The ideal board member attends meetings, is prepared to engage in critical thinking in the board room and understands the fiduciary AND strategic roles that board members are called on to play. Checking the fiduciary boxes is no longer enough to ensure your organization thrives and reaps the full benefit that can come from board members and staff leaders forming a dedicated team committed to a common purpose.
To develop as critical and strategic thinkers in the board room, board members need to be surrounded by a culture that encourages them to grow as a team. A different kind of new board member orientation can set the stage for higher levels of engagement and change your board’s culture.
All new board members should have already passed through several critical decision gates before being elected to your board. For example, you should be able to assume that new board members are passionate about the mission. Your nominating committee should have assessed whether the board member has prior business or board experience. If they don’t have these skills in place, then the nominating committee should have discussed how to support the new board member through one-to-one meetings with key staff, fiduciary board training, or other skill development.
However, while these are necessary, they are not sufficient to assure your board goes beyond functioning as a group and becomes a true team. Why is this so critical to your organization’s success? From a pure skills perspective, your board represents a reservoir of talent and experience that often goes untapped. As a leader, you need their relationships and insights into the larger community that surrounds your organization. They are a force multiplier in tapping into community perspectives, attitudes, opportunities, and threats. They carry your organization’s reputation on their shoulders. However, they have to be engaged as team members, not disengaged bystanders. What is needed is an orientation to a culture, not a checklist of documents or a one-way dump of information accompanied by a 4″ binder.
Creating a culture of engagement starts with recruitment and continues through orientation. The orientation is an opportunity to build the relationship between the board member and your organization. Teamwork develops when people have the chance to create relationships that will allow them to trust each other, hold each other to account, and risk the possibility of failure. Creating a board buddy system is a great way to start the process.
Board buddy schemes aren’t a new idea. However, many fail because the buddy or mentor isn’t prepared. Coach the ‘buddy’ before the orientation session re their role in creating the organization’s leadership culture. For example
- Encourage the buddy to prepare a story about how the board reached a significant decision
- Ask them to describe the information that they received and brought to the decision
- Ask them to be ready to explain the critical issues the board is engaged with
- Describe opportunities they have had to share their network, attend and invite others to events, lead a committee, etc.
Create a meeting agenda that offers time for dialogue and interaction with the buddy and the staff leadership. Give the new board member and ‘buddy’ time to get acquainted and ask the ‘buddy’ to share their board membership story. Be ready with open-ended questions that require self-disclosure of their ideas and opinions. Some possible questions are
- What interests you most about the organization?
- What would you like to learn more about?
- What challenges do they see for the community and the types of service providers your organization represents?
- What do they think would be lost if your organization did not exist in the community?
- What would you like to learn more about?
Remember, new member orientation is a process, not an event. Encourage the buddy and new board members to meet before and after meetings for a few months. Check-in with the new board member periodically to assess if their membership is meeting their expectations.
A stronger orientation that focuses on the social as much as, or more than, the fiduciary checkboxes can catapult your board into more effective leadership and engagement.