Five Mistakes New Board Chairs Make and How to Avoid Them
Author: Garth Nowland-Foreman
It’s easy to make mistakes or slip into bad habits when you are new on a job, especially when there doesn’t seem to be anyone around to show you the ropes. Sadly, we often leave new chairs in exactly this position — without any good support or guidance. This leaves many new chairs with little else they can do, but merely mimic the behaviour of chairs they have experienced. whether it be the good, the bad or the ugly. Add to this the unfortunate dynamic that appointment (or election) to the position of board chair is seen as much an honour as a job; it’s a promotion and if you have to ask others for help, maybe that casts doubt over whether you deserved it.
Some of the five biggest mistakes we see new chairs fall into include:
Being overwhelmed, at its worst even paralysed, by all the responsibilities they feel they now have, as if the fate of the organisation was sitting on their shoulders alone.
Often as a result of this, falling into a far too authoritarian style of leadership — needing to be the expert and final arbiter of all topics and decisions.
Or, in reaction against this trap, being intimidated and retreating into far too laissez-faire, offering no help in setting a consistent direction but instead letting everyone run in their own directions.
Falling back into excessive formality in meeting procedures, either out of ignorance or because you believe it’s what you are supposed to do.
Failing to help the board focus on its own effectiveness — succession planning and recruitment, orienting and on-boarding, self-review and reflection, professional development and investing in the board.
What can we do about these common traps? How can we avoid them? Here are five suggestions we have found helpful. You’ll soon notice they are not five discreet actions, but overlap in a complex web of mutually reinforcing approaches.
LEAD offers as a community service a free on-line lunch-time Chairs’ Forum every second month. The next Chairs’ Forum is at 11:30am on Wednesday 4 May. Click here for more and to register.
Focus on your main job and learn to delegate.
The clue is in the title. Your main job is to chair the board meetings, and almost everything else can be delegated. You do not need to be the main media or public spokesperson. You do not need to be the subject expert in all the fields the organisation covers. You do not need to be the go-to person on your constitution and non-profit legalities. You will almost always get better result when these jobs are shared around and more people are able to contribute. The chair is the conductor, not every musician in the orchestra. And the first violin is no less important than the conductor; they just have different tasks. The latest research all suggests that the most effective leadership is ‘distributed’ or ‘flat’.
This will free you to really focus on the process of decision-making — making sure the issues are fully canvassed, all voices are heard, and all are satisfied with the process followed. You can focus on discerning what would be the best process to tackle an tough decision, how to promote greater creativity and innovation when it is needed, and how to make sure we don’t overthink the obvious. You can experiment with using different participatory group decision-making tools, like go-rounds, idea-listing, multi-tasking, fish bowls and more. (If you are looking for just one book on this, check out Kaner et al, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass).
Incidentally, when we fail to spread the jobs out, we usually end up widening the gulf between ‘ordinary’ board members and the chair, making it harder to recruit all but the biggest egotists or the most self-sacrificing martyrs to the role of chair. Not only is distributed leadership more sustainable for the incumbent, but it also makes success planning more realistic.
Go for the Goldilock’s ‘sweet spot’ of a democratic leadership style
In the 1930’s a pioneer social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, identified three styles of leadership: Laissez-faire, authoritarian and democratic. Authoritarian leadership tells people what to do — sometimes with great charm. Under time pressures this can allow leaders to make quick decisions. This can also look like ‘strength’ if you don’t look too closely. However, it usually means the good ideas of anyone else can be easily overlooked. Authoritarian leadership can also inspire resentment and stress. In extremis, honest advice or dissenting perspectives is silenced. In Lewin’s study, the children under authoritarian leadership were productive but not very creative.
Laissez-faire leadership allows group members unfettered freedom, rarely participating or drawing together a consistent direction. This can, for a time, work well with a highly motivated and highly skilled group. At its best it can allow new and creative ideas to emerge. However, without any direction, members can easily sink into conflict or confusion. Decisions may take too long or even never be resolved. In Lewin’s study, the children under laissez-faire leadership were the least productive and the most argumentative.
The ‘sweet spot’ of democratic leadership aims to balance decision-making between the leader, the individual board members and the group as a whole. The most successful wield together diverse coalitions able to collaborate well together, aligned to an overall purpose or vision as a cohesive team. As a result it can bring out a group’s creativity. The focus is on bringing out the best from all in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, because of the structure that they leader offers. Jim Collins describes the most effective leaders as looking out the window to give credit to all their team when they encounter success, and looking in the mirror to ask of themselves how they could do better next time when they encounter failure. In Lewin’s study, the children under democratic leadership made the highest quality contributions.
Leadership style is not just about how a chair relates to other board members, but also about how a chair develops a genuine partnership (or not) with the organisation’s manager or CEO. The chair (on behalf of the full board) is not there just to bark orders at the manager; nor are they just to be their uncritical, unthinking ‘cheerleader’.
Be confident in developing your own meeting structure and processes
Insecurity can lead to us to retreat into excessive formality. But the truth is that (unless there is something weirdly specific in your constitution) we are not required to follow the conventional business meeting agenda. In fact, you may know that at LEAD we believe the conventional format is actually counter-productive for effective and especially forward-thinking and creative decision-making. Deliberately planning a smart agenda can make a meeting and its decision-making much more effective.
While we have our own suggested templates for Smart Agendas, you can design whatever format best suits your needs. Whatever you design, however, it is important to: not under-estimate the welcome as a transition to the meeting; use simple features to help consistently focus and guide preparation ahead of the meeting; prioritise the most time and our most creative time (at the beginning of a meeting) for the big issues, so you can keep future-focussed and strategic; and, don’t waste time on the routine or spend too much time just looking backwards in a checking up mode. [One particular tool that can help with this is using a Consent agenda.] You can even use the headings in your strategic plan to structure your meetings.
By the way, we also recommend you have an annual agenda for what is the focus for different meetings across the annual cycle. This helps ensure all the needed governance tasks get done (for example, if you are always behind in your annual board appraisal of the manager or CEO), spreads the tasks more evenly across the year, and perhaps most significantly helps the board as a group proactively take ownership and lead its own agenda – rather than just turn up, passively pondering “I wonder what do they want us to discuss tonight?”
Finally, it is also liberating to know we are not actually required to use motions, moved and seconded, or to know the rules of formal meeting procedures, points of order, motions of which notice has been given, and so on, unless we decide that is the way we want to go about making decisions. It is worth knowing that these formal rules of meeting procedure (sometimes called parliamentary procedure) were primarily developed to handle high levels of conflict or opposition, by taking the humanness out of the interactions. If that’s not the culture we want on our board we can make decisions in other ways, including for example by consensus. There are specific tools and methods for consensus decision-making. The important thing, whatever procedure we use, is that we are clear and agreed what decisions are made and we can record this.
Facilitate a cohesive team clearly focussed on its purpose
The chair’s role is be help the board do its best thinking and decision-making. This is the job of a ‘facilitator’, which literally means the one who makes it easier – easier to do the work of governance, by helping the board work together more effectively. This means helping the team to easily work together in a good process, and stay focussed on achieving its purpose.
Much of this is achieved by developing a positive board culture, one where board members:
feel comfortable and safe (supported by the physical environment, the relationships, and the behaviour that is encouraged and supported)
take turns and really listen to each other (not just use the time when others are speaking to plan what they will say next)
acknowledge each other’s contributions (people need 3-5 positive comments to every negative, constructive comment or suggestion for improvement)
freely speak up and express their views, without fear of ridicule, judgement or negative consequences
name and deal with difficult issues, differences or conflicts, with respect for all the people involved
use questions to open up issues and expand understandings, rather than as backhanded arguments or ways of belittling the person being questioned.
Some of these aspects are spelt out in more detail in the concept of “above the line” thinking. This can be a useful way of introducing these concepts and establishing a common language for desired behaviour. In practice, we can also explicitly identify the type of culture we want in our meetings and write them into ‘ground rules’, which can become part of the board’s charter or code of practice.
Help the board deliberately invest in its own governance
Boards chronically under-invest in their own composition, performance and effectiveness. Too often, recruitment doesn’t begin until we have an empty seat and an AGM coming up, and our criteria is little more than a warm body with a pulse. Too often, orientation and on-boarding is little more than a round of names and the directions to the toilet. Too often, serious self-review or reflection is passed over, after all we are “just volunteers”. Too often, suggestions of investing in training and professional development is passed over as impertinence. The big risk is that as a result we get the boards we deserve!
To break this cycle means we need to be deliberate about prioritising these tasks, expecting it as ‘business as usual’, planning for it, allocating time for it, budgeting for it – for each of these tasks.
Why should the chair have any special responsibility to help this happen? The chair is concerned with the overall operation of the team. While most of the board needs to be outwardly, organisationally and strategically focussed, the chair is needed to focus on the board’s internal operation to make it most effective in its governance work. Someone needs to look under the hood to keep the engine humming, and usually that is the chair.