Despite some relatively optimistic data points in the past year or so—low unemployment, declining Covid numbers—executives are fielding a lot of stress in their workplace lately. Inflation and supply-chain issues aren’t entirely resolved; recession concerns still loom; hosts of industries are concerned that AI will termite into their business model, if it hasn’t been doing so already.
For association executives who are leading not just their staffs but also the industries their members represent, it’s become a time where reliability is key to soothing a lot of stakeholder anxiety. A report released last week by FTI Consultingunderscores the point: People are looking for CEOs who prioritize workplace wellness and other measures that speak to stability. For instance, the percentage of employees who listed “financially minded” as a most-desired attribute in CEOs increased from 17 to 23 percent. And respondents said they want more transparency from leaders: The percentage citing “accessibility” as a key attribute leaped from 15 to 28 percent.
Employees now indicate they want to see a CEO who is ethical, accessible, and transparent.
Gone, for the moment, is the emphasis on the CEO who’s simply “here to listen”; getting things done and being clear about it is now a priority. As the report puts it: “The desire for a ‘Chief Empathy Officer,’ which rose in importance during the pandemic amid increased health concerns, is behind us. Employees now indicate they want to see a CEO who is ethical, accessible, and transparent.”
On a similar note, last week Deloitte and SAP released a report last week calling for a chief trust officer—an executive role that recognizes the role that trust plays in “employee engagement, customer loyalty, and financial performance.” According to their report, Introducing the Chief Trust Officer, the job is closely aligned with leadership around information security and real concerns about how data breaches can affect how a company is perceived. But the role as the report envisions it is also expanding well beyond that, covering all manner of potential reputational hits, from how an organization handles sustainability and wellness issues, regulation, and more.
Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect most associations to make an investment in one more full-time executive role. But some of the elements of the CTrO job can be folded into a CEO’s work, if they’re not already. For instance, the report advises that organizations look at “relevant signals emanating from different sources—ranging from news media and social media, to blogs and regulatory postings, among others. This exercise lets organizations evaluate how they are perceived by the public and helps them to pinpoint opportunities to earn or rebuild trust with external stakeholders.” Knowing how you’re perceived internally and externally is always a good practice.
These trends will likely see-saw over time. The FTI report also notes that of late CEOs are being asked to modulate their comments on social issues, a substantial shift from 2020. With a presidential election year coming, that emphasis may change, especially for associations engaged in advocacy. For now, though, there’s a strong craving for consistency, transparency, and stability. It will be the executive’s job to determine how best to establish and communicate it.
A new year is typically a time to take stock of things—look back at the past year and plan for the one to come. Following a year like 2020, though, it’s tempting to just skip over the past year, treat it like an outlier, and move on.
But there are good reasons to look back, especially when it comes to performance reviews. The annual performance review is necessary as a tool for establishing goals and salaries for the coming year, but it’s also a good way to assess how you, as a leader, and your team weathered the storm. And because the past year has been different, what you need to consider in the performance review process will need to change as well.
Finding out at the end of the year that you’ve been missing the mark all year is unhelpful—to say the least.
For one thing, the relationship between a CEO and the board should now be an iterative one, involving more than just quarterly check-ins. (I’ve heard from many execs in the past year that board calls have become monthly events, a positive thing.) That level of interaction shouldn’t go to waste.
“To avoid unpleasant end-of-year surprises, board members should be encouraged to provide feedback to the CEO on an ongoing basis,” Oser writes. “As a CEO, finding out at the end of the year that you’ve been missing the mark all year is unhelpful—to say the least.”
Because the pandemic has revealed so many things about an executive’s leadership style, it’s a good time to discuss what worked well and what didn’t, and then make professional-development plans accordingly. As Oser writes: “The skilled executive seeks to continue their professional growth to effectively address the job’s ever-evolving demands and complexities… It helps the CEO to identify areas and opportunities for development.”
The same is true for the evaluations an exec provides for staffers, but the factors in assessing performance are different now. The toxic remote worker, something most organizations hardly knew existed a year ago, is now very much a thing. And because the way you’ve managed workers in 2020 was different, the way you evaluate them will have to change too.
In a recent article in the New York Times, reporter Julie Weed points out that cases of weak performance in the past year ought to be considered in the context of all the mitigating factors that the pandemic delivered. A leader will have to be able to assess what represents an employee’s shortcoming that requires correction and what constitutes a temporary COVID-related issue. “Poor performance owing to temporary factors shouldn’t be judged the same way as poor performance from lack of skills or effort,” Weed writes.
Performance reviews now are even more of a test of a leader’s soft skills than they have been in the past. But it’s harder than ever to cultivate the kind of casual rapport that many employees need in a remote environment. Leaders have done their best, but “management by Zooming around” hasn’t really caught on—check-ins with employees have been a lot more formal and task-based in the past year. To that end, leaders and employees will have to do more prep work to understand each others’ perspectives.
George Mason University management professor Kevin Rockmann told the Times that it’s now more likely that boss and employee disagree on things. “Both parties should take time to evaluate the employee’s performance before the meeting and send it to the other in writing,” Weed writes.
The pandemic likely upended a lot of your association’s goals for the past year. But at the staff level, the needs are largely the same—clear communication, a sense of belonging, and a plan for how to improve. All things that are too important to pass up.
How have you been handling performance reviews in the context of the pandemic and remote staff? Share your experiences in the comments.
If you’re a new CEO, you already know your board at least a little bit—a few of its members have likely sat on the executive search committee that hired you. But now that you’re actually the staff leader, the dynamic changes. You’re actually expected to start implementing that vision you talked about during the hiring process, and you may be doing it with a board that’s a little more resistant than they perhaps let on. Where to start?
Doug Eadie, a longtime governance consultant, has been thinking a lot about the question lately. “Coming up through the ranks, you tend not to learn what you need to work with the board, unless you’re very lucky,” he says. “One common mistake is to underestimate how much you have to learn, and not invest enough time early on to work with the board.”
In his 2014 book, The Board-Savvy CEO, Eadie writes about the multiple hats a CEO needs to wear to encourage their boards to think strategically and get out of operations mode. But when it comes to first steps, Eadie argues that the best approach is one that’s dirt simple yet often difficult: work on relationships, especially your relationship with the board chair.
If you take an arm’s length approach, you will run into serious problems.”
“The best CEOs get to know the chair well right away,” he says. “I want to know what they want out of this experience, because I [as the CEO] have an opportunity to help them achieve it. If their preferred method of communication is a well-crafted memo, that’s how I communicate with them. If their preferred mode is in person, I’m going to have to try to accommodate that.”
Being a good communicator is just the start, though. After all, CEOs are in the delicate position of needing to lead the board without dictating to it, and many CEOs may resist pressing their own vision to a board chair for fear of being perceived as hijacking the association’s leadership. But Eadie says that a too-distant attitude contains its own dangers. “If you take an arm’s length approach, you will run into serious problems,” he says. If you’re going to have a really good relationship with the board, they’ve got to be satisfied with their governing role. You can’t have a board feeling disengaged, dissatisfied. It’s too dangerous. So for your own protection, you have to step in.”
This soft-skills stuff has a more solid practical purpose, Eadie explains in The Board-Savvy CEO. Close communication with the board helps everybody not just feel like they’re on top of things, but avoids the ill will that can be generated if they feel blindsided by new information. The CEO “makes sure that board members are never caught off guard and embarrassed publicly by important events they’re unaware of,” he writes. Ultimately, leaders want to feel like they have a direct role in the stewardship of the organization. Surprises erode that feeling.
And the good-communications piece of the CEO-board relationship doesn’t have to be informal. Indeed, Eadie recommends creating a standing committee explicitly dedicated to monitoring the board-CEO relationship (made up of the chair, CEO, and the heads of other standing committees), or dedicating the executive committee to the task. This committee serves as both a formal performance-evaluation group, but also a complaint desk and place to simply talk about what’s working and what’s not.
Consider a relatively innocuous case, he suggests: a CEO who treats the job more as a public-spokesperson role advocating for the association’s mission, rather than a day-to-day operations executive. Boards can split on whether that’s the best move move for an association, but, Eadie says, “in traditional board architectures, there’s no place to talk about that. So what often happens is the relationship begins to sour, but no one’s managing it, and that can can happen very quickly. [The committee] gives you a place where you regularly monitor the relationship between the board and the CEO, with the CEO there.”
And that group can cut both ways. Just as the committee can keep an eye on the CEO’s performance, it also provides an opportunity for the CEO to raise a discussion about what the board should look like in the future.
“Every year, the committee can update the profile of what they’re looking for,” he says. “Attributes, qualifications, certain kinds of experiences they need on the board.” What the board does with that outline is up to them: One strategy Eadie recommends is inviting potential board members to the next strategic-planning retreat to watch them in action and see if they’re leadership timber. (“How do they do with the breakout groups? How collegial are they? How substantive?”) How the CEO and board decide to do that watching and vetting is up to them. The important thing is that they’re doing it together.
What strategies have worked for you in building a rapport between the CEO and the board? Share your experiences in the comments.
“Performance measurement doesn’t measure performance,” said Paul Pomerantz, FASAE, CAE, CEO of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, in front of a packed crowed Sunday at the ASAE Annual Meeting & Expo. CEOs are hungry for valuable feedback about how they’re doing their jobs, but too often they receive feedback that’s perfunctory, tick-off-the-box stuff that neglects serious issues.
That’s something I discussed in the August issue of Associations Now with Pomerantz’s copresenter, Nancy Green, FASAE, CAE, executive director of the National Association for Gifted Children. “My [board] members are mostly academics, so they wanted to cast a wide net, get a lot of data, and then crunch the numbers and give me the metric,” she told me. “Knowing that I was two standard deviations away from the mean was important to them, but not very meaningful to me.”
If I have a president who’s a bomb-thrower, that reflects on me
So what works well when it comes to evaluations? There was some disagreement in the room about the virtues of 360 reviews; one attendee argued that they work best as feedback exercises outside of the formal performance review. But Green and Pomerantz listed a number of ideas they considered valuable:
Try a consultant. A third party can serve as an intermediary between the CEO and board, and give the direct feedback that might otherwise not occur. “They’ll give me the tough stuff, ” Pomerantz said.
Make it a forward-looking conversation. Instead of measuring against past metrics, turn the evaluation conversation that looks at the association’s future needs.
Keep it focused on strategic objectives. This is particularly relevant, Green said, with boards that have a habit of getting the weeds of chapter activities and other managerial tasks.
Involve more people than just the board chair. For better or for worse, the reputations of the CEO and the board chair interweave, and a divisive board chair can split opinion on the staff leader. “If I have a president who’s a bomb-thrower, that reflects on me,” Green says.
Get some informal outside input. Green consults with a “kitchen cabinet” of experts for help. “I do have people in most segments of the organization who I can call when I need unvarnished advice, whether it’s advocacy or government affairs or the convention,” she told Associations Now. “It’s a way to surface the early warning signs.”
Make it a forward-looking conversation. Instead of measuring against past metrics, turn the evaluation conversation that looks at the association’s future needs.
Keep it focused on strategic objectives. This is particularly relevant, Green said, with boards that have a habit of getting the weeds of chapter activities and other managerial tasks.
Involve more people than just the board chair. For better or for worse, the reputations of the CEO and the board chair interweave, and a divisive board chair can split opinion on the staff leader. “If I have a president who’s a bomb-thrower, that reflects on me,” Green says.
Get some informal outside input. Green consults with a “kitchen cabinet” of experts for help. “I do have people in most segments of the organization who I can call when I need unvarnished advice, whether it’s advocacy or government affairs or the convention,” she told Associations Now. “It’s a way to surface the early warning signs.”
These issues are more pronounced for CEOs, Green and Pomerantz said, because the skill sets of an effective CEO are much more dynamic now. He or she needs serious political acumen (both in terms of staff and the statehouse), business skills, change-management skills, value-creation skills, solid tech chops, and global knowledge.
The CEO gig is more challenging now, but more dynamic. But is your board aware of your hand in those responsibilities? And have they devised an effective way to measure performance that includes those responsibilities? Let use know how you do it—or think it should be done—in the comments.
When Debbie Witchey became president and CEO of the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness in October, she had replaced a long-standing executive who, she says, “for all intents and purposes” was ABHW’s founder. That has its upsides: Witchey was promised the outgoing CEO’s support during a transition period to reassure staff, board, and stakeholders. But being in an esteemed leader’s shadow meant making changes could be difficult.
To manage that dynamic, Witchey accepted the assistance but also made sure to draw bright lines around it to avoid any confusion about who was in charge. “The first week I was on, I shadowed her, and during the second week, she shadowed me,” Witchey says. “Then she went on vacation, which I think was helpful because I was doing things on my own, and I could see where my knowledge was lacking and what I needed help with.”
Having a clear plan about how to approach the early days of a new leader’s tenure is crucial, says Candance Chow, managing director and cofounder of NextGroup, LLC, a support firm for nonprofit leaders. That initial period, she says, “is a lot about building rapport and trust with the board as well as staff. Sometimes leaders will focus on spending time and developing relationships with staff, especially if they have a change agenda, but doing that with the board is just as critical.”
If you see signs the team is flailing and not sure of their direction, that’s a problem
Candance Chow, managing director and cofounder of NextGroup, LLC.
Witchey is doing just that, meeting with staff and board members to hear their thoughts and concerns about the organization’s direction. But she’s also clear about setting a start date for when actual changes will be implemented. “I told staff that I was not planning to change anything until the start of the new year,” she says. “There are things like the hybrid work schedule and things like that, which were important to them. So I told them that I was not going to change anything until the start of the new year, and even then, I might not be changing anything. But what I wanted to do was hear from them.”
Setting a stop date for the new executive’s listening tour can be just as important as the listening itself, Chow says, and each leader will have to determine when it’s best to start taking action. “I think sometimes new EDs [executive directors] prolong that period of listening and learning a little too long to the point that the team isn’t really sure actions are going to be taken,” she says. “And then on the other side of that, there are EDs that are hard-charging—everything is wrong, and everything needs to change. There’s definitely a balance there.”
Time for an Exit Coach?
It’s common for incoming leaders to call on a coach to navigate their transition. But outgoing CEOs are transitioning too, and Wipfli’s director of organizational performance suggests they could benefit from a coach too.
“If I’m interacting with an exiting CEO, one of the first questions I may ask with a big smile on my face is, ‘What do your tomorrows look like?’” she says. “And if an individual doesn’t have a clear idea of what their tomorrows look like, because they’ve been so committed to the organization and time intensive in that leadership role, I may suggest they connect with a personal coach, and that personal coach can help them define their tomorrows.”
That’s a reward for the outgoing leader, but it also keeps the exiting CEO from being overly intrusive with new leadership. “Part of that personal coaching process is to help individuals who have maintained an active and strong role in day-to-day operations and overall success of the organization, learn how to let go and how to pass the baton,” she says.
Julia A. Johnson, director of organizational performance at the nonprofit consultancy Wipfli, says new leaders should enter the listening period with both openness and a sense of what kind of leadership the new organization needs.
“When the CEO comes into those listening sessions, I think their job is twofold,” she says. “To come in with a very open agenda and simply sink into what is being shared. The second part is to reveal their leadership style and how it aligns with the needs of the organization.”
In conversations with board members and staff, Witchey is looking for more than just complaints or praise for past practices. She’s looking for opportunities to make changes. “I want to understand the value that [stakeholders] have seen in their relationship with ABHW,” she says. “If there are any ideas about other ways we can work together that we haven’t in the past, and also if there are any suggestions for how those relationships can work better, I want to understand that as well too.”
If the new leader’s presence or actions are overly disruptive, they’ll know fairly quickly, Chow says. “One red flag is staff not having a common understanding of what your overall vision might be, how you support the mission of the organization,” she says. “If you see signs the team is flailing and not sure of their direction, that’s a problem. And also, of course, if people start to leave.”
Getting ahead of those kinds of crises means an executive shouldn’t wait for the next big board meeting to bring them up. Indeed, during the transition period, Chow recommends recording brief weekly video updates to share progress and concerns.
“I much prefer someone giving me a weekly small update than having to digest a 50- or 100-page packet,” she says. “A weekly three-to-five-minute video helps you stay in touch and manage the learning curve.” She also recommends that boards discuss providing for leadership coaching with new leaders if necessary and building that into their employment contract.
Those actions help keep lines of communication open, and in turn help new executives better prepare to lead their organizations. “No matter how much you put down on paper, how many policies and procedures and transition documents you have, it’s just really hard to capture all that on paper or in a couple of exit interviews,” Witchey says.
Culturally, we admire change agents: People who disrupt the status quo, break things, reimagine what the future looks like. In associations, leaders are often encouraged to be the sworn enemy of phrases like “but we’ve always done it that way.” Transformation doesn’t happen by staying in well-worn ruts.
One thing that is less discussed while we’re handing flowers to those change agents, though: They can’t make change on their own. They need allies, staffers, stakeholders, board members, and others to understand what the change is going to be, and get buy-in for it. That process was on my mind when I was writing “Change Done Right,” one of the articles in the latest batch of Associations Now Deep Dives. In it, I speak with Debbie Witchey, the new CEO of the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness. Change is on her agenda, but she’s also been figuring out how to bring the relevant people along for it.
To do that, she has the assistance of the previous CEO during a transition period, and she’s done a listening tour with board members and staff. But she’s also taken care to let people know that the listening tour eventually ends and that she’s fully settled into the role of staff leader. “We told them that starting, November 1, I’m their point of contact,” she says. “The outgoing CEO is there to advise me for the month of November, not to advise them.”
Moreover, Witchey has been clear that she won’t rush into big changes, but may make relevant ones. To that end, it’s important not just for the listening tour to surface sources of frustration for the organization, but also to establish a tone from the top about how communication is handled.
The benefit of the listening tour is to go in wide open. Nothing is sacred, nothing is protected.
Julia A. Johnson, Wipfli
“When we are in a leadership role, we tend to create patterns of behavior in terms of how we interact with one another,” says Julia A. Johnson, director of organizational performance at the nonprofit consultancy Wipfli. “There can often be topics that may be cloaked or protected. So the benefit of the tour is to go in wide open. Nothing is sacred, nothing is protected. The CEO should come into those conversations with candidness and tact, asking clarifying questions. What I suspect may happen is that an incoming CEO may discover themes within the organization to address. The communication strategy may not have cascaded down. How decisions are made haven’t cascaded down.”
Those listening-tour meetings are also good opportunities to float trial balloons about how people might respond to changes. “While you’re doing that listening, also set that stage for pieces of your vision,” says Candance Chow, managing director and cofounder of NextGroup, LLC, a support firm for nonprofit leaders. “You can always say, ‘Here are my early thoughts. Here’s what I’m seeing.’ Within four months, you should have some viewpoint on where the organization should go. Much longer than that, you’re going to start losing people.”
And that’s the tricky part about the listening tour: People want to be heard, but ultimately they also want to be led. Hearing out where people are struggling is an excellent first step. But it needs to be done with a plan to be the person who handles the solutions.
ONE OF YOUR CORE responsibilities as a board member is engaging in and promoting healthy board dialogue. Without the right kind of discussion and debate, neither the board nor the organization is likely to fully deliver against mission.
Your challenge is to build within your board what BoardSource founding president and governance consultant Nancy Axelrod terms “a culture of inquiry” in which leadership conversations feed true fulfillment of the organization’s mission.
A culture of inquiry involves gaining comfort with tension and vigorous debate. That means diverse views, experiences, and perspectives are sought out to fully inform the conversation. This must happen in an atmosphere of respect and appreciation that recognizes that the process is going to go more slowly than it would otherwise; that progress typically arrives at the intersection of diverse viewpoints; and that nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore, collective wisdom is more powerful than any lone voice.
Another reason that vigorous conversation is necessary is to avoid what Yale social psychologist Irving Janis called “groupthink.” This is a tendency for established groups, like boards, to place a higher priority on unanimous agreement than on pursuing alternative courses of action. This is a natural response, because as humans, we like to get along. The risk of groupthink, however, is that you may miss key issues that are in your organization’s best interest.
Janis’ work is the basis for these board-specific tips to avoid groupthink:
The board chair should create an environment in which each member has the role of “critical evaluator.” This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
Board leaders should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
The organization should set up several independent groups working on the same problem.
All effective alternatives should be examined.
Each member should discuss the board’s idea with trusted people outside the board.
The board should invite outside experts into meetings. Board members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
At each meeting, at least one board member should be assigned the role of devil’s advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.
Engaging in constructive conversation may sound simple. And, intellectually, it is. The challenge comes in actually doing it. The best way forward: practice, practice, practice. Your board and organization will be better for it.
HIRING AND EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE of a chief staff executive is a key role of the board of directors. The board should establish an executive assessment policy that includes how and when the assessment will be done, who will be involved, and whether and to what degree salary increases or bonuses will be tied to the results.
Associations assign the task of assessing the executive’s performance in different ways. In some cases, the whole board is involved; in others, only the executive committee; and still others use a hybrid model. In the interest of transparency and inclusiveness, the full board should be involved in some way, even if it just receives a report from the executive review committee.
Elected leaders often find it difficult to assess their CEO’s performance. In part, that’s because the executive is both a leader and an employee, which makes the relationship awkward. Board members may feel they know less about the association and how it is run than the executive, so they may find it difficult to give feedback about either programmatic or strategic issues.
ASAE’s CEO Assessment tool enables the board to meet its annual responsibility to evaluate the chief executive’s performance over the past year and mutually agree on priorities for the future.
Following a few best practices can help. The executive assessment process generally includes the following components:
Establishing measures. It is important to start by specifying executive performance expectations at the time of hiring and outlining them in the CEO’s contract. The board should work with the executive within the first six months to establish agreed-upon, measurable objectives for the coming year, along with the performance metrics to be used to measure success. Ideally, the executive evaluation metrics will be similar to the management metrics that are linked to objectives in the strategic plan.
Gathering data. Executive performance should not be judged by quantitative data alone, and the executive’s role is about more than the organization’s bottom line. He or she is also a leader whose style, demeanor, and emotional intelligence count. The assessment process should include elements that can provide the executive with feedback on how he or she can be more effective in interpersonal relationships and leadership roles with the board, staff, and members.
Compiling and presenting assessments. The purpose of the data collection and assessment process is to frame a candid conversation with the executive about performance and to agree on a new set of objectives for the corning year. While assessment data may be gathered from a larger group, the synthesis of the data and presentation of the assessment is best done by a smaller subset—often the board chair and the chair-elect—who should set up a private face-to-face conversation with the executive and allow ample time for a reflective dialogue.
Done well, executive performance assessments are hard work, but they pay off in improved performance for the executive and the association.
NASCAR and INDYCAR drivers often credit their success to what happens before the race begins. Planning, preparation, and a strong crew are what most often make the difference. Each member of the team, from the driver to those who work in the pit, remains focused on the vehicle to ensure it can perform at highest level while encountering a variety of challenges.
Time, talent, and teamwork are also critical when a board convenes. While the road of good governance is less dangerous and overtly competitive, readiness and pacing still come into play. Some board meetings are short sprints, while others can feel like numerous laps around a huge track.
You can’t contribute fully to your next board meeting unless you’re fully prepared. In keeping with the metaphor, think of getting ready for your meeting as heading off to the “RACES.”
Remember to do the following:
Review. Read all materials provided in advance, including the agenda, minutes, financial reports, and background materials prepared to help orient and inform board discussion.
Ask. Get more information on anything that is not clear or that you think others would benefit from knowing. Questions can be asked at any point, including before and after a board meeting.
Contribute. Identify ways you can add value to the meeting. Perhaps you can listen and summarize key points, or you may be able to offer a suggestion or different point of view. Make sure you’re ready to participate—even if it’s your first board meeting.
Engage. Before, during, and after board meetings, get to know others who serve on the board with you, and take time to consider various points of view. Touch base with staff members to expand your knowledge, understanding, and insights about important issues being considered or discussed. (While staff can be a valuable resource for you, remember that your role is not to direct their work. That’s the CEO’s responsibility.)
Summarize. This one happens after the meeting. Identify a few key messages and takeaway points that are appropriate to share with others. Other people in your organization, your coworkers, and even your family will wonder what you did at the board meeting. If you’re not certain what you are free to discuss outside the boardroom, check with the CEO or chief volunteer officer.
Champion stock car driver Dale Earnhardt is credited with saying that finishing a race is important, but not as important as racing well. I suspect he was referring to his professional pursuits—as far as I know, he never served on an association board. Either way, he was right
GET MORE INFORMATION ON ANYTHING THAT IS NOT CLEAR OR THAT YOU THINK OTHERS WOULD BENEFIT FROM KNOWING. QUESTIONS CAN BE ASKED AT ANY POINT
GOOD GOVERNANCE matters to association performance. But it can be hard to find a path through the anecdotes, the conventional wisdom, and the sometimes competing notions of what works and what doesn’t. Given the enormous variety in associations, you and your board colleagues should be asking the hard questions about what success means for your organization.
But benchmarking can be helpful. In a series of research initiatives, the ASAE Foundation has studied good association governance from several angles. The foundation’s 2013 book, What Makes High-Performing Boards: Effective Governance Practices in Member-Serving Organizations (which I co-wrote with my colleague at Indiana University, Ashley Bowers), benchmarked governance practices from a broad perspective encompassing member-serving organizations across many tax statuses and missions.
What can be learned from the association boards that received the highest performance rankings from their CEOs and executive directors? The factors you might expect—size, budget, staffing, geographic scope— were not the strongest drivers of organizational performance. Instead, four things set these boards apart:
Strategic focus. High-performing boards were twice as likely to invest substantial board meeting time to strategic considerations. Fully 99 percent of these boards were operating under an organizational strategic plan—and the plan was more likely to be one the board had worked jointly with staff to develop. The result is striking: The top-performing boards also had healthier membership and budget growth, and their CEOs were less likely to report intentions to leave the organization.
Commitment to assessment and skills development. These boards were twice as likely to set performance goals for themselves, almost twice as likely to invest in board development activities such as mentoring and training, and twice as likely to engage in formal or informal board self-assessment.
Effective recruitment processes. They were also more likely to recruit new board members broadly, by, for example, soliciting nominations from outside the board rather than depending on CEO nominations. They were more likely to screen prospective board members and to hold competitive elections rather than voting for a single slate. The result? Their CEOs were half as likely to report challenges finding board members who had the qualifications they needed and half as likely to report problems keeping the board members they wanted.
High participation levels. The CEOs at top-performing associations were half as likely to report board meetings that failed to make a quorum or to report that board members had left office before their terms were up. These may seem like minor issues, but they weaken leadership, complicate governance processes, slow down board decision making, and create a culture of weak accountability.
Whether or not you have these practices in place, asking your board colleagues and your CEO smart questions such as “Why do we have these practices? Why don’t we?” will help you understand the value they bring to your governance work and which practices should be prioritized.
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