The Board Agenda

Board Business or Staff Business: An Agenda that Works

– Because a board only acts when it officially meets, and board meetings only occur periodically, it is very important to pay attention to what the board actually does during meetings.

In 2008 I wrote an article for the American School Board Journal, describing how our board structured its meetings to focus the board’s work on the board’s business (that which only the board can do, and that which is only done during these limited opportunities for board time) rather than the thousand-and-one things that constitute the business of the staff. Some excerpts from that article follow. Although written for a school board, there are lessons for boards of all kinds:

Most school boards try to do too much with their meeting agendas, keeping a watchful eye on all sorts of district activities yet failing to accomplish the board’s most basic functions.  After we figured out the difference between board business and staff business we produced an agenda that works.

Coming to the end of another late night meeting, after detailed briefings on curriculum, facilities, financial accounts, a school report, and an update on highly capable programs, board members commiserated while triaging meeting materials (keep for reference, pass on to others, throw away.)  We had discussed a lot but accomplished little as a board.  Our meetings had a habit of piling one hurried agenda item on top of another, each discussion in turn curtailed by the urgency of getting to the next item.  Our agenda wasn’t working.

Board Meetings – What’s wrong?

We have to overcome six obstacles to meeting effectiveness:

• Limited time. Being a board is a part-time activity, so time for board members is a scarce commodity.  We typically spent only 3-8 hours per month in board meetings.  Over the course of a year, our 36-96 hours is far less than the 2,000+ hours per year for each staff member.  There simply isn’t a lot of time available for board business.
• Misplaced priorities. An agenda without priorities wastes time, because agenda items of immediate urgency can crowd out issues of more long-term importance.  Our meetings used to succumb to the Pareto Principle, whereby 20 percent of our desired results consumed fully 80 percent of available time, and vice versa.
• Unnecessary routines. Routines are normally a good thing; they can enable an organization to function without always reinventing the wheel. But our agendas were crowded with unnecessary routines such as generalized staff updates, management-oriented financial briefings, and ceremonial events merely because that’s the way we did things.  Critical board business took a back seat.
• The staff. Most agendas are prepared by staff.  Our staff-prepared agendas showcased staff work, rather than facilitated work that only board members could do and that could not be done when the board was not in session. Whoever prepares the agenda exercises control over board time
• The public. Stakeholders and other members of the public attending our board meetings always paid attention to plans, programs, resources, activities…in short, the work of staff.  Because they chose to attend there were there not as owners of the schools, with long-term ownership principle-based needs, but as customers, with short-term interest-based wants.  Customer interests, to which staff should be responsive, are not the same as owner interests, which boards must represent. This is always a difficult distinction for boards to make.
• Board members themselves. In a 1960’s comic strip, Pogo notoriously said that we have met the enemy and… “He is us!”  Board members sometimes are the enemy of their own meetings when they come to meetings unprepared, or obsess on one agenda item while paying no attention to others.  Personal agendas, inexperience with debate, board insistence on reviewing and approving (all kinds of) staff work…These board member proclivities can obstruct meeting effectiveness.

Board Business and Staff Business – the ends-means distinction

We need to distinguish “board business” from “staff business.”  Over time, our board learned that the difference between board business and staff business is primarily (if not entirely) a matter of ends and means.  As a board we should be in the business of discerning our community’s expectations about desired end results, and providing guidance for (but not doing) the work of our staff.  Staff should be in the means business, doing the work needed to achieve those board-directed end results, within the bounds of policy guidance.  Do the ends as identified by our board justify the means as chosen by our staff?  The answer is “yes,” as long as the means chosen by staff fall within acceptable boundaries of legality, ethics, and prudence.  Our policies can provide those boundaries, and if carefully crafted will still allow staff the freedom to choose from among any acceptable means.  Once we clearly understood the meaning of board and staff business, we started concentrating on the right things (end results) during meetings, while delegating most decisions about doing things right (staff means) to the superintendent.

“Still,” we asked, “isn’t the board responsible for everything our districts do or fail to do?  How can we ignore staff activities that generate so much community and stakeholder interest – school closings, boundary changes, new math curriculum, hiring and firing of personnel, and a host of other hot topics guaranteed to draw crowds to our meetings?”

As these questions indicate, understanding the ends-means distinction is necessary but it is not enough to gain control over our meetings.  Boards are responsible for everything in the district, and we do have authority over all staff activity.  Furthermore, we cannot ignore the expectations of our constituents.  Therefore we have to pay attention to means.  Our challenge is to figure out how to do this without letting concern for staff means dominate our time.  We needed a strategy for deciding which board tasks were most important for the board to do, which could and should be delegated, and how to retain control over delegated work by monitoring so that important results are achieved while staff work is also guided.

The annual agenda.

Many boards regularly set annual goals and objectives for their CEO, sometimes to the CEO’s chagrin. But few boards prepare an annual plan for their own work.  By setting and following an annual board agenda whose primary focus is desired organizational end results and whose secondary focus is means, we have been able to guide our work and control our meetings throughout the year.  We have thereby converted ourselves from followers, primarily reviewing and approving staff work, into proactive leaders, deliberately planning and doing our own board work and guiding that of our staff.  In our district, we use an annual agenda to limit the board’s scope (only scheduling activities that require board involvement) while expanding our strategic perspective (working on larger issues.)  Our annual agenda projects 12 months’ worth of meetings and limits our focus to four main areas of board business: (1) maintaining the board-community connection; (2) monitoring ends and means; (3) reviewing written policy/guidance; and (4) developing/informing our members and improving our board’s capacity to govern.

Traps to watch out for:

• Trap: Obeying customers who are not acting as owners.  The community’s members (our ‘owners’) are those to whom the board reports, and to whom we must listen.  Collectively they are the real boss of our board, which is there to represent them.  Therefore, we build into our annual plan multiple opportunities to listen to invited community members from whom we solicit their expectations, values, hopes and fears.
• Trap: Monitoring without declared criteria.  The board’s responsibility to account for end results requires that monitoring be scheduled.  As the saying goes, “An organization does well only those things the boss checks.” But we have to resist the urge to monitor without previously declared criteria, because we are too easily diverted by curiosity about what the staff is ‘up to’.
• Trap: Letting others dictate our use of time.  Even actions that are mandated by law might not rise to a level of importance that justifies use of dedicated meeting time.  When dealing with these, and staff initiated agenda items, we assign all but the most important to a consent agenda.  Prudent use of a consent agenda enables our board to minimize time spent on these items, so we can focus on big picture items that only a board should decide.
• Trap: Reversing roles with our CEO.  Boards that fail to gain control of their meeting agenda leave the big picture thinking and decision-making (the board’s job) undone.  Responsible and proactive superintendents (ours included) fill this void, but they tend to do it between board meetings, without board deliberation or community involvement.  Our board’s short-range preoccupation with administrative detail left to the superintendent the task of guiding the district over the long-term,0 a reversal of roles and a predictable consequence of our board’s failure to do its own job.

What the board can do

Once we have an agenda that schedules the right things, we have an obligation to do things right in our meetings to ensure their effectiveness.  In 2003 our board adopted a strategy that changed our approach to meetings, and our concept of board business:

• A board’s purpose is to stand in for our owners (the community). Therefore our primary responsibility is to connect with the community we represent.  Communicating with staff is important, but secondary.  In meetings, our board intentionally engages with community members to discern their values and expectations.
• The board speaks with one voice, in writing, through policy. We direct the CEO and the organization by speaking and directing through written policy.  In meetings, we take frequent votes to approve and revise our policy voice.  Between meetings, written policy speaks for us.
• The job of the board is to ensure the organization achieves community expectations while avoiding unacceptable conditions. In meetings, our board does this job by connecting with our community to ascertain its values and expectations, then making policy to put those values and expectations in writing, then monitoring to ensure district performance is in accord with policy.
• Monitoring includes staff reports, external inspections (such as an audit) or direct board inspection. Its purpose is to assess district achievement of desired end results and its compliance with policy.  In meetings, we monitor results against each criterion written in the relevant policy, and compare what is with what we’ve said should be.
• The board chair is responsible to see that the board follows its own policies. Prior to meetings, our chair and superintendent prepare individual meeting agendas that follow the annual board agenda already approved by the board at the beginning of the year.  In meetings, our chair ensures that the board follows its agenda.
• Board member conduct is guided by governance policies and boardsmanship protocols. In meetings, the chair is responsible for ensuring compliance with our adopted principles, but each board member is also responsible to point out whenever we stray.  At the end of each meeting, one member assesses (we rotate this function among all except the chair him/herself) how well the board as a whole has complied with policy/protocol.  At the end of the year (our annual retreat) we review these individual meeting evaluations and conduct a summative self-assessment of the board.
• Superintendent evaluation is a continuous process, and we work on it as part of every meeting agenda. When we monitor district performance for a given policy, we add one more piece among many that make up the annual superintendent evaluation.  In meetings, valuable board-superintendent performance discussions are extensive, they are conducted in open public sessions (fulfilling the transparency purpose for which open public meetings laws are written) and they last all year long.  This has produced a significant and positive change in our board-superintendent relationship, and has led to continuous progress toward student achievement goals.

Old and new.

A comparison of our board meetings as previously conducted with those conducted under this newer strategy reveals the following:

Old	New
Approve staff plans	Direct staff action through policy
Agenda prepared by staff	Agenda prepared primarily by the board
Connect primarily with staff	Connect with ‘owners’ (our community)
Receive updates	Monitor performance against policy criteria

Summary

Rather than just answering the question “What’s going on?” our meetings now consider “What is important?” and “How has district performance met our stated expectations?”  Under our previous format board meetings allocated time to staff-generated items that by law or tradition were always brought to the board for approval.  Meetings in this format were primarily conversations between board and staff.  Our meetings now give higher priority to conversations between board and community.  Meeting agendas previously dominated by staff reports about staff activity and board approval of staff business, now emphasize board monitoring of the organization’s performance  (hence our CEO’s) against criteria written into policy. We follow monitoring with a review and revision of those policies as needed to ensure the community’s values clearly direct staff action.  Agendas once primarily prepared by the staff, approved by the chair, and followed by the board now are directed by the board at the beginning of each year.  We delegate a lot of items from our previous meeting agendas (staff work) to the CEO, reserving for our agenda the work we have decided is board work.  Through this improved strategy we have responded to:

• Limited time, because we increased the amount of time available for actual board business;
• Misplaced priorities, because we reduced board time spent doing staff business;
• Unnecessary routines, because we replaced time-eating routines oriented on the work of the staff with routines that focus on the work of the board;
• Staff, because the attention of staff is now focused (in board meetings) on responding to board direction as written in policy;
• The public, because it is represented by a board that focuses on long-term community expectations rather than one that reacts to short-term customer interests; and
• Board members ourselves, because we use a disciplined strategy for doing the work of the board, the kind of work we are most capable of doing, rather than staff work.

Through this new approach we now spend meeting time doing board business, because  we produce an agenda that works.