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Week 3 Lecture

Course video 13 of 18

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!

The Factors that Influence the Effectiveness of Boards and the Governance Process

Université d'État de New York

Cours 3 de 4 dans Améliorer le leadership et la gouvernance des associations à but non lucratif Spécialisation

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.

Visualiser le programme de cours

Enseigné par

Prof. Yvonne D. Harrison, PhD
Associate Professor and Director
Prof. Vic Murray, PhD
Adjunct Professor

Transcription

[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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