It’s summer…time for the ½ day board retreat.
Or, in some cases, the all-day staff retreat.
And (least usually), the joint board-staff extended session.
We facilitate a bunch of these each year. As a result we’ve become reflective about how this partnership works best.
It’s tricky. On the one hand the board needs to bond – to gel as a group and not depend on staff to prop them up. Looking at each other in the room without staff present can open up the space for board members to ask questions they feel inhibited about voicing with staff present – but which may, in fact, be inhibiting not just their curiosity but also their whole-hearted participation in being an advocate for the organization (with all that means).
And staff, for their part, need a space to get into extended implementation mapping – i.e. developing a marketing strategy for a new initiative and drafting outcomes, brainstorming partners, assigning tasks. A space in which board member input is needed for selected segments, but not to dwell in the weeds that are necessary to get the job done with accountability.
Yet there’s also an extraordinary synergy when board and staff members come together to bring their varied perspectives to bear on an institutional challenge/opportunity.
We worked on a retreat last week in which they managed to combine all three.
The first half was board (with the ED in the room). The focus was general, on looking at the overall board responsibilities, what this board was doing well, what it’d put in progress over the past year, and what they knew was yet to come. And, of course, what that meant for the individual board members and for new board member recruitment.
Then the group had lunch – and kicked out the staff. There’s nothing like eating to bring a group together socially, but the meal conversation veered naturally from kids and vacations into more substantial questions that some of the newer board members had – which actually opened up space for some of the more long-serving folks to also voice their concerns. There was definitely a different tone in the room, with only the board members (and me as facilitator) there – not one of criticism, but one of “we” – as in “we” as a group need to make sure “we” are exercising our responsibility since “we” are entrusted with holding this gem of a mission in “our” hands.
Simultaneously, the senior staff was upstairs getting briefed on the earlier session’s results and talking about their own concerns.
The day ended with a board staff partnership – in committees. Each committee chair was paired with a staff member in that area, and an additional board member or two,
to create a map. On the table: what the committee’s general mandate was, what the coming year’s most urgent areas of focus were, and naming the next three action steps that the committee needed to undertake after walking out of this room. (We also asked them to brainstorm on who they might also need at the table, to the end of recruiting additional committee members to help get the job they’d just defined done.)
It was a nice mixture of all three forms of leadership – and a productive use of a lovely summer day...
But in any case, your development department is not your sales team. Your board is. The development department supplies the tools, but the board – and committee members, volunteers, other donors – are the ones doing the listening that allows the organization to close the sale.
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