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!