End Game Thinking

The task of a new board chair is to think about their legacy – and then to work backwards...

We’ve been doing a lot of board-chair-coaching recently. My personal opinion is that there’s been a lot of board leadership transitions going on nowadays – most groups have had a really tough year, and most board members have hung in there, but now it’s time for new blood.

We see that happening all over New York City, and maybe it’s even happening all over the country. But in any case, we’re watching a lot of younger board members step up, knowing that this is their time to take the reins.

So what’s the first item on their agenda? Not cleaning house, because a lot of the boards we’ve been counseling, while not decimated, are definitely down to a “last man standing” kind of composition.

To wit: Organizations have had to make hard, hard decisions this past year, and board members who were used to simply going along applauding a dynamic executive director, had to stand up and wrestle their way through some pretty difficult decisions. They used some muscles they hadn’t used before, and the dead wood has definitely left the house as a result. (Not to mention the strain on people’s personal and professional lives that’s contributed to board member exodus).

SO – our conversations with new chairs tend to focus more on “who can we get on” than “who can we get off.”

But I’m going to suggest another place to start.

And that’s in 2013.

Where do you want your board to be, in 2013?

Take a moment, to play out that vision. What kind of communities are represented?... What kind of discussions are taking place?...What kind of actions are happening before, during and after board meetings? …What kind of structures are in place to enhance board member motivation and accountability?

If you can picture your legacy, you can develop a route to get there.

The final moment is often a start.

Who’s Really Leading?

I’m on a board, and I staff a board, in two organizations that really need a powerful board-staff bond to surge forward in fundraising (and who doesn’t?). And of course Cause Effective counsels many a board with those needs.

But I want to talk from a personal perspective here, as a board member and as a staff partner to the board, about the struggle to get the right balance to move the fundraising portfolio aggressively forward.

Both of these positions, interestingly enough, leave me wishing the staff could be more active. As a board member, I keep asking staff to tell me what to do. If they give me a specific fundraising task, I can respond – or I can beg off if I don’t feel capable that particular week – but I’ve got something to add to my to-do list and I know exactly what it is. And I’ll get to it (eventually).

If staff is looking to me to lead (and they frequently are, since fundraising’s my profession) – I often let the “loudest whelp of pain” guide my action choices. It’s not quite as innocuous as a squeaky wheel – it’s more like waves of: Am I prepared for my meeting tomorrow?...Did I remember to call the landlord back?...What should I write my next blog about?...Does my kid need a math tutor?... that pass through my brain daily – and they’re all important, and all need tending. (BTW, on Father’s Day the New York Times had an article on how now fathers had the privilege of being as stressed as we working moms have been all along.)

But I digress in order to get into something real – that in board-staff partnerships, board members have a job (usually), family (often), and sometimes even other volunteer obligations, that compete for mental space. As a board member, I really appreciate it when a staff member leads me down the garden path of what I need to do, in fundraising as well as in other areas. And I’m a heck of a lot more likely to actually do it.

Now as a staff member, it might seem surprising that I’m yearning to put more staff time into steering the board-staff relationship. Why not do just that, in that case?

Well, for some of the same reasons – I’m wearing a million hats, and this month we need to prepare for the auditor…and the staff reviews are pending…and I promised a particular funder I’d get back to him by mid-June…and whoops! it’s almost late-June!

And so it goes, and so I don’t get to pull out of my board members all they have to give because they’re human too, just like me.

But the first step is to acknowledge, and to own, the fact that as the executive director, it does all rest with me.

Sure it’s a partnership – they can reach so much farther than I can go – but realistically, I’m the one living and breathing it 24-hours a day. So I’ve just reorganized my staff to better reflect that reality, giving me more development backup so that I can more proactively support the board, and others who’ve told me “Let me know how I can help.”

While we’re a nonprofit with a strong board-staff partnership, if the driver doesn’t drive – well we all know what happens to a car that isn’t steered well on a six-lane winding highway…

It goes off the cliff.

Let this not happen to you!

The Research Swamp

I was at a meeting yesterday with some board members who’d committed to getting started in fundraising. They wanted to hire Cause Effective to help them develop a fundraising plan and coach them through their first steps. And then the big “R” question came up – will you do research for us?

Well sure we’ll do research – but that’s so far down the line at this point, that the question itself is a red herring…an avoidance mechanism. It’s like in baseball when someone breaks out to steal second in order to hide the fact that someone’s about to try to steal home. (You can tell it’s far along in the Little League season). It takes your eyes off the prize.

The major problem in community-based fundraising is not lack of prospects, or lack of knowledge about a prospect’s financial resources – it’s making the wrong choices about how to spend one’s time (staff time, board time, volunteer/advocate time) given the potential wealth of assets just one or two steps away.

In other words, you know what you need to know to start cultivating someone – and you’ll figure out what the right-sized gift is to ask for – when you feel out their enthusiasm for your cause and the extent to which you can raise up their sense of “ownership” over a particular project.

It’s not about the cash – it’s about the love. And ya can’t look up love.

But you can build it – with the prospect’s willing cooperation.

So better to spend time developing a relationship, then finding out the 411 on every last one of their assets.

Now of course I’m oversimplifying here and we should use everything at our disposal to understand where a prospect’s coming from, so we can appropriately match what our agency has to offer with what best meets their “leap-over-tall-buildings-for” test…

But, really, sitting behind a computer and doing research is a cipher. It’s the hand-to-hand combat that matters.

She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain…

We were facilitating an anniversary planning meeting the other day for an organization that was trying to think about what its 25th anniversary meant to them.

One of their oldest board members wistfully recollected the early days when the board was intimately concerned with producing the organization’s programming. “We were really involved then – now it’s all money and budgets and planning. But back then, we met everyone who came in here…we had our fingers on the pulse.”

What do you do when you have a venerable and valued board member who’s attached to the old days? To the old ways of being a hands-on board member? Someone who’s historically important and a moral bellweather – and who still brings in resources even though they’re getting more and more disenchanted with the new meaning of being a board member?

How do you move them along, and keep them with you at the same time?

The answer is exactly what we were doing – having a group conversation about what matters most to the organization – to reassure them that board service is not just budgets and numbers crunching, but is in fact determining the future of the institution.

By involving them in thinking and in re-attaching to why they’re really here.

By the end of our meeting, this board member was fully engaged in the weighty question of who the organization’s changing constituency was, how the old and new were mixing together, and how the notion of “engagement” could be used as an institution-wide theme to open up conversations with the organization’s audiences, staff, donors, and even board.

Just as we were doing in this planning meeting.

Sometimes, to get a board member away from the day-to-day, or from the rose-colored glasses view of when day-to-day programming was the board’s primary concern, what’s really needed is to open up the conversation. To make it meaty, and to make it matter.

Not that there’s no numbers crunching at the board level – but that that alone is not enough.