Whose Idea?

The Duty of Loyalty – that’s an old one, engraved in law and “best practices” board manuals from fifty years back.

The way I’d always heard it explained to me, it requires that board members put the interests of the corporation – the nonprofit – above all others, including their own.

Or that of other boards they’re on.

Tricky, for folks on multiple boards, if the organizations’ spheres of activity intersect at all.

I saw this come down last week, when a board member who’d been a driving force in promoting an annual Chili-Tasting Festival posited the idea that the Festival should be spun off – and he should run it.

Well he was right, the Festival had become too big an idea for the nonprofit organization to house. When it was five home cooks facing off, that was one thing. Now it was 25 chefs from around the country and growing, and producing the Festival – though profitable – was draining the resources of the hunger advocacy organization, called EAT (Everyone Advocates Together).

So here’s the dilemma. The board member proposed to run the Festival as a separate organization, and use the proceeds – the surplus – as a donation to EAT. Sounds good, right?

But there’s a few complicating factors. For one, EAT was about to see its brand equity, the sweat it had put in, the loyalty of the event volunteers, the interest of the event’s sponsors…evaporate without a value given to that. Without having EAT’s name on it, all of this intellectual property and relationships were being transferred over to the Festival without a second glance. (Here’s where a loud buzzer should sound – WRONG!)

But it was the board member’s idea and it wouldn’t have happened – or grown the way it did – without him! was the thinking.

Well, sure, but the board member had worked on the Festival as part of EAT. So his labor…and thinking…and the contacts he’d made…were under the umbrella of EAT, and remained the “property” of EAT.

This concept is clear and wide-spread when it comes to employees – what you create as part of your job becomes the property of the organization you’re working for unless agreed otherwise – but it applies to board members as well.

Let alone that if EAT were to spin this off, and the new group hired someone to run it, would this board member have been the best person for the job if there was an open job search? Maybe yes, or maybe no…

SO… the duty of loyalty. The obligation to ensure that the interests of the nonprofit corporation come first. You can see how this gets kind of messy!


PS The answer was, to have EAT co-sponsor the Festival with the new entity – and the board member stepped off the EAT board to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest (one of the other guiding tenets of board service).

Making It Fun

Cause Effective hosted our “It’s A New Year” party last week. A few years ago my board members protested too loudly when we were setting the date for a December holiday get-together, and asked if we could push the annual gathering till January. I complied, and we’ve never looked back.

So here we all were at the lovely Pescatore Restaurant, on the Upper East Side. We invite staff, former staff, board, former board, spouses, and a few long-time organizational “friends” – about 25 were planning to come, when all was said and done. We create nametags, but really, it’s a gang of insiders, most of whom have known each other for years.

The food was delicious, the wine kept flowing, but I was struck, most of all, by the squeals of delight every time someone new walked into the room. The people at this party – board members, mostly – were really glad to see each other, and to see the staff. Spouses got to catch up with each other’s doings, people shared news about kids and jobs and the state of the world – it was a chance to let down our professional divisions and share our commonality as humans.

Three days later, I think we’re all still carrying the glow.

We spend every day doing good in the world, or trying, at least. The warmth in this room was testament to the fact that the human connection, the pleasure in each other’s company, is as important a factor in where we put our energy, in how we choose to do good, as any rationale based on political values about the world.

Congeniality, collegiality, cordiality – not just the “c” list in a thesaurus…

They’re the hidden gems, the glue that makes slogging through the hard times of nonprofit governance/management (and lord knows there’s been a lot of them these past few years!) worthwhile.

Will I Be Noticed?

Remembering back to my college days, I was thinking about one semester when I made the mistake of signing up for an art history class at 8 am. Dark room, big lecture hall, slides, early morning…you get the picture. I just couldn’t stay awake.

I’m sure I was not alone.

And I’m equally sure that no one noticed.

At the last possible moment I had a fit of conscience and dropped the class. Nowadays I might have kept going and learned the material from the Web.

But the question at hand is: who paid attention? Who knew I was there in body but (truly) not in mind?

I’ve come across a few boards lately with that anonymity issue – or perceived anonymity. One board is pretty large, and another is actually quite small – but I can sense in all of them a feeling, on board members’ parts, that nobody will really notice if they’re not coming up to the plate.

So they come to meetings late because they don’t feel essential to the first half (or any) of the meeting. They don’t respond to group emails because they’re just one of the names on the distribution list. They don’t read the materials and they don’t ask the questions, because they know you (or someone, at any rate), has it in hand.

Anything familiar about this?

We’ve all been in situations where we’re happy to have someone else carry the ball. It’s rational – who wouldn’t be?

So what makes people step up to the plate?

In a nutshell – the attention (and praise) of their peers.

Does that happen on autopilot?

No.

It needs to be built, brick-by-brick. In day-by-day groundwork that gets volunteers, especially, to know in their gut that they’re a critical link in the chain.

That if they don’t show up, with full presence, that they’re breaking that promise.

That they’re letting other people down.

And that by their actions – or lack thereof – your clients, your organization, your mission, will lose.

Strategizing…Stargazing

Serendipity.

Sometimes that’s all it takes – a misguided spell-correct – to put a different angle on the task at hand.

In the frenzy of post-holiday emails, I dashed off a note asking someone for help strategizing on an upcoming grant deadline.

Well I guess strategizing isn’t a proper English word, though I certainly use it a lot. So in the infinite wisdom of the spell-checking gods, it was changed, I was going too fast, and there it was.

Need some stargazing with you…

Who wouldn’t respond positively to that invitation?

But beyond the chuckle, it brought me to reflection.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our strategizing – we’re too busy plotting a route between the trees.

Maybe what’s really needed is stargazing – lifting up our sights to imagine what’s not right in front of our eyes.

Maybe that’s what’s meant by leadership, what was so paradigm-busting about Steve Jobs (never mind his parsimoniousness in denying employees matching gifts).

The best ideas don’t come from the trees…we all know that.

But do we need to go on a 10-day vision quest to absorb the stars?

I feel a New Year’s resolution coming on (so what if it’s two days late).

More stars.

The forest day-by-day, for sure, but a little more time for the sky.