To Be or Not to Be…High Performing

With the Greenlights Board Summit coming up in April it’s hard not to think about spring. After all, the event’s goal is to “grow” good board members and strengthen nonprofits. While I’m so glad that spring has sprung, I keep thinking about last fall.

Last October I attended the BoardSource Leadership Forum in Washington D.C. BoardSource, formerly the National Center for Nonprofit Boards, promotes excellence in board service. Many nonprofits may know the organization from The New Governance Series and other publications.

In that final week of October there was a convergence of happenings: Halloween, the pending presidential election, and the ever-downward-spiraling economy. With all the scary stuff happening in our world, I was really looking forward to submerging myself in a board governance conference, but whoa, wait a minute — the economy was on everyone’s lips, everywhere. Three hotel levels of nonprofit board and staff members were breathing it in and out of every conversation. Creepier than the proverbial elephant in the room, it was a shadow that followed you while you networked, sat in the seat next to you at roundtables, and filtered almost every session topic.

One session seemed to have the perfect title considering the current times, “Creating a Culture of High Performance (Without a Crisis).” The only crisis on everyone’s mind of course was the big “E” almost as if there were no other kinds of emergencies a nonprofit could encounter other than a bad economy.

We agreed, and experienced for ourselves, that in times of crises boards rally and get the job done. The session raised a question however. Why do so many nonprofit boards under-perform? Participants threw out a few individual thoughts:

• lack of preparation;
• having a personal agenda;
• lack of clarity and unrealistic expectations;
• being on the wrong board.

While we thought about possible solutions and how we could have a high-performing board at all times, presenter Cathy Trower, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, shared with us the definition a team: “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills, who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” (from The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance of Organization by John Katzenback and Douglas Smith, 2003).

With the image of a successful team in our minds, we came up list of ways for organizing our strong boards:

• staying connected and informed;
• being engaged in a high capacity way;
• remembering the mission and core values of the organization at every board meeting;
• having a board mission statement = defining what does our board does and what legacy we create.

Ultimately our group concluded that the solution for having a high performing board — with or without a crisis — is having a galvanized team steered by clear and riveting goals and keeping the needs of the organization above the needs of individual members. For many successful nonprofits, casting the right board member for the right reasons is the best solution of all and events like the Board Summit can be the first step in starting that unique and powerful relationship.

Let me know your thoughts. What do you think contributes to a culture of high performing boards? Maybe together we can grow powerful nonprofits.