Board Service – The Importance of Humor

In these stressful days for nonprofits, it may seem odd to have the words board service and humor in close proximity.  But I was reminded of the importance of levity in board bonding at a retreat I facilitated last weekend.

The group worked hard all day, then went out for an early meal together.  I could see there was a method to how the board chair indicated seating around the table.  And then I watched a long-standing board member unwind and work his wit on one of the newest board members.

As I saw the newer board member throw back his head and laugh, I realized I’d been worried about the ability of the board culture, in a time when the board was facing tough decisions about cutting programs, to absorb this new recruit.  I was concerned that he wouldn’t stick it out – that times were too tough, it wasn’t fun.

Fun – now there’s a novel concept for nonprofit board service….

Humor is a great way for people to bridge the gap between their personal and professional selves; between the matters at hand and their life-experiences perspective; and to simply swallow the bitter medicine that is part of board service nowadays.

"If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise, they’ll kill you."

- (variously attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and others)

We may not be able to change the grim environment we’re forced to spend board meetings responding to – but the quality of the company we keep can make all the difference in how grim the process is of meeting today’s board challenges.

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!

Boards run amok…or the stress, the stress, the stress

I got another one of those calls today –

“I don’t know what my board thinks it’s doing but they’re hurting each other’s feelings and they’re not making it any easier for me to get my job done.”

And after my initial reaction:

“What the heck is going on with these otherwise reasonable people?”

I started thinking about the stress level of Board members today.

Red ink abounds.

Groups are facing very difficult programmatic scenarios – way beyond cutting just travel and staff development costs.

Boards are making tough calls about invading endowments, spending rainy day funds, projecting deficit budgets and white knuckling it through.

And while the stress on nonprofit staff is not to be diminished, the stress on board members hasn’t been talked about much. 

And add to that board members’ own job-related stress.  Or, worse, lack-of-a-job stress.

What I sometimes see coming out of that pressure is a brusqueness, a rush to get the hard decisions made and live with the consequences – and a lack of process and relational behavior. 

Now I’m all for plain talk about the key issues in the room (does this program really return mission-value? what would happen if we cut out or deferred this entire budget line?), but running rampant over each other doesn’t help anybody.

It’s a tough Fall.  Let’s be good to each other.

So here’s my personal example.  I’m a board chair and last week as part of a regular chat with my executive director, after we went over the current grim financials, she complained that the staff was working at 150% yet there was no praise from the board, only picking at errors and omissions.  After a wave of defensiveness, including, I’ll admit, feeling guilty that as board chair I can’t personally solve the organization’s difficult financial straits – I channeled my better self.

I took a little time out of the board meeting later that day, to thank her, and the staff.  I noted that while we were all under a lot of strain, and continuing to hone our vision and programs under excruciatingly tough financial circumstances, we, the board, could go home, whereas this situation was, in fact, the staff’s “home” – where they lived everyday.

The whole tenor of the room lifted.  The sniping stopped, and a climate of gratefulness and graciousness took hold.

How can we bring more of that to the nonprofit universe?