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The Secret to Successful Board Meetings?

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The Secret to Successful Board Meetings? Great Facilitation.

Think back to the last time someone invited you to sit on a nonprofit board. If you’re like most folks, the first thing that popped into your mind was something related to board meetings… how many board meetings do I have to attend, how long are they, will I be wasting my time…?

No one joins a board because they want to go to board meetings; folks join boards because they want to help make the organization’s mission a reality. But, here’s the catch:

Well-attended and well-facilitated board meetings are critical to the organization’s ability to achieve its goals.

So, now, think back to the last board meeting you attended. Did you leave the meeting feeling it achieved something valuable in pushing the organization towards its goals? Did you feel your time was well-spent? Did you walk out of the meeting with understanding and agreement on what actions were needed from your colleagues and you? Were you glad you attended and proud of your affiliation with the organization?

No? Not exactly? Do you relate to the cartoon above?

If so, there’s a good chance that your organization is making a few cardinal mistakes that sabotage the nearly 11 million meetings held in the US each day:

  1. Failing to design your meeting agenda for success – a task that begins at least a week before your meeting.
  2. Failing to properly prepare meeting participants by sharing your agenda and relevant information prior to the meeting.
  3. Failing to understand how groups make decisions. Not supporting the process required for the particular action/decision your group is considering.

The Right Way to Bring New CEO on Board

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Just hired a new CEO at your nonprofit? Now, the real Board work begins.

Spring is always a time of growth and re-birth in the natural world. It seems the same is true in our local nonprofit sector with many nonprofits transitioning from a retiring or exiting CEO to a new one, and many more preparing to hire the very first staff executive in their organization’s history.

 

Finding a new executive leader is always challenging for a nonprofit board. In fact, it may be the hardest task any nonprofit board must face. To start, the board faces the daunting task of managing the organization until a new leader can be found, which is then compounded by the additional stress and worrying of trying to find the “right” candidate. And the hard work doesn’t end there. The most critical period for a nonprofit’s success comes after the new CEO starts the job as the entire organization acclimates to its new leadership.

One third to one-half of new CEOs, whether they’re hired from outside or from within, fail within their first 18 months, according to some estimates. 

At Spokes, we’re constantly talking about how critical the role of a nonprofit board’s continuing support and guidance is in helping a new CEO be successful. The topic is really nothing new. What is new, however, is an article from Harvard Business Review, “After the Handshake“ by Dan Ciampa, which offers some fresh tips and insights.

  • Nonprofit boards must find and maintain an appropriate balance between being un-involed and over-involved. CEOs routinely report that they don’t get enough transition support from their directors. Boards cannot micromanage, but there is also a danger in being too remote.
  • Nonprofit boards must set clear expectations about how much communication they expect between board meetings or in which decisions or changes they want to play a larger role. Ciampa recommends that board members can start defining clear and appropriate expectations with the new CEO by asking the following questions:
  1. “What information do you need from the board to be able to do the best job you can?”
  2. “What behavior on the board’s part would best enable us to have a trusting relationship at board meetings, between them and in one-on-one conversations?”
  3. “From your experience during the search process and in your first meeting or two as CEO, what one thing about how the board operates would you change to make our relationship all it must be?”
  • Nonprofit boards must help a new CEO build his/her relationships with key organizational stakeholders – including each of the individual board members. Every new CEO will need some help navigating the new culture of your organization.
Ciampa explains that the CEO’s first 6 months or so is a time when nonprofit board members should expect to be meeting, talking and contributing more than they ordinarily do. Read his entire article here to learn more useful insights to help your board and new CEO successfully leap into a bright new future – together.

Four Steps To Prevent Stress

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Stress and burnout plague everyone in every sector. Nonprofit employees, however, seem to suffer especially. If we all spent five minutes jotting down the causes of our stress, we’d probably have fairly similar lists: emotionally draining work, constant urgency of needs, limited resources to do the work, low pay, not enough time in the day, etc. And, surprisingly, we’d all miss the only true cause of stress: rumination.

In his article, “Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn into Stress,” published in the Harvard Business Review on March 16, 2017, Nicholas Petrie explains that the “causes” we would put on our list are actually not stresses but, rather, pressures. We create stress when we choose to react to pressures with rumination – the act of rethinking past or future events while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts.

Different folks can face the exact same pressures but experience very different levels of stress because of their individual reactions. For those who are interested in reducing their stress-levels, this is great news! Your stress-level can be entirely within your control with practice and discipline. Petrie offers the following four steps to help you:

Wake up and be present. Most rumination occurs when we are daydreaming or not focused on our current actions. Try some physical tricks like sitting up, clapping your hands or moving your body to bring you into the present. Get busy and re-engage with tasks at hand.

Focus on taking useful action. Petrie suggests the following exercise: Draw a circle on a page, and write down all of the things you can control or influence inside it and all of things you cannot outside if it. Remind yourself that you can care about externalities — your work, your team, your family — without worrying about them.

Put things in perspective. Petrie suggest three strategies for gaining a healthy perspective of your situation. One is a questioning exercise in which you ask yourself:  “How much will this matter in three years’ time?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?” and “How would I survive it?”.

Let go. Petrie admits that this is the hardest step to take. It has three required components: accept the situation, learn from the experience, and take appropriate action to move through and out of your situation.

Read Petrie’s entire article here and start a stress-free Spring tomorrow!

https://hbr.org/2017/03/pressure-doesnt-have-to-turn-into-stress

Hardest Part of Board Member’s Job?: Orienting a New Executive Director

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Imagine starting a job where you have 5 or more bosses with whom you meet once a month. They are thrilled to have you on board – relieved, really – because they haven’t been intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization and they know that there is lots of work to be done. Staff is glad to have you on board, too, and is anxious for direction.  Where do you start?  How do you make sound strategic decisions when you’re still trying to figure out where the bathrooms are located and remember everyone’s name?
This scenario may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but, sadly, it replays in nonprofits of all sizes again and again, year after year.  The “costs” of replacing a key executive in any type of organization are costly because of the requisite learning curve. Flattening that learning curve is especially important for nonprofits – both because they are working with fewer resources than their for-profit counterparts and because the services they offer are critical to clients who rely on them.  Ironically, right at the moment that the board of directors sighs with relief after hiring a new executive director, that’s when the real work needs to begin.
In their article, “Boosting Nonprofit  Board Performance Where it Counts,” published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 16, 2014, Lisa Walsh, Libbie Landles-Cobb and Leah Karlins offer 5 specific strategies for nonprofit boards to employ to help a new executive director transition more successfully to your organization:
  1. Do your homework in order to hire well.
  2. Collectively set the new leadership agenda.
  3. Get clear on goals.
  4. Go slow on orientation to go fast on the job.
  5. Make performance management routine.
For more specifics about each of these recommendations, read the entire article here.

How Much Should You Pay Your Nonprofit Executive Director?

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Lately at Spokes, we’ve received a lot of questions about nonprofit executive compensation.  Many nonprofits are planning and budgeting to hire their first-ever executive directors in 2016.  Others, unfortunately, have suffered some turn-over in their executive positions.

So, how does a nonprofit that is hiring a new executive director – either for the first time or to replace a previous one – decide what to offer to attract and retain the best person for the job?   How does a nonprofit compete with increasing employment opportunities in all sectors of our economy?  How does a nonprofit balance its fundraising obligations with its desire to retain good employees?

The answer is complicated. And, there is no one solution for all organizations.  As with all nonprofit management issues, there is quite a bit of art mixed in with the science of budgeting and managing employees.

First, visit Spokes!  We have purchased the most recent Compensation and Benefits Survey for Southern & Central California Nonprofit Organizations.  Published by the Center for Nonprofit Management, the survey provides detailed compensation information from 509 participating nonprofits for every staff position, including executive director, bookkeeper, administrative assistant, program officer, volunteer coordinator, development manager, counselor, receptionist, gardener, case worker, activity director, thrift store clerk, network technician and many more.  We have only one reference copy available in our library, so you’ll need to visit us to view the survey. Members, however, may also call us to request scanned copies of portions of the report.

One of our favorite educational resources, Blue Avocado, recently published an article that offers some concrete steps boards can take to better inform their compensation discussions and decisions. Highlights include:

  1. Consider the value the individual brings to your organization.  Salaries are paid for the work to be done.  What would it cost to recruit and hire someone else to meet your goals for next year?  If your expectations are escalating, perhaps your salary budget needs to grow as well.
  2. Ask other nonprofits what they pay their executives. If there are not enough local comparisons, consider similar positions in same-size organizations in the for-profit or government sectors to establish a benchmark that’s in line with your community’s cost-of-living.  Remember, salaries within the same sector can vary widely throughout the country.
  3. Consider what benefits you are offering.  Retirement and health benefits can add thousands of dollars to the overall compensation package.  More and more employee candidates are more interested in benefits than salary, especially with escalating healthcare costs and concerns over the future of social security.  If you don’t offer benefits, the salary may need to be higher to allow the employee to purchase/invest independently.

For many of us, a new fiscal year and budget will be here before we know it.  Start planning now by scheduling time on your next board meeting agenda to discuss your process for evaluating the executive director, ensuring that other employees are being evaluated and defining a strategy or policy to guide your salary and budgeting discussions.  As always, please let Spokes know if we can assist you as you move through your process. We’re here to help!

Blue Avocado article link: http://www.blueavocado.org/content/how-much-pay-executive-director

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