The third course in this Specialization introduces you to the factors that influence how effective boards of directors will be in carrying out their roles and responsibilities and hence the impact they have in shaping the success of the organization they govern. While this course has been developed with North American culture in mind, we do appreciate that, in other parts of the world, the nature of the factors that influence the effectiveness of nonprofit boards of directors may vary. Nevertheless,it is our hope that much of the course content will still be of value to those in other parts of the world. To learn more about this course, please watch the overview video by copying and pasting the following link into your web browser: https://goo.gl/aAMIfl. Keywords: Nonprofit; Nonprofit Sector; Voluntary Sector; Nonprofit Organizations, Non-Governmental Organizations, Volunteer Organizations, Leadership, Management, Governance, Board, Board of Directors, Performance, Effectiveness Course 3 Overview: Week 1: This week's questions: What factors influence the effectiveness of board meetings? What are the formal procedures and structures within the board that impact its performance? What can a board do to intentionally improve the way it structures itself and runs its decision making meetings? Week 2: This week's questions: What do we mean by board composition and development and why is it important? Why is it difficult to change the composition of the board? How do you design the ideal mix of board members? How do you locate, recruit and develop board members? Week 3: This week's questions: What do we mean by the "culture" of the board and why is it important? How do boards develop and pass along culture? Can board cultures be intentionally changed? What is the role of leadership in shaping board culture? What do effective nonprofit leaders involved in governance do? How can leadership be managed for higher performance? Week 4: At this stage, you are asked to review the course content, submit a written assignment (known lightheartedly as a BEAR (Board Effectiveness Readiness Assessment), and take two multiple choice Readiness Assurance Tests (known similarly as RATs). One RAT will assess knowledge and reading comprehension and the other will test application of knowledge within a practical case. Week 5: We will encourage you to discuss the RATs in the discussion forums and take them again should you wish to change any of your answers based on the information exchanged.
Week 2 Guest Interview with Pat Bradshaw on Board Diversity
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En provenance du cours de The State University of New York
The Factors that Influence the Effectiveness of Boards and the Governance Process
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The State University of New York
28 notes
Cours 3 sur 4 dans Specialization Improving Leadership & Governance in Nonprofit Organizations
À partir de la leçon
The Composition and Development of the Board
Hello and welcome to Week 2 of the third course on Improving Leadership and Governance in Nonprofit Organizations! The focus this week is on one of the most difficult challenges to board performance--creating the ideal mix of board members and training them so that they can be as effective as possible. Some of the key questions we will explore this week are: What do we mean by board composition and development and why is it important? Why is it difficult to change the composition of the board? How do you design the ideal mix of board members? How do you locate and recruit the best new board members? What are the best ways to orient and develop board members? Is your board socially and functionally inclusive? These two influences form the basis of the video lecture, special guest interview, and content in Chapter 8 of the SUNY Open Textbook, Guidelines for Improving the Effectiveness of Boards of Directors of Nonprofit Organizations. We look forward to helping you learn about another factor that may influence the leadership and governance of nonprofit organizations this week!
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. Yvonne D. Harrison, PhDAssociate Professor and Director
Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN)
Prof. Vic Murray, PhDAdjunct Professor
School of Public Administration, University of Victoria
Hello. I'm Vic Murray,
and I'm here today with a dear friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Pat Bratcher.
Pat is currently the dean at the Sobey School of Business
at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
But prior to that, she was a professor in
the Schulich School of Business at York University,
where we were colleagues.
She has had a longtime interest in the world of diversity,
the issues of diversity in nonprofit organizations,
with particular emphasis on
diversity in the boards of directors of these kinds of organizations,
and it's on that subject we're going to talk to her today.
Pat, thank you for doing this,
I'm looking forward to our conversation.
As we both know, the problem of diversity or the issue of diversity in governance of
nonprofit organization is something critics of
nonprofits have been concerned about for quite some time,
but lack of it primarily.
Before we get into this in more depth,
maybe Pat you could help us by
explaining a little more about what the concept of diversity actually is.
Thanks Vic for inviting me to talk about diversity.
It's a construct, you're absolutely right,
that I'm very passionate about and one that I think the voluntary sector is
starting to embrace both in the general population and for boards.
The construct really focuses on the idea of difference.
We look at boards and do we have a balance
of composition of people that can bring different skills?
Do we have diversity in terms of professional backgrounds, accountants,
lawyers, service providers, clients?
The diversity issue then goes to educational background and includes
questions about people's background of social class.
It's now evolving, I think even more importantly to issues beyond
personality and those kind of factors to embrace; ethnicity, race,
sexual orientation, gender, physical ability,
other aspects of ways in which the community is diverse
and that we need to start to embrace and bring those perspectives into the boardroom,
to celebrate it and to enrich the discussions that we have.
Okay. Now let's go on to the question of why diversity is important?
Why is it that nonprofit board should be concerned about how diverse they are?
In a related way,
why should the society in which these organizations exist also
be concerned about the diversity on the boards of
directors in their nonprofit organizations?
Diversity on boards I think is becoming recognized as important for a number of reasons.
At the societal level,
we understand that boards are a form of what I'd like to call loyal opposition.
They're there to play that check and balance on the CEO,
and the activities of the organization,
and they provide a really valuable and important function.
What we want on those boards,
is that capacity to engage in loyal opposition,
to bring different perspectives to bear.
If everybody is similar,
if there's no diversity on that board,
it's really hard for society to feel confident.
That different stakeholders are being represented,
that the issues that are emerging and the trends that are engaging,
critical questions about the survival of the organization about its strategic direction,
are being embraced in a complex way.
In a way that really allows the relevant questions and voices to be heard at the table.
I think society is looking to boards to bring a more robust,
and a more diligent,
and a more accountable lands to questions of strategy,
and direction, and mission, and fiduciary responsibility.
That on the societal side is important.
When I bring that question that you asked about why is it important for the board itself,
is we know that boards are decision making groups.
They're actually dealing with group dynamics.
We now know from all years of research on groups and effective teams,
that effective teams have a little bit of conflict.
They have a little bit of disagreement.
They have the ability to bring multiple perspectives to bear,
and if everybody comes from a similar background,
if everybody has the same history and belief system,
we're not getting that creative tension in the boardroom.
We're not getting that engagement with
the relevant questions in a way that brings those perspectives to bear,
and we're not representing often the clients that the organization is trying to serve.
Again that celebration of diversity,
that coming together of multiple perspectives that we all bring because of
who we are and where we come from in this society is important.
And the research is definitely showing that more diverse boards are
associated through statistical analysis with more effective organizations.
I think the case for diversity is very compelling and very strong.
Now, here's another question,
how can a board itself assess whether it is adequately diverse or not?
It's interesting to think about if I were on a board,
and have been on a board,
how do we assess diversity?
I think there are a number of different approaches.
One approach that I've seen is the hospital actually that went out and surveyed
the patients that they were serving and as patients in that hospital.
They looked at the composition of the the patient base and found out that they had a
heavily Italian and a heavily Cantonese speaking community in their hospital.
Then they went back to their board and said, "You know what?
We don't have anybody from those communities. "
And started to do outreach
to organizations that were working with those communities and said,
"Please help us identify members of
those communities who we can put on a nominating slate,
for participation on our board."
Other boards are doing scans of their communities externally.
They're going to their funders and saying,
"What are your expectations?"
They're doing stakeholder analysis and stakeholders
are really the people that have an interest in your nonprofit.
They really want to see themselves reflected as important components.
Looking at the stakeholders,
looking at the constituencies that are being served allows a board to do an assessment.
The other strategy that I've seen used very effectively,
is to actually do a matrix.
For the board to sit down on
a particular the nominating or governance committee and do a skills matrix,
so down one side of the matrix would be here the competencies and skills.
We've got accounting, we've got legal,
we've got mission related skills and capacities.
Then across the top to take the elements of diversity that you're interested in,
so that could be gendered.
We have a balance of men and women.
Do we have diversity in terms of racialized communities and marginalized groups?
Do we have a balance of persons with different physical abilities et cetera?
When you fill out that matrix,
you can see where the gaps are.
Then nominating committees instead of relying on the traditional networks,
we know that often nonprofit boards will get a look around the table and go,
"Who do you know, who do you know?"
And usually, we know people that are looking more like us,
who have the similar background to us.
So, more explicitly going out to different groups,
going out to different communities,
going so far as to advertise in the newspaper for strategies,
looking for members to form parts of the board.
Sometimes they bring them on as advisory groups.
For example, I know nonprofits that are working
with abused women and sometimes those women don't feel comfortable on the board,
but they're very comfortable being on an advisory group.
Other times, I've seen boards bring people
in and mentor them through committees until they're ready to get onto the boards,
so that you don't just put people directly
onto the board if they're not comfortable in that environment.
Those are a number of ways that I've seen boards
try to address that question of diversity.
Have you've been doing research on diversity in boards,
nonprofit organizations for quite a few years now?
I was wondering what's your impression is with regard to trends.
Do you see diversity increasing in North America,
Canada and US or staying the same or not going down?
Vic, I think the trends are actually quite fascinating.
What intrigues me is how stable it is.
You and I actually did a study of Canadian nonprofit boards in 95,
and I recently repeated that study,
and looked at the demographics of Canadian nonprofit boards,
and it has not changed.
Well over 40% of the boards are made up of women,
many of the CEOs and executive directors are also women.
The latest study, we also included
racialized minorities and people of color and the boards are 87% white.
I don't see that dramatically shifting.
Although, I think with the growing focus on diversity,
I'm hoping that all these efforts that boards are
making will lead gradually to improvements.
It's a very similar picture in the United States.
I think 86% of the boards are made up of people who identify as white.
About 7% are African-American by background, 3.5% are Latino.
That seems again to be a pretty stable picture that's
not trending upward significantly or very quickly.
Optimistic that things will start to improve,
but the picture on gender is very positive.
You know what really excites me about that is the research that shows that
boards that have a high proportion of women are actually more effective boards,
and that's being proven now both in the nonprofit sector and in the corporate sector.
Encouraging trends, but pretty stable at this point
I think we both agree that many boards do seem to have
considerable difficulty in attaining the levels and
forms of diversity that they would wish.
I just wondered what your thoughts were on why that is?
Why is diversity among all of the issues of
governance that boards have to deal with simply such a problem?
Vic, I don't know why, it's so difficult.
I think it's a combination of factors.
I think one, boards are finding it challenging to find any board members.
We need so many thousands of people to sit on nonprofit boards across
Canada and United States that often
were grateful for anybody that will volunteer and step up.
Really putting attention to diversity,
calls on in an expanded effort.
It's a change, and we're often resistant to change.
We're comfortable with the way things are and we want people that are like us,
are passionate about the mission,
and so we tend to go to friends and colleagues that we're comfortable and familiar with.
On the other hand,
I do think that these issues start to bring in questions that are bigger.
You know that my research over many years has been on change and
power and I can't help but wonder whether some of these questions aren't embedded in,
questions of exclusion and racism and discrimination.
Issues that are very hard to start to talk about and bring up stereotyping,
they bring up tokenism,
they bring up issues of power dynamics that
often we don't want to bring into the Boardroom explicitly.
And so for me as a scholar it's easier to talk about how are some of
those dynamics that are embedded socially and
systemically starting to inform some of these questions,
and how can we get the training as Board members that will allow us
to open up those conversations to make Boards more welcoming?
I know we talk a lot about exclusion but the real dynamic becomes how do we include?
How do we bring in?
And start to make the Boardroom a
place where we can overcome some of those systemic barriers and
welcome difference into those conversations with
an understanding that some of those differences are going to be hard to manage.
They're going to create some disagreements,
some conflict and with that conflict comes
the opportunity for positive innovative change and inclusion.
Right. Well one final question Pat.
Drawing in all the work you've done on inclusion in Boards,
I'm wondering what can you
suggest to Boards as some practical steps they could take to try
to improve the level and kinds of forms of
diversity they have in their governance process?
Thank you for that question.
I really feel that there are some very concrete things that Boards
can do and again it comes back to this issue for me of inclusion.
The research I've done with Chris Fredette,
is really looking at understanding how
Board members who are on the cutting edge of diversity,
understand approaches, very concrete specific approaches,
to enhancing the diversity on their Boards.
And what we concluded after
talking to Board members is that there are two main approaches.
One is social inclusion,
and the others functional inclusion.
And let me break those two down.
Social Inclusion is really how do you bring people with
varying degrees of difference together in an environment which is filled with trust,
with respect, with collegiality,
with good decision making?
All of those things that we want from a high performing team.
And we have learned that Boards that are deeply committed to
diversity bring social inclusion in explicitly.
And they do it in a number of ways.
For example, they provide mentors to new Board members.
Sometimes if you have a young person who's joining the Board for the first time,
they really don't understand what their role and responsibilities are.
And the mentor can phone them up,
can debrief them after a Board meeting,
can prepare them for the meeting,
can help them understand the core issues
and some of the political dynamics that are going on.
So that would be one approach on the social side.
Another would be orientations.
Sometimes we hand people a binder and say,
"Hey welcome to our Board."
But if you really want to bring people in,
feedback we heard from members of
diverse communities that they really valued a half day training,
a chance to watch the Board in action before they joined,
a chance to meet with others from
designated groups who can help them understand what's going on in the Board,
really working to make sure we're not suffering from tokenism or stereotyping.
For example, we know that often if you're the only person from
a particular group there's a tendency to say to that person,
"Hey what do all women think of that issue?"
You can't, I couldn't speak for all women.
So that's obviously another issue.
We know that Boards can often go away and do team building.
They can do retreats.
As part of the self-assessment,
they can look at and get feedback from
all Board members on how do you feel about being on this Board?
And do you feel you're able to give voice to your opinions and be respected?
And I have just simple things.
In Canada a lot of us have summer cottages and we're really passionate about hockey.
Well you know I've talked to Board members who don't come from Canada.
They grew up in another country and emigrated here and they go,
"I can't stand hearing people talk about hockey all the time.
Can't you talk about cricket or soccer?
Why are you always talking about your summer cottage or golf?"
So really trying to be sensitive to some
of those social dynamics that are going on in the Boardroom.
Let me move then to functional inclusion.
And that really is much more strategic.
It's an orientation to inclusion that's very targeted
in terms of Board practices, policies and approaches.
Let me give you some examples of things that
I've learned about Boards that are really focusing on functional inclusion.
One strategy is actually creating
a diversity committee and tasking that Board committee with
the job of increasing the diversity in
the Boardroom and helping people get prepared for being on the Board.
Another is to build diversity into the strategic plan of the organization,
so that it becomes a part of what's assessed.
We know that what gets measured gets done.
So again if we have some goals and targets for enhancing diversity.
Another approach is I've seen good Boards build the business case,
so they can actually go to Donors and Funders and say,
this is why diversity is important in this organization.
This is how we're approaching it,
so that they can actually be compelling in the way they're addressing it
and bring new Board members in with a clear commitment to this issue.
Again, the more that it gets embedded
in the practices so that the Board members say we're
going to be accountable for this issue and we're going
to hold ourselves to those plans and objectives,
the more that is impacting the performance of the Board.
And in fact our research shows that
functional inclusion and those more tactical approaches on process and policy,
are having huge impacts.
But the story doesn't end there with social and functional inclusion.
And what Chris Fredette that I found,
is actually there's something that comes together in a kind of magical way when you bring
functional and social inclusion together and
we're calling that transformational inclusion.
Boards that are dedicated enough to these questions of diversity to
actually transform the way they're working through both social and functional inclusion,
are the Boards that are having the real benefits of diversity.
Boards that just simply put people in the Boardroom and don't do
anything to bring them into the members of diverse communities,
into the conversation, and into the way the Board works,
are actually having negative outcomes.
Their performance is actually hindered.
But if it's a commitment,
if it's a real emphasis on doing something to create the inclusion,
the magic, then something special can happen.
So it's worth the effort.
We've proven it statistically.
We know from talking to people that there's
a transformative potential in diversity and that everybody wins.
One final thing Pat,
at the end of each of our topics in this course we like to ask our students or
participants to engage in peer to
peer discussions among themselves on issues related to the topic.
So I was wondering as one parting short whether you could
suggest a few questions that our participants
might look at when they engage in their peer to
peer discussions on diversity and non-profit organization governance.
Homework I can give the participants around the world
are two or three questions that I would recommend that you look at and think about.
The first one would be,
what's driving diversity on your Board?
Is this something that comes from the heart that this is of value?
It's related to your mission,
is it being driven by Funders?
Are external stakeholders looking for you for accountability on
these elements of your Board composition and Board Dynamic?
So being really thoughtful looking out
externally and looking internally at what we care about and why are we doing this.
And then from there drawing out the business case.
What is the logic for embracing these issues?
Because I think unless you have a deep commitment to it and you
have a real understanding of why you're engaging in these issues,
it's harder to make that change and it's harder to invest
the energy because it's a commitment and you need to start to think about that.
And I would also then from there encourage looking at a skills matrix.
Where are the competencies that you're looking for
the actual concrete skills that you need in the Boardroom,
and where are the elements of diversity?
Do you have the gender,
the cultural, the sexual orientation, physical ability?
And do have the range in your Boardroom currently?
Where are the gaps?
And then how do you think you can move forward to address
those gaps in the recruitment process?
And finally recruiting people is only part of the story.
So you want to,
once you have people on the Board look at those practices for inclusion that I mentioned.
So I would really encourage you to look at what are our social inclusion practices?
How do we help people feel comfortable?
Are we looking at diet?
Are we looking at where we hold Board meetings?
Are we looking at all those different ways that you can build the team?
And then what are our functional inclusion practices?
Is it embedded in our practices,
in our policies, in our strategic plans?
Are we measuring and holding ourselves accountable to it?
And then finally are you bringing the functional and social
together for the transformational inclusion that's possible?
And have you created
a robust dynamic growing community that's committed to the ongoing benefits of diversity,
in such a way that you're doing governance better?
So those would be the few points that I would recommend looking at.
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