Engaged and Ready, not Bored and Outmatched: Stewarding the Board

Why do people want to join independent school boards?

If we could make a complete list of reasons over cocktails one night, it would likely be a combination of reasons associated with our best selves – a desire to have a positive impact on a place about which we care deeply, sort of reasons, as well as other more selfish desires – for social currency and professional accolade, sort of reasons. Sometimes the reasons may be related to simple curiosity regarding how the school works behind the curtain.

The reality of board membership and desire to join a board, however, do not always fit neatly together. In my work for EXPLO Elevate, I have worked with many boards, and I have seen boards operate in remarkably varied contexts. Some are facing existential crises, while others are able to explore how best to allocate their ample resources to rise to even greater heights.

During a Board retreat I facilitated last year, a board member said this to me as she decided whether to take another miniature blueberry muffin and I rushed to finish my coffee before it reached room temperature: “Sometimes boardwork seems beyond our ability to make sound decisions – we don’t know enough, understand enough, work well enough together. And, at other times, most of the time, boardwork just seems a bit boring.”

Figuratively, I put this statement in my pocket to process later, but it seemed immediately that it contained some truth for many boards. Did she capture an inevitable truth of independent school boardwork? Not at all, but while I know it is not the truth for all boards, it is certainly the reality of many of them, and it is all too easy to slip into board practices that create the context where it can occur.

Neither extreme is healthy. Feeling (or being!) outmatched by the task is dangerous institutionally and threatens the board’s ability to serve as institutional fiduciaries and stewards. As for being boring, who wants to be bored, or even worse, who wants to be boring?

The problem this board member voiced names an issue related to building good habits of governance, a health plan of sorts, to build up the muscles between board-level crises management and routine board school report reading and school spectating.

To mitigate the challenge, boards must use the sparse resource of board time together extremely well. Here are some thoughts regarding how boards can create engagement (the answer to boredom), and prepare for whatever is next for the institution or education generally.

• Make enough time to plan board time in meetings. It is easy for school heads and board chairs to fall into a routine of planning that numbs the board to the school's important work. If your board meetings simply open with a welcome, committee reports, and a nod to how well the fall sports teams are doing, your plan is boring, and you're not preparing for the harder work that inevitably lies ahead.
• Create clear expectations and internal accountability for board members. This is, of course, easier said than done, and it requires that board leaders prioritize the first bullet–if nothing happens in board meetings that is valuable or engaging, it is impossible to maintain expectations and accountability.
• Prioritize board members' learning on key topics in education generally and in independent schools specifically. Make time to engage with challenging topics before the board has to react to them. Board chairs and heads must consider what our board needs to learn to maintain its role as institutional stewards. When done well, this work not only staves off the feeling of being outmatched by crises that may arise but also, when planned well, creates deep engagement among board members. Critically, such conversations enable board members to become learners, not simply trustees. Being a trustee means being something, while being a learner means doing something.
• For goodness sake, move away from providing the CliffsNotes on committee reports that the board should have read in preparation for the meeting. A consent agenda allows the board to use its time to think deeply, advance understanding, maintain strategic focus, and look ahead. Meetings that are simply reporting infantilize the board, making it far more difficult for them to “game up” when challenges arise.
• Prioritize creating alignment, not agreement on every topic. With enough time and focus, board members can learn to disagree with each other while maintaining overall institutional alignment. This is a critical muscle to build, as it enables a board to navigate complexity even when the stakes are high.
• Always center students and the school's mission and purpose in order to ground board engagement. Institutional drift is a threat to all schools, no matter their overall resource profile. To focus the board's attention, use student experience and the school’s transcendent language to bring the board to its work. If board members roll their eyes a bit whenever you remind them of the student experience and the school’s mission, values, and purpose, you are repeating them almost enough.

The truth is, schools bring people onto their boards for myriad reasons. (To be honest, I think schools should do a better job of interrogating those reasons.) However, we have not always used the resource they offer as trustees to its full potential. Schools can (the good news) and must (the hard news) do better.

I have had the remarkable opportunity to work with outstanding, highly functional boards. The commonality I have noticed is that their board members say, “This has been one of, if not the, most valuable and engaging volunteer experiences of my life.” Recognizing that this sentiment sets a high bar, it is not too much to ask of the board that serves young people.