance of being attentive to the board’s behavior. “Newly appointed CEO’s need to be extremely sensitive to the past—specifically the systems, processes and expectations––built by their predecessors,” he writes. The ways that boards cling to old behaviors manifests itself in a variety of ways: A past CEO asked to “stick around” with vague duties that still muddle with lines of authority, reflexive resistance to new proposals, benign neglect.

Stackpole’s recommendation in response is similar to a line this blog (and the experts I lean on for it) has long taken: Communicate. But, he stressess, do it tactfully and diplomatically. “You need to meet with all key executives and informal leaders in the organization,” he writes. “The tone and tenor of your initial contacts go a long way in carrying your message and setting the stage for your leadership and the organization.”

That’s good advice for a CEO navigating his or her honeymoon period, which ends….well, when does it end?

I put that question to Stackpole: When does the onboarding or transitional period end for a CEO, to the point where earning the board’s respect isn’t the primary concern?

The answer: Slower than you might like, and perhaps never. “In my experience, the transitional period is done when the board begins to endorse and actively support the ideas of the new CEO. Notice I didn’t say ‘accept.’ Accepting is far too passive and lacks the essential elements of enthusiasm and commitment to assure success for the new CEO. The true challenge here is that gaining endorsement from a board for your ideas is rarely unanimous.”

When it comes to getting to the point of active support, Stackpole makes a distinction between the speeds at which the new CEO needs to operate—fast when comes to understanding the board intimately and well, slow when it comes to implementing new ideas. Doing the opposite may force the CEO to play defense. “If a CEO hasn’t worked early in their tenure to quickly build understanding of board members, strengthen personal relationships and mold a general consensus for the future, the only ‘safe’ route for the CEO is to make small changes at the margins and move slowly toward their own implementation,” he says.

That doesn’t mean you need to be timid going in, but your actions need to be meshed with passion for the organization you’re leading. That’s what the board will be looking for when they first get to know you, Stackpole says. And of course they’ll want it for years to come as well. “In many ways the CEO is earning the board’s respect everyday,” he says. “It is an ongoing effort and something that can be easily derailed by the CEO.”

How did you establish strong communication with your board early on, and when did you feel confident that you had the board’s support? Share your experiences in the comments.

Do Boards Do Enough to Support New CEOs?

Last week, Associations Now’s Rob Stott wrote about a great success story: Amy Snell, CAE, the relatively new executive director of the Wood Component Manufacturers Association, has revived an organization in the doldrums, in part by lighting a fire under the board.

When she joined the association, Snell says, “the board had become somewhat stale…. They weren’t engaged in any sort of planning or looking at the future of the organization, there was no committee structure, and they only met once a year.”

Onboarding is a two-way street: It’s not so much the board guiding a new CEO as much as the CEO and board working together.

Snell was put in a position of being a CEO who was helping to lead the board strategically. In a more stable situation, the roles would more properly be reversed, or at least in some kind of balance. Snell’s predicament is frustrating. But on the evidence of a recent survey, it’s also not unusual.

At the website of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, three staffers of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consultancy, discuss the lack of a hands-on role that boards take when “onboarding” new nonprofit CEOs—that is, preparing them for their new role and helping them settle into the job.

A few data points from the Bridgespan study:

  • “39 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement, ‘My board was effective in helping me set priorities the first year.’”
  • “50 percent of executive directors did not clarify with their boards how they would work together in the first few months on the job.”
  • “66 percent of executive directors disagreed with the statement: ‘The board and I worked effectively together to establish concrete measures and milestones for the board to use to assess my performance in my first year.’”

The story’s authors attribute this general apathy to the exhaustion that comes following the CEO search. “They are often burned out from a demanding executive search, and eager to hand things off to the new leader and go back to their day jobs.” That’s just as true in the association world: As Jackie Eder-Van Hook wrote in Associations Now in 2011, “[The board members] are tired and have done their job. Yet, there is a rich and untapped opportunity to jumpstart an executive’s tenure and help ensure that the new executive starts out on the right foot.”

One point underlying those statistics above is that onboarding is a two-way street: It’s not so much a function of the board giving guidance to a new CEO as much as the CEO and board working together to make sure they’re both moving in the same direction. The Stanford Social Innovation Review article makes five prescriptions for how a board can help onboard a CEO—”collectively set the new leadership agenda,” “get clear on roles’—but they all effectively boil down to one thing: communication. That goes beyond communication between the board and the CEO but with staff and members too.

That kind of communication is hard work, and something that CEOs in the association world seem to be hungering for: One of the more packed Learning Labs I attended at last year’s ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition in Atlanta was on CEO performance evaluations and how CEOs can get better feedback from their boards about how they’re doing. Many of the recommendations at the session involved repairing a dysfunctional relationship. But the session stressed the importance of having forward-looking conversations regardless of whether the relationship is smooth or rocky. “Instead of measuring against past metrics, turn the evaluation conversation that looks at the association’s future needs,” the speakers emphasized.

Amy Snell did it when there was pressure to turn around a struggling association, but the conversation doesn’t have to—shouldn’t—wait until things come to that point.

How well were you supported by your board during your first months of the job? How do you keep lines of communication open about your performance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Lessons From a Failed Governance Change

Many things can prompt an association to consider a governance overhaul. The board may be too large or too small. The number of committees may have expanded over the years, with no attention paid to whether they remain relevant. Executive committee roles may be a poor fit for the organization’s current goals.

Regardless of the reasons, the transition to a new governance model may not go smoothly. Michael Fraser, executive vice president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, learned that lesson when he came to the organization in August 2013, just as it was considering a sizable change to its structure.

PMS currently has a 37-member board as well as a 300-person house of delegates that makes policy recommendations. A member vote to shrink both the house and the board and move policy making out of the house failed in October 2013, which means Fraser faced some intense member emotions after less than three months on the job.

“People are still pretty raw about it,” he says. “There were a lot of feelings about losing the democratic process they felt the house represented, a lot of concerns about board’s power and control. [Many members felt] that the house acts as a check on that.”

That split about the virtues, or lack thereof, of a governance restructuring speaks to one of the challenges of this kind of change.

“Agreement on the need for change needs to precede conversation about what the change should be,” says Glenn Tecker, CEO of governance consultancy Tecker International (not speaking to PMS’s situation specifically). “Sometimes the analysis produces a finding that a change in a group’s process will achieve the same outcomes that would be achieved by elimination of the group. Modification of a group’s contribution to the organization is far less difficult than making a case to abolish [it].”

As important as the discussion of change itself is gauging what level of change the organization is comfortable with. Fraser believes that PMS’s proposal didn’t sit well with members who were willing to accommodate some change but were not ready to eliminate the house of delegates or rename and restructure other volunteer bodies.

“There was a lot of ‘new’ in the proposal,” he says, and that diminished the strategic discussion of its merits. “There was a lot less about, ‘What do we want the Medical Society to look like in 20 years, and is this the governance structure that’s going to keep things going?'” That’s the conversation the association is having before a revote in October, Fraser says.

Tecker stresses that a second vote requires more soul-searching among the participants. “A no vote is a political and communications problem. It requires political and communication strategies to reverse,” he says. “Informed analysis of the thinking in favor of and opposed to a change is necessary before the initial vote and certainly before any revote.”

Fraser also says that it is critical for staff leaders to stay neutral during these periods—to support the volunteers as they make a decision but not to lobby on behalf of one side or another.

“The kiss of death for me would be having to choose a side and defend it,” he says. “We really are here as stewards and servant leaders of our organizations that we maintain on behalf of our members, and I strongly caution any CEO from getting too close to either side or being seen as a champion for a particular model, because that comes with a very huge political price. Instead, guide the conversation in a way that’s responsible and will lead members to the right answer in terms of what the organization should look like to be effective. For us to own this as a staff thing would have been a horrible way to go.”

Does Your Board Need an Outsider?

Your board might seem like it’s running smoothly and governing soundly, but sometimes it’s not clear until after a big change that something important was neglected. When that happens, the results aren’t pretty: Consumers in your industry are confused. Stakeholders are infuriated. If one of them had been in the room before the vote, perhaps you wouldn’t be in this predicament.

A “public member” or “lay member” of the board is designed to avoid such mishaps and bring a different outlook to governance. Since 2002, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons has had a lay member on its 18-person board. According to CEO Karen Hackett, FASAE, CAE, the idea was implemented because the organization “wanted to hear an outside perspective at the board table. Someone who wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon [and] someone who wasn’t a staff member.”

AAOS has no firm rules about who can be a lay member, except that he or she cannot be an orthopedic surgeon and does not serve on standing committees. The system works, Hackett says, in part because of that relative lack of restrictions: The lay member is fully integrated into the full board structure.

Lay members “don’t come in with a portfolio or a specific set of marching orders,” she says. “They participate in discussion. They participate in the entire board meeting. They are assigned work based on the needs of the organization.” For example, AAOS is currently building a new headquarters building, and Hackett says the lay member was fully part of the discussions about it.

Though AAOS makes it work, Leigh Wintz, FASAE, CAE, a principal consultant with Tecker International, advises caution when considering adding a public member to your board. Without a clear sense of what role that person plays in the organization, he or she could be less of an “official outsider” and instead just a poor fit.

“The biggest problem is when people aren’t clear what their role is,” she says. “You need a real good match of expectations and skill set.”

AAOS works around those concerns by making sure that its vetting process for lay members is thorough. Nearly a year before the lay member’s term ends (he or she serves for two years and is limited to two terms), AAOS sends a communication to its fellows, requesting nominations for the person’s successor. That call typically results in a pool of 50 names that AAOS staff considers. Each nominee is contacted and informed about the role’s responsibilities and time commitment. Finalists are then vetted by the association’s top board leadership before a final candidate is voted on by the full board.

Far from complicating the dynamics of the board, Hackett says, an outsider can sometimes voice ideas and opinions that might be politically difficult for insiders to say out loud.

“It is a position that I truly appreciate personally, because sometimes the lay member can say things that are better coming from a lay board member than they are coming from staff,” Hackett says. “They can be very helpful in that regard.”