The Nonprofit Board Therapist: A Guide to Unlocking Your Organizations True Potential

Dennis C. Miller

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In it, you'll learn: Paperback , 86 pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Sep 25, Charles Venti rated it it was amazing. Dennis C Miller has provided a practical roadmap to succession planning, new CEO recruitment and transition of leadership.

Overcoming common challenges

He offers many insights into excellent management. John Uzzi rated it it was ok Mar 07, The surveys provided our quantitative results.

To improve the governance of nonprofits, their boards must venture beyond the traditional focus on raising funds, selecting CEOs, and setting high-level policy. Our research indicates that the best boards also provide professional expertise, represent the interests of their nonprofits to community leaders, recruit new talent to the organization, and provide the more rigorous management and performance oversight that funders increasingly demand.

These boards get their hands dirty undertaking the tasks they do best while carefully avoiding micromanagement that would demoralize full-time staff members. Good boards, well aware that they lack the time and resources to tackle all of their responsibilities at once, manage to adapt—perhaps by devoting extra energy to a single task, such as a capital campaign, before moving on to the next challenge.

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Rising to this level of performance takes time. We found that many nonprofit boards struggle with basics such as recruiting the right members and running meetings effectively. The first task, then, is to nail down the fundamentals—a clear vision, appropriate board membership, and effective processes—because these elements enable directors to avoid wasting a great deal of time and energy. Getting the basics right makes it easier for a board to undertake the hard work of providing true performance and management oversight and to adjust the priorities of both the directors and the organization.

Our research and the work we have done with many nonprofit boards have highlighted certain recurring problems: Any one of these can hamstring a board by wasting its time, causing it to fall short of its responsibilities, or making some directors less and less engaged. Effectiveness starts with clarity of purpose. In our experience, many battles over strategy are really disagreements over what organizations are trying to achieve. Boards might then fail to make decisions or become bogged down in painfully repetitive debate.

A Guide to Recruiting Your Next CEO

The best way for a board to begin resolving such confusion is to retreat to a quiet place and discuss the problem. Away from day-to-day activities, an organization can hammer out its vision and uncover fundamental differences of opinion. Simple as this step should be, only 42 percent of the directors and executives we surveyed had participated in meetings or retreats devoted to clarifying the mission of their organizations and the strategies in place to achieve it.

When the board of the International Rescue Committee, for example, conducted such an exercise, it realized that to mitigate the damage caused by crises such as earthquakes and civil wars, support must be sustained beyond the first wave of aid. Conversely, many cultural institutions facing budget shortfalls have narrowed their focus in tough times by reducing the number of performances they give, focusing on cheaper exhibitions, or contracting their community outreach programs in hopes of maintaining essential activities.

Once the mission and the vision are both in hand, it is important to use them as a guide to action. The board of Scholarship America, for instance, routinely reviews individual decisions for consistency with its overall purpose: In this way, boards build a set of well-understood precedents that directors can draw on when making choices. Even a nonprofit organization with a clear mission and vision may find that certain directors no longer meet its needs: And the board as a whole can become complacent.

But removing board members can be tricky.

It might be difficult to find new people with the same level of passion, and the organization could be reluctant to lose the personal connections of established directors. Furthermore, managers often feel indebted to board members who over the years have given generously of their time, money, and contacts.

There are a few short-term solutions. An often overlooked one is for board members to upgrade their skills through training.

Design How You Want to Lead

Only 38 percent of the directors we surveyed, for example, served on the boards of organizations offering instruction in fund-raising—a crucial skill for nonprofit directors. Another possibility is simply to expand the board to bring in new blood while setting term limits for current directors. Over the longer haul, however, nonprofit organizations have no choice but to rethink the way they replace and recruit directors.

Regular evaluations can help by setting forth expectations, indicating when a change of behavior is needed, and even motivating underperforming directors to leave. Another form of organization—the two-tier board—can eliminate the need to dispense with the valuable experience, relationships, and resources of departing directors.

The board of Scholarship America, for example, created what it calls its Honor Roll Trustees, a special board to which exceptional retiring directors are elected by their peers. Much of the …. Trump Foundation Agrees To Dissolve. Save the Children Hacked Twice In I would recommend the following five ways to transform your nonprofit board: Engage the board as leaders and partners in your vision and goal-setting, encouraging them to ask questions and encourage their ideas. Every board member brings unique experiences and knowledge to the board. As executive director, your job is to develop and learn the art of developing their full potential.

Involve the entire board in your evaluation as executive director and respond in a positive tone to all constructive criticism. Make sure board meetings are well organized and are of appropriate time. Respect the time of your volunteers. Be constantly willing to examine and re-examine your organizational performance.

Identify your strengths, as well as needed areas of improvement and forcefully address them.

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