The two jobs of nonprofit boards
Governance is strange and sprawling work, but it only has two primary parts.
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”
—Audre Lorde, from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
Anyone who has served on or worked with a nonprofit governing board knows what a strange and sprawling job it can be. It’s not clear who you actually work for as a board member – the community, the corporation, the mission, the artists, the audience, the staff, each other. And it’s confusing to be both a cheerleader for an enterprise (raising money, enthusiasm, influence, and the like) while also being a referee (ensuring compliance, watching for and guarding against bad behavior).
But at their core, nonprofit boards have two essential jobs:
Defining and describing success for the enterprise, and
Fostering the conditions within which that success can be achieved.
To be fair, both of those jobs contain multitudes.
Defining and describing success requires more than a mission statement that names how the world is made better by our work in it. It also requires clarity about for whom the world is better, and specifically how. Board authority John Carver (2006) named the elusiveness of this “for whom” among nonprofit boards:
The board acts, in a moral sense and sometimes a legal one, as the agent of a largely unseen and often undecided principal, an entity that may express itself in curious and spotty ways, if at all.
Even when you find clarity about success, fostering the conditions within which that success can be achieved demands on-going attention and effort at multiple levels – fiduciary, strategic, and generative (Chait, Ryan, and Taylor 2005). You oversee and ensure legal compliance and fiscal accountability (fiduciary); align and monitor people, resources, attention, and action (strategic); and interrogate a dynamic world and your changing place within it (generative).
All of this requires collective emotional and operational intelligence, which means one of the primary conditions to foster is a coherent, collaborative, clear-eyed, and adaptive board.
It is easy to get lost in the weeds or to drift up into the stratosphere. Which is why it’s helpful to acknowledge and anchor your two primary jobs: defining/describing success, and setting the conditions for that success to be possible and even probable.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).
Framework of the Week: Three Modes of Governance
The authors of Governance as Leadership propose three domains for strong leadership in any nonprofit: fiduciary, strategic, and generative.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Sources
Carver, John. 2006. Boards That Make a Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations. 3rd edition. Jossey-Bass.
Chait, Richard, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor. 2005. Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards. John Wiley & Sons.
Thanks Andrew. A good reminder of the primary responsibility of a Board. I appreciate this as well as the context supporting the statements. I want to share another perspective that was given to me 30 years ago…” a Board’s role is to appoint the CEO and disappoint the CEO.”