Governing Effectively via a Framework for School Governance
Capacity of a board to perform its governance responsibilities. The first responsibility of a board is to develop its capacity to govern.
From the Boardroom: Questions Many Boards Never Think to Ask (Part I) About Development Orientation of new and prospective board members. Q#1: Does the Board orient its new members? A: First of all, most boards fail altogether in providing any sort of orientation. Even if an orientation is provided, the board typically leaves such a ‘chore’ to its staff. Guess what? Whoever provides the orientation has a vested interest in training the new member in a way that makes sense Read More …
A Three-Legged Stool In any leadership situation, including the leadership role assumed by a board of directors, a conceptual trio of responsibility, authority, and accountability share an inseparable relationship. Boards of directors must understand this relationship if they are to succeed. Like the legs of a three-legged stool, they must be kept in balance, or they will not stand. Ineffective boards pay little or no attention to this essential balance. A hands-on board, for example, that refuses to delegate authority Read More …
In his 1977 book Servant Leadership Robert Greenleaf tells of a journey, and a man named Leo… …who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some Read More …
Dealing with the Board’s Limitations Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. – Leo Tolstoy Recently I described some limitations that can get in the way of board effectiveness, and offered ideas about: Board voice – Unless we “speak” as a board and in writing, what we say as board members has little impact. We should use the power of our “board voice” by putting it in writing; The board – Respect “the board” Read More …
Operational or Strategic? Most agendas, as described in a recent post (see The Board Agenda, August 18, 2017) are filled with operational matters. Finding out “what the staff are up to” is surely interesting to board members, and it is tempting to excuse it as part of the organizational accountability/evaluation/monitoring function for which a board is responsible, but it is too often just a matter of “wandering around” in the data. The problem with this situation is that there is Read More …
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 Read More …
What’s Wrong With (Too Many) Boards? 8 Lessons for Improving Board Performance “A [board’s] got to know [its] limitations.” – Dirty Harry Ok, so Harry wasn’t a board member. He didn’t go in for collective action – he acted alone, one man standing against ‘system’. Maybe Harry never uttered these exact words, but if he were advising a board, he might have. If a board is to govern effectively, it must understand its own limitations and develop a strategy for Read More …