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 3 Lecture
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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
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Cours 3 sur 4 dans Specialization Improving Leadership & Governance in Nonprofit Organizations
À partir de la leçon
Board Culture and Leadership
Hello and welcome to Week 3 of the third course on Improving Leadership and Governance in Nonprofit Organizations! The goal of this week is to address important questions related to two influences that empirical research suggests are difficult to change in boards of nonprofit organizations—the informal culture and leadership of the board (Harrison and Murray, 2014). Some of the key questions we will explore this week are: What is “culture” and why is it important? What shapes board cultures and can you intentionally change them? What is leadership in the organizational and governance context? What do effective leaders involved in nonprofit governance do? Why are some leaders ineffective? How can leadership be managed for effectiveness? These two influences form the basis of the video lecture and content in Chapter 9 and 10 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 two more factors 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
[MUSIC]
Professor Yvonne Harrison welcoming you back to the third week in
the third course in our specialization on developing leadership and
improving governance in nonprofit organizations.
And as you know, the focus of course 3 has been on some of the factors
that influence the effectiveness of boards and the governance process.
And we've been drawing from our research
to illustrate what some of those factors are.
And this week, we're going to be looking at two more influences that our research
has suggested are really difficult to change in not-for-profit boards.
And that is the informal culture and the leadership of the board.
As in other weeks, we'll be drawing from our open textbook, Guidelines for
Improving the Effectiveness of Boards of Directors of Nonprofit Organizations.
I'll also be referring to other texts and citing those resources, and
again as in other weeks, the course page contains the resources and
learning activities to complete this week.
This lecture is divided into two parts.
The first part will address the culture of the board within the following questions.
What do we mean by culture, board culture, and why is it important?
How do boards develop and pass along culture?
What shapes board cultures?
And can board cultures be intentionally changed, and if so, how?
With regard to leadership, the following questions will be addressed.
What is leadership?
What is leadership in the context of governing?
What do effective nonprofit leaders involved in governance do?
Why are some less effective than others?
How can leadership be managed for higher performance?
And what is the cost of not developing leadership?
And we'll end with questions to inform
your peer-to-peer discussions about culture and leadership this week.
What is culture and why is it important?
Well culture is a set of shared, taken for granted attitudes and
assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs about how one should think,
feel, and act in a social setting.
Those within a culture are often unaware of its influence on them.
A culture of a board of directors referrers to the informal and
largely unconsciously held set of shared attitudes and
beliefs about how we do things around here.
A board culture can be strong or weak, and
it can be composed of a large number of elements or just a few.
If the informal culture is strong and encompasses a wide range of attitudes and
beliefs, it can impact almost all aspects of board behavior from
how it views the organization's mission, clients, and funders.
To how members behave toward one another and go about making joint decisions.
Now that we've defined culture, board culture, and
talked a little bit about why it's important, and
the fact that it's difficult to change,
I want to turn your attention to a chapter in the Cornforth and
Brown text, Nonprofit Governance.
Chapter 6 by Debra Baker Beck, called Learning to Be and Learning About.
And this is a chapter that examines culture,
but a specific theory, sociocultural learning theory,
as a framework for understanding how board members learn about and
how they act in governance.
And she uses a case study approach to do this.
And she has two purposes with this chapter.
One is to understand board learning within the context of a board meeting.
And two, to articulate the factors that contribute to an environment
where generative governance can take place.
And so this is the focus of her chapter.
She reviews the literature and provides some very important quotes, I think,
that help us better understand the concept of board culture.
One of them is a quote by William Brown and his colleagues that talks about
the concept of culture within the framework of authentic activity.
And it's really the only way that members really gain access,
to the point that enables them to act meaningfully and
purposefully in governance.
A quote by Richard Chait, talks about board culture as so
important that it matters more than structure.
And that an environment of trust and respect,
open inquiry, candor, and lively discussion.
An environment that respects diversity and different points of view,
and minimizes power difference and social status.
These are all qualities that matter more than structures,
like how large the board should be or the number of meetings it should have or
whether certain offices should have term limits.
Axelrod goes one step further and describes the norms that are important
to creating a culture that's conducive to productive and creative,
or what you're reading about in Governance as Leadership, generative governance.
And she highlights the need for mutual respect, trust, and inclusiveness.
The capacity to explore divergent views in a respectful manner.
The willingness to gather information and the presence of
feedback mechanisms that can help the board engage in continuous improvement.
And then the commitment to decisions, plans, and actions and accountability.
The question of how boards develop and
pass along culture was addressed in our chapter.
And some of the ways that boards do this is through
orientation, through organizational stories,
through mentoring and role modeling these behaviors.
Through first hand experiences with services or
work, with opportunities to get to know each other.
I've been at a conference all week at the Midwest Center for Nonproffit Leadership,
and we've spent a lot of time talking about culture.
David Renz gave a presentation the other day on strategies for
strengthening your board and growing a culture of effectiveness.
And he says that boards really need to talk about what drives or
shapes Their board's culture and
what culture is the board trying to cultivate?
What type of culture does it have?
And is it intentional in developing this culture or not?
So what shapes board cultures?
And in Debra Beck's chapter she talks about some
of the factors that shape learning in a culture
where generative governance can take place within the context of meetings.
And talks about a number of factors, and one of them being the importance of
questions, of board members asking questions and
that leading to greater clarity of roles and responsibilities.
But this question looks at other key influences.
What shapes board cultures?
And the first here is the influence of founders and
long-time serving board members.
And they're a key influence on the culture developed in the board and
how board work should be done.
And the next is influence of powerful external stakeholder groups with
expectations that the board hold certain values or engage in certain practices.
And we see this coming from clients, members,
funders, regulators, and so on.
And these expectations help to shape board cultures.
Another is the influence of core groups within the board.
And these could be referred to as cliques that form around shared
interests among a small group of board members.
It could also be that you have a very large board.
Again, I said I was at a conference and
I met a staff member in an organization who has a board of 120.
And of course, the core group has whittled this down
to the executive committee of about 40 of those members.
So a core group can grow this way or it could be a clique
that forms around shared interests among a small group
of board members who then unofficially pressure others
to conform to their views of the way of the world or
the way of the governance world.
And then finally, the influence of those in key leadership roles, so
the influence of the chief executive officer and the chair, the board chair.
They also help to shape board cultures that develop.
Can board cultures be intentionally changed and, if so, how?
Well, our research on the effects of online board performance
assessments suggests that yes, that culture can be changed.
And we see evidence of the changes that boards are making after
assessing performance and culture through our impact assessments.
But not all boards are changing, and
in fact we also ask a question about changes that the participants
wanted to see in their board that the board didn't make.
And one of them that comes up most frequently is in the area of board
culture and wanting to see more collegiality within the board,
the board working and acting more as a team.
So the answer to this question is maybe, and
that the first step in really changing a culture is to
recognize that it exists and identify its elements but
to have a tool or some kind of diagnostic to do that.
And the board check-up is one of those tools, and in fact,
it's one of the best practices that has been empirically
linked to improvements in board effectiveness.
So our research and
that of others suggests this might be a good place to start.
But I will say that we have had reports on people assessing performance and
taking on some of these issues,
that it might be more than some people bargained for.
And so we have also seen that at this time,
that some people voluntarily decide to leave the board.
And that this isn't what they signed up for.
And so they learn through this process what the role and
expectations are in governance.
And then they make a decision whether they want to continue to participate in that or
leave.
But it's important in surfacing board performance challenges and
elements of culture issues that challenge culture in particular,
that in surfacing those elements, that it be safe, and
that the process be anonymous.
And with the check-up, we've created that.
It's not even possible for Vick and I to know who completed surveys.
We don't collect IP addresses.
So any individual who takes the check-up, their responses are anonymous.
And we believe that this explains why we found,
when we've observed boards and gone in and
independently assessed boards, that the perceptions and
the issues that are reported through the check-up match up with our observations.
And so the people really are being truthful and honest in their perceptions.
It's also part of the design of the instrument as a behavioral diagnostic.
Which really requires a low level of judgment in identifying
whether these issues exist, is there a core group in
your board that seems to be making all the decisions, and
some of the other issues that you'll notice in the chapter on board culture.
I think I would like to point your attention to Board Source's report,
and it's on the course wiki, Leading with Intent,
their 2015 report on their National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices.
And a summary, one of the key findings of this
assessment is that high-performing boards really
do pay attention to culture and board dynamics.
And this is a quote from their report, The Real Secret to Board Success.
Leadership culture is difficult to measure.
A productive leadership culture requires having the right people on the board,
achieving clarity around roles and responsibilities, and educating and
engaging board members.
Strengthening the culture requires leading with intent,
thoughtful planning, determined dedication.
In collective commitment from executive board chairs and board members to this.
So as I mentioned,
there are tools available, like the board checkup, confidential self-assessment,
a free self-assessment that boards can use to do it.
But they can also use outside consultants and
they can work with professional consultants.
They can also work with universities.
We offer, at the University in Albany, and I know in other universities,
service learning experiences.
University of Oregon, University of Missouri Kansas City, where students can
be matched up with boards to provide an independent view on board effectiveness
and help boards really, the intentional board, their development efforts.
So there are many ways that tools and
practices to help boards become intentional and if so,
more likely to change the culture of their board.
Most literature on the leadership function of nonprofit organization
boards concentrates on the role of the board as a whole.
This emphasis is because legally speaking,
the board is a final authority for the organization,
even though it may delegate some of its authority to a chief executive officer.
Similarly, it recognizes that no one board member may legally
act as a representative of the entire board on a given matter,
unless been given the authority to do so by the board, and always have.
An example of a board chair who met with me to talk about
the fact that she hired the CEO and she did it in isolation.
After the board had done a self-assessment, she had come to me to
talk about concerns that she had acted outside of her authority.
So many boards really lack understanding
of the formal authority of the board and
the informal of individual leaders within it.
These are people like the board chair who have significant influence over how
the board works.
And so play key roles in identifying or
selecting a chief executive officer, but don't really have the authority to
make that the decision of who to hire and so on.
I reviewed the larger leadership literature several years ago and
found a very useful definition of leadership in
the context of governance boards and groups by Stogdill.
And his definition is that leadership in
an organizational context consists of more than one person.
And it is the process of influencing the activities
of an organized group in its efforts toward setting and achieving goals.
And for leadership to exist,
there must be a group with a common task or objective and at least one member
must have responsibilities that are different from the other members.
If all members have the same role, there is no leadership, according to Stogdill.
Some of the key organizational variables in leadership are responsibility.
What members are expected to do, work performance,
what members actually, do and the methods they use to do it.
Formal interaction, who members are accountable to, and
the people they need to cooperate and interact within the organization.
And informal interaction, and
this is where we can get into a culture the way things are done.
The people, they actually work with and
corporate with in the performance of their tasks.
And so leadership can be viewed from these perspectives.
What do effective leaders involving governance do?
Well, this question really gets at leadership competencies.
What are the competencies of highly effective leaders who
are involved in governance?
And so, I'll spend the next few slides talking about the competencies,
drawing from the empirical research to suggest what
effective nonprofit leaders involved in governance do.
First is effective chief executives.
And drawing here from the work of Herman and Heimovics, seminal work in the field,
and this is from the Bloch School in University of Missouri, Kansas City.
And they found that board center
chief executives tend to have effective boards and
that the competencies of these executives are that they
facilitate interaction in board relationships.
They show consideration and respect toward board members.
They envision change and innovation for the organization with the board.
They provide useful and helpful information for the board and
they promote board accomplishments and productivity.
Drawing from the research that Vic Murray and
I have conducted on board chairs, effective board chairs
assist the board in identifying and developing strategic goals.
They see the big picture and they lead the board in this process.
They create a safe climate where issues can be discussed and they look for
and acknowledge the contributions others make to the board and organization.
They also confront and resolve inadequate performance on the board and
they do so in its respectful way.
They're open to new ideas and information, they're fair and impartial.
And they provide, seem to know how to provide the right autonomy and
independence for the board and the CEO to perform their work.
And they make people feel like a valuable member of the team.
Some of the specific traits of effective board chairs
are these commitment to the organization and
not distracting it or the board from its goals.
They're devoted in terms of time, clear about their role.
They're capable of seeing the big picture, and
clarifying issues, and handling them in a collaborative way.
So in a way, going back to the slide on coining on these interactions,
we see board chairs playing an interventionist,
interplay, and influential roles.
But going one step further, what are the competencies of
effective board members or leadership volunteers?
And Bob Herman has done some work.
There's a publication called Emerging Areas of Volunteering by ARNOVA and
he's produced a chapter on board members as volunteers.
So I encourage you and will put a link up to that on the course wiki page.
But there's been some empirical research on effective leadership
volunteers by the National Learning Initiative out of Canada.
And some of the competencies they identify are that
effective leadership volunteers be motivated to serve.
That they be recruited for the right reasons and
empowered for the service of the mission and for others.
And that they help create and share in a vision and align strategically with it,
that they're informed, that they consider best practices and
contribute to this vision through their work.
Another is developing effective relationships, and
that they nurture a healthy organization in work environment,
that they're socially aware and maintain effective relationships.
And then create value, that they're open to innovation and creativity and change.
And that they're able to translate theories and plans into action,
and are responsible and accountable for it.
Why are some leaders less effective in their leadership roles than others?
And there's several reasons, explanations for this.
And one of them is that they may lack leadership experience
in the non-profit governance context.
They may be effective in their day jobs, but
lack experience of leading in governance, and at the board or group level.
They may really just lack some of these competencies for the leadership role.
Or they have the right competencies, but maybe they're
exerting too little or too much influence in the role.
And so it could be that they just lack information and
support in knowing how much influence to exert.
And they might not know that they are ineffective.
In our study of board chairs, our research reports perceptions
of chairs from the perspective of the key actors that interact with chairs.
But when we looked at the data from chairs themselves, perceptions we found,
it was difficult to determine who
was effective and who wasn't because all the chairs that
responded to our research perceived themselves as effective in the role.
We knew from the people they interacted with that wasn't necessarily true.
So it just could be that they lacked information and
feedback that's necessary to fully develop in the role.
So how can nonprofit leadership be managed for higher performance?
Well, as we alluded to in the last slide, one explanation for
less effective leadership is that leaders simply don't have the information.
They simply don't know that they're ineffective.
And so the recommendation here
is to implement a system of performance feedback for nonprofit leaders.
But to keep in mind that performance assessment in the context of
leadership at the governance level is complex.
I mean, it's complex at any level.
You have, as we've discussed, a diversity of leaders, leadership roles and
different types of interactions in governance that requires
leaders to do different things at different times for different situations.
And different leaders contribute effectiveness in different dimensions
of the organization, and no one leader or
actor contributes all that is required for effective nonprofit governance.
That you really have a collaborative governance situation with
people doing different things.
But going back to the definition by Stogdill, each has a different role and
doing different things to advance the organization and
the board towards its goals.
So performance assessment in this context would require some method,
criteria, for evaluating leadership effectiveness,
collecting that data, and analyzing it, and
generating some information that feeds back to leaders.
But also then, in terms of formative assessments, but
also then, could be aggregated to determine the impact of leadership and
recognize people for the value of their contributions.
All right, so what about criteria?
You've decided you're sold on this process of assessing performance.
You don't feel it's fair that your leaders haven't had that feedback.
You want to develop this.
You think it's going to return value.
What could you do?
What tools are available?
How can you think about this?
How can you talk about this?
How can you make decisions about it?
And even use it to understand leadership effectiveness challenges,
and tensions between people on how we really should lead this organization and
how leadership really should be around here.
So what you see is the competing values
approach to leadership effectiveness.
This is taken from Quinn, Fairman and others, their colleagues.
And it's from Becoming a Master Manager, and it's a competing values approach.
I'll put a link up on the wiki.
But essentially, you have different leadership competencies and
effectiveness criteria in different dimensions,
different schools of organizational thought.
And leaders play different roles.
And so you can observe these behaviors.
You can codify them.
You can assess them, and they have the tool to do that.
But one thing to point out is that oftentimes you'll
see tensions within these different perspectives.
You'll see, particularly in nonprofits, between the open systems,
internal processes.
You might see smaller grassroots organizations really tending
toward the open system model and towards leadership effectiveness,
this competency to be adaptive to the responsive to needs.
And on the opposite, the tension is around control and
hierarchy, and having to establish internal procedures and
processes structures, some more things to control the organization.
And some tension there and perhaps resistance.
And so on this competing values framework can be useful
in servicing and talking about some of the tensions.
Will if we implement these structures will it change
how responsive we are to our members or to
the public or to the people who we serve.
And so this really is a useful in a number of ways and
really getting reducing some of the tensions in around leadership and
that there really is no one best way to lead.
What this diagram shows are these different competencies in these different
schools of thought.
Again, drawing from Quinn and his colleagues of the master manager, and
really to show that there are a set of effective behaviors and
there a set of ineffective or less effective behaviors.
And they tend to be polar opposites and
this is consistent with our research on board chairs but it's also consistent
with leadership at the governance level study by LaBlanc and Gilly.
And really either not exerting enough or
exerting too much influence in the role in any one different situation.
And you can see examples of too much, and
you can see where there's just simply not enough.
And this is useful to know that it may be that we
certainly need this behavior, but the performance assessment
could be used to give the leader information to either step it up,
do more, or to information that they're doing too much.
And so maybe this approach to leadership assessment and development may be
useful in preventing us from swinging from one ineffective leader to another.
Maybe we could develop leaders and that they are on the right track but
they just need the information to get there.
So, how do you get there?
I also think the master manager by Quinn and his calling is very useful.
It contains all kinds of development strategies in each of these dimensions
that I have used and we have tested in boards and could be very useful.
And so some of them are in our guide book but many are in the master manager and
there's some here on this slide and I've adapted this from John Rohrbaugh,
a colleague I work with, and his work on groups.
And so you can see some of the best practices in each of these dimensions and
to build collaborative competency, orientations,
skill building, team building, conflict management.
Performance feedback, create competencies to help
the organization adapt and change to do stakeholder analyses,
to work on forming alliances and collaborations and how to do that.
Discussions, development around a creativity and
brain storming, idea generation, how to negotiate and
bargain, how to think and be more politically astute externally
and then finally on the bottom two, control developing information resources.
Looking at structures and records and
making sure you're compliant with the law but that you also have procedures
that are essentially your operations manual for the board,
that help the board reach leadership competency.
And help members fulfill their roles and do their duties of due diligence care.
Part of that is through performance assessment function functions,
so gathering that information.
And then finally, on the compete side, I think a lot of the work already is
It's been done, but around vision, mission, and strategy, planning.
And paying attention to the advice of Chait, Ryan, and
Taylor on not just creating a plan or rubber stamping a plan but
also in generating on asking questions and
working collaboratively with the CEO in the development of that.
So what is the cost of not developing leadership?
Well, I just came out of a small group session that I facilitated at
the governance conference at the Midwest Center for Non Profit Leadership and
many of the the things that are on this slide we talked about.
An informal group that has a board that runs things.
A passive or overly aggressive chair, or a CEO that dominates
the board, or withholds information from the board.
All of these and
many many others can negatively affect governance behavior in a number of ways.
One, boards lack the information to meet their due diligence
function and carry out due diligence assessments of performance.
Board meetings that are poorly facilitated or
poorly attended effect board discussion and decision making.
The board could end up in a leadership is governance situation where
the CEO is really managing and governing the organization and
the board really isn't governing at all.
And leadership and effectiveness can be very costly for the board and
organization that fails to address it.
There is no financial indicator and the cost of leadership or
govern and board and effectiveness in the non-profit sector.
But in the corporate sector there has been an estimate by Donaldson who said that
leadership and effectiveness at the governance level, so corporate
boards announced a $7 trillion loss in the aggregate value of American corporations.
So, may not be as high in terms of money, but certainly significant for
the organizations that fail to address it.
So here we are at the end of the last week of the course,
last lecture, and our last peer to peer discussion,
so here are three questions to discuss this week.
In our guidebook, we discussed a number of reasons that
might explain perceptions of leader ineffectiveness
in the eyes of those who interact with leaders.
Have you come across situations where you perceive a leader as more or
less effective?
Can you describe the situation and
what the person did to leave you with this impression.
Two, in your eyes, what do effective Board Chairs do?
When do they become ineffective?
And finally, what can boards do To develop leadership at the governance level.
Or does it even matter?
Here are a few questions to talk about this week.
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