A couple of years ago during the first of four coaching sessions, the superintendent of a mid-size suburban school district identified board “micromanaging” as one of his 10 most worrisome challenges as the district’s relatively new chief executive officer.
When we dug into the micromanagement issue during our second session a couple of weeks later, the culprit was obvious — a poorly designed board standing committee structure that actually invited board members to get into the administrative weeds. This was not the new superintendent’s fault. He had inherited the committees his seven-member board had adopted 18 months before his arrival.
Three Functions
A classic rule of organizational design is that structure should align with broad functions. It is now widely recognized in the rapidly evolving field of public/nonprofit governance that the decisions and judgments making up a board’s governing work flow along three primary functional streams: (1) strategic and operational planning; (2) performance monitoring; and (3) external/stakeholder relations.
These are the opening paragraphs of my “Board-Savvy Superintendent” column in the August edition of School Administrator magazine. Click on this link to read the entire column: http://www.pageturnpro.com/AASA/85944-August-2018/default.html#page/12.
