The half-day Zoom governance workshop I presented a couple of weeks ago for 25-some superintendents of a diverse array of districts included a segment on board development. Early in my career I would have been a trifle worried that the topic might be ho-hum for some of the more seasoned superintendents, but I soon learned I needn’t have been concerned. Since much of the terrain we covered in the workshop turned out to be refreshingly new to the great majority of my participants, I think readers of this blog will be interested in the key points that came up during what turned out to be a pretty robust discussion.
I opened this 90-minute segment by asking three questions: 1. What exactly do we mean by “board development”? 2. Why should I, as my district’s superintendent, play the role of “Board Developer-in-Chief”? 3. How can I go about spearheading my board’s development? I’ll deal with the What and Why questions in this week’s post, and next week I’ll share important points from our How discussion.
Workshop participants were intrigued by my suggesting – by way of introducing our discussion of the What – that board development should be seen as a very special kind of organizational development. The fact is, a board is essentially an organization: a group of people engaged through formally established, permanent structure and processes in carrying out a common mission: to govern the mother district the board is part of. We fairly quickly moved on to create a list of the organizational elements we need to develop so the board is capable of doing an effective job of governing. For example, we identified and discussed such elements as the board’s detailed role and functions; building the board’s composition; the board’s committee structure; and the detailed processes for engaging board members in key functions like strategic and operational planning and annual budget development.
It was the Why question that got everyone in our virtual room really revved up. I kicked off this discussion by suggesting that every board and its superintendent face a stark choice: merely inherit the board of yesterday, or systematically develop the board’s organizational capacity to deal with today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. We used the remaining time discussing why the superintendent has no choice but to play the role of “Board Developer-in-Chief,” responsible for spearheading board development. The case I made, which so far as I could tell the majority of participants thought made the best of sense, went like this: 1. Satisfied board members make for more dependable superintendent partners. 2. Satisfaction comes from active engagement in making high-impact governing decisions. 3. A fully developed board is more capable of doing high-impact governing work that that makes a significant difference in district affairs. 4. Boards tend not to be self-developing organizations, principally because board members typically have neither the time nor the expertise to spearhead board development. 5. And the clincher: dissatisfied board members almost always take out their frustration on the superintendent, who consequently has every reason to play the Board Developer-in-Chief role with gusto.
Next up: key points from our discussion of the How question.
