Recently I have seen several organizations that are struggling with quality board member communication. Even when all the board members are passionate about the organization and have the common good at heart they are not experiencing the joys of being part of a high performing board team that leads the organization to great results.
One of the challenges is the lack of transparency between board members. In the interests of time efficiency board members aren’t spending the time needed to get to know each other well. On the surface the board members may trust each other, they believe that their colleagues are honest and well intentioned. However, their trust doesn’t go deep enough for them to risk sharing their thoughts, feelings, and gut reactions openly with each other. This too often leads to decisions that are only accepted at the head level. Board members leave the meeting not bought-in with their heart and therefore do not promote or enthusiastically support the board’s newly stated philosophy. The rest of the organization, in turn, does not get the message, and thus does not have the benefit of effective leadership. Even if the board’s decision was a quality one, there are no followers because the rest of the organization does not get the message. This lack of effective leadership significantly impedes results. Increased board member transparency leads to decisions that are accepted, more clearly communicated, and impact positive organizational results.
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Stephen Covey’s first habit of highly successful people, “begin with the end in mind”, also applies to organizations. The purpose of strategic planning is to articulate goals for the organization for the next one to five years. These goals define what the organization is expected to achieve by the specified dates.
“A key person on our board died several months ago and it is taking us a while to recover.” Three people have shared this challenge with me in the past week.
Changing organizational structure has come up in so many of my conversations in the last week that I thought I should touch on it for all of you who are in the midst of such changes. One of the biggest issues in mergers coming out of these conversations was, “Who should champion the change?”. There was common agreement that the owners or members of the organization need to be served by any change in structure.
An organization that is highly effective long-term has a smart and healthy board. This requires that appropriate people are sitting on the board. One bad apple can spoil the whole bushel. If you are serving your organization well, you won’t let one bad board member cripple your progress.
I recently heard David Barton, an expert on cooperatives from Kansas State University, speak on board term limits. Since I see the downside as well as some benefits of organizations having term limits for their board members, I was particularly interested in his comments. David Barton shared that recent research on governance practices among cooperatives in Kansas has shown a move away from term limits. Many organizations have found that the benefits of term limits are not worth the disadvantages.
Last year a board on which I was sitting discovered that our incorporation had expired.

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