Building High-Impact Board-CEO Partnerships Blog - Doug Eadie & Company

Getting a Brand New Board Off to a Good Start at The T

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:13:58 GMT

Imagine that you’re the CEO of a large public corporation, and one day you learn that your whole board has been “fired” and replaced by all new board members. By any standard, you’d consider this a pretty extraordinary challenge, if not a downright crisis. Well, this is what confronted Dick Ruddell, President/Executive Director of the Fort Worth Transportation Authority, known popularly as ‘The T,” early in 2013. A pretty board-savvy CEO, Dick recognized that a business-as-usual response wouldn’t suffice; extraordinary circumstances called for an extraordinary response.

So shortly after the nine new members of the T Board of Directors elected their officers, Dick huddled with his new Board Chair, Scott Mahaffey, a prominent Fort Worth businessman, to discuss how to turn the brand-new Board into a reasonably cohesive governing team in fairly short order. The urgency had a lot to do with a large commuter rail project in the planning stages, confronting the new Board with a stream of critical, high-stakes decisions in the near future. Scott and Dick had both learned from experience that if the new T Board members were to function effectively as a cohesive governing team, they’d need to feel strong ownership of their governing role and detailed governing processes. They were also keenly aware that just putting the new Board members through some kind of formal governance training program – teaching and preaching about governance – wouldn’t get the team building job done; ownership, they well knew, would come from being actively engaged in helping to shape their governing work.

So Scott and Dick agreed to hold an intensive, daylong “High-Impact Governing Work Session,” involving all nine new Board members and Dick’s senior executives, along with invited representatives of key stakeholder organizations in Greater Fort Worth. I was privileged to be retained to plan and facilitate the daylong session. Recognizing that an outside consultant couldn’t bring off a successful work session alone, and that turning Board members into true owners had to begin well before the April 12 session, Scott established and chaired an ad hoc committee consisting of four other Board members to oversee design of the High-Impact Governing Work Session. This group played a hands-on role with me in developing the blow-by-blow agenda of the April 12 event, and took public accountability for the session by attaching their names to the memorandum describing the session, which was sent to all participants a week in advance. The five Board members also agreed to serve as leaders of the five breakout groups that would be employed to brainstorm content during the day together.

The April 12 High-Impact Governing Work Session was highly productive and satisfying, fostering both understanding and ownership, in large measure the result of active participation in the five Board member-led breakout groups. And adding real luster to our day together, the President & CEO of the American Public Transportation Association, Michael Melaniphy, not only flew into Fort Worth to talk about national trends in the public transportation field over lunch on the 12^th, he actively participated in the session much of the day.

As I write this, there is a lot of follow-up yet to be done, but there’s no question the April 12 High-Impact Governing Work Session has laid a firm foundation for the kind of high-impact governing the T requires to thrive and grow in the years ahead.

Harnessing the Power of Ownership

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:30:59 GMT

My son William, then 11 or 12, and I had just sat down to breakfast at our hotel, when I pulled out a brochure and pad and began map out our day together touring Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Enthusiastically describing the wonderful experience in store for us, I noticed that William, head hanging, was looking anything but excited. “What’s up with him?” I thought. “He’s the one who chose Greenfield Village for a father-son outing, and I can’t believe he’s lost interest before we’ve even started our tour.” Then it hit me: “I’m making this my day, not his. No wonder he’s losing interest.” Going with my gut – and, being a classic control-freak, against the grain – without another thought I just handed William the brochure and pad, saying “Why don’t you map out the day from beginning to end, including where we eat.” Seeing a skeptical look cross his face, I reassured him: “I’m serious; the day’s yours to plan; I’ll just go along with whatever you want to do.” Perking up, Will got to work with gusto, and the itinerary was ready by the time breakfast arrived. I re-learned a valuable lesson about the power of ownership, and, by the way, we had a great day together.

Ownership isn’t just a personal force, of course. Countless times over my quarter-century as a nonprofit leadership consultant, I’ve seen the power of ownership at work, fueling high-stakes change that otherwise would probably have bitten the dust. Two examples come to mind.

Jeff Finkle, president & CEO of the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) – newly created by a merger of the American Economic Development Council and the Council for Urban Economic Development – was faced with the challenge of transforming his brand new board (essentially a combination of the existing two boards) into an effective governing body. Chris Fox, executive director of the International and American Associations for Dental Research faced a similar challenge: reforming two under-performing boards that were mired in programmatic and technical details while not providing the strategic guidance necessary to capitalize on major growth opportunities. Jeff and Chris, both board-savvy association CEOs, tapped the power of ownership to get the different board development jobs done.

Jeff convinced his board chair to appoint a large “governance task force” consisting of equal numbers of AEDC and CUED representatives serving on the new IEDC board. With consulting assistance over the course of three months, the task force fashioned a number of recommendations aimed at clarifying the new board’s governing role and putting in place a modern committee structure. This task force of board members presented the recommendations to the full board and, after their adoption, oversaw implementation. The IADR and AADR board chairs, following Chris’ recommendation, created an ad hoc committee representing both boards to design a daylong retreat of the two boards, which identified board governance issues and brainstormed possible actions to address them. After the retreat, the ad hoc committee worked with a consultant to develop specific recommendations for strengthening the two boards and presented the recommendations at a special work session involving both boards.

In both cases, early and intensive board involvement in shaping the governance improvement recommendations bred strong ownership, transforming a number of board members into ardent “change champions,” who played a key role in convincing their peers to adopt the recommendations. In both cases, the recommendations were subsequently implemented, resulting in highly effective governing boards. If Jeff and Chris had chosen the traditional course of hiring consultants to study the situations and come up with recommendations themselves, which they would then sell to the IEDC, IADR and AADR boards, it’s highly unlikely that the board capacity building initiatives would have been nearly as successful.

Governing Philanthropists

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:40:26 GMT

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “philanthropy” as “the effort or inclination to increase the well-being of mankind, as by charitable aid or donations.” We tend to think of philanthropists as people who donate money to good causes – typically nonprofits – but also occasionally to public organizations, such as the Gates Foundation grant to the Hillsborough County Public Schools for its Empowering Effective Teachers Initiative. Large-scale philanthropy is a wonderful American tradition. Talking about his father John D. Rockefeller Junior’s favorite New Testament story, the parable of the Good Samaritan, in his remarkable “Memoirs” (Random House, 2002), David Rockefeller (the last surviving grandchild of the founder of Standard Oil and one of history’s greatest philanthropists, John D. Rockefeller) beautifully describes the philanthropic impulse:

Who is your neighbor? What are your obligations to him? That is the point of the story. To Father the moral was clear: Everyone is your neighbor. He would emphasize that point over and over again at our prayer sessions before breakfast each morning when we were children. The story of the Good Samaritan . . . epitomized Father’s life and inspired his philanthropy. For him philanthropy was about being a good neighbor.

What we can easily forget is that philanthropy is about more than giving money. Being a philanthropist is also about contributing your time to good causes, and a time-honored way of doing so is serving on nonprofit boards. Over the past quarter-century I’ve worked with hundreds of wonderful philanthropists who do tremendous good through their governing. One of the most inspiring philanthropists of this ilk I’ve ever worked with is Steve Goldman, M.D., a cardiologist who has donated hundreds of hours to the Good Samaritan Health Clinic of Pasco County here in Florida, whose Board he has chaired for several years. Here’s what Steve says about volunteering in a deeply moving video that I shot a couple of years ago: “It is not simply us. It is our community. It is all of us. We are one member of this humanity – our humanity.” If you’d like to see Steve’s video, click on http://www.dougeadie.com/Resources/responding-governance/ and scroll down to the second video on the page.

Lincoln and True Humility

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:50:45 GMT

As a fervent admirer of Abraham Lincoln who has read most of the major biographies of his life and career, I accompanied my wife Barbara to our local cinema yesterday to see the film “Lincoln” with some trepidation, expecting, despite many glowing reviews, to be disappointed. After all, Lincoln, who has long been an American icon, was a tremendously complex human being who couldn’t easily be captured on film, and I was afraid I’d be seeing the heroic Lincoln carved in stone at his majestic memorial in Washington, rather than the real man. The man I’ve come to know through my reading was a tremendously ambitious and highly successful trial attorney who reveled in the nitty-gritty of electoral politics and, although he was, indeed, a man of principle, his principles without question evolved over time, and to achieve them he was always willing to compromise – never confusing the means with the ends. He was also the man who told funny – often very earthy and off-color – stories to make complex points and relieve tension in the policy making process. I need not have feared. “Lincoln” is a wonderful film that I’d happily see again – and again. I can’t imagine a better written script or a more effective portrayal of Lincoln than Daniel Day-Lewis’s. This is a film that will be seen and appreciated fifty years from now.

An aspect of Lincoln’s character that I really admire and that helped to make him a highly successful national chief executive comes through in this remarkable film – what I call “true humility.” Truly humble leaders like Lincoln embody seemingly contradictory traits that enable them to achieve phenomenal results. On the one hand, the truly humble leader is, like Lincoln, highly ambitious – aiming to achieve significant results – fundamentally self-confident, and bull-dog tenacious. This is definitely not a whimpy leadership model. But at the same time, the truly humble leader, like Lincoln, possesses the kind of healthy ego that doesn’t need to win every battle or beat others into submission on every point. And as Joyce Kearns Goodwin so well demonstrates in her excellent study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, Team of Rivals, Lincoln’s robust but healthy ego never demanded being surrounded by a coterie of worshipful acolytes. On the contrary, Lincoln was so fundamentally self-confident that he was able to enlist the services – the knowledge, expertise, diverse perspectives, and political capital – of a Cabinet that included men who were harsh critics of his policies and political competitors who, distaining (and underestimating) this prairie lawyer with his frontier twang and folksy stories, were waiting in the wings to replace him.

Today, as I read the latest accounts of progress in averting our nation’s possible fall off the so-called “fiscal cliff,” I can’t help but feel we could use a huge dose of Lincoln-like true humility in Washington, DC these days!

Creatively Shaping Your Board's Composition

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:28:11 GMT

Nonprofit and public boards fill vacancies in various ways. The great majority of nonprofit boards at the local level are self-appointing, but the members of many public transportation boards are appointed by mayors and county chief executives, school boards are for the most part elected by voters living in the school district, and association board members are typically elected by the association’s members. No matter how the members of your board are chosen, you can influence the filling of vacancies in order to strengthen your board’s composition. The first step is for your governance or board operations committee to fashion a two-tiered profile of the ideal board you’re looking for over the long run:

The broad categories of people you’d like to see on the board (for example: representatives of the business community; minorities; women; representatives of key stakeholder organizations)

The more specific attributes and qualifications you’re looking for in individual board members, regardless of the category the fall into (for example: having the time to commit to the work of the board; having contacts in the community)

The second step is for your governance or board operations committee to develop and execute a strategy for filling vacancies with people who fit the profile. For self-appointing boards, the strategy can be quite direct (identify the people and go get them), but for elected boards and boards selected by third parties such as the mayor or county CEO, the strategy will necessarily be less direct – aimed at influencing voters and appointing authorities.

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLES

Let’s look at some real-life examples of boards that have creatively shaped their composition in the interest of higher-impact governing:

The governance committee of a self-appointing nursing home board I worked with not too long ago decided that it needed to diversify the mix of people on the board by consciously recruiting women, small business owners, hospital executives, and representatives of the rapidly growing Latino community. The members of the governance committee didn’t set specific targets, but agreed that in identifying candidates to fill vacancies, they would pay special attention to these under-represented categories.

The executive committee of a public transportation system the in the southwestern US provided the appointing authorities with a profile of attributes and qualifications they were looking for in board members, and asked that the profile at least be considered in filling board vacancies. The list included: “knowledgeable about transportation issues;” “able to commit the time to committee and full board meetings;” “experience on at least two other public or nonprofit boards;” “demonstrated interpersonal skills;” and the like.

The board operations committee of a state association whose members are insurance agents recommended that the board amend the bylaws to allow three of the fifteen seats on the board to be filled by “outside” board members who aren’t insurance agents, as a means both to enrich board deliberations and to build ties with important stakeholder organizations in the state. The amendment, which was adopted, provided that the three outside seats would be filled by the board itself, while the other twelve seats would be filled by members voting at the annual meeting.

The governance committee of the elected board of an international trade association has put in place a kind of “farm system” for identifying candidates to stand for election to the board. The chairs of the association’s several technical advisory committees consisting of non-board volunteers (for example, professional development, annual conference program, and certification committees) are provided with the profile of desirable board member attributes and qualifications and asked to identify committee members closely fitting the profile and provide their names to the governance committee. The committee takes its nominating committee role so seriously that committee members actually check references and the top candidates being considered are interviewed, in person if possible but at least by phone.

This blog post is adapted from my book Meeting the Governing Challenge (www.GovernanceEdge.com).

Beware of the Slippery Slope of Board Downsizing

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:56:51 GMT

Here’s a fact I’ve learned from my work with hundreds of boards over the years: The more diverse your board is in terms of its membership, the more valuable your board’s contribution to your organization’s out-of-the-box change process is likely to be. It’s difficult to imagine having too much brainpower, knowledge, expertise, experience, connections, etc., in your boardroom when you’re dealing with complex issues; more is without question better. And then you’ve got the symbolic aspect of diversity to consider – such things as gender, race, ethnicity, economic status – which can and often does influence the legitimacy of the change initiatives your board adds to your Change Investment Portfolio (CIP). What this means in practice is that your organization should pay systematic, close attention to developing your board’s composition on an ongoing basis.

A key step in this direction is to assign a standing board committee responsibility for developing the board as a human resource. Clients of mine have employed “nominating,” “executive,” “board operations,” and “governance” committees to get this job done. Whatever its name, one of the committee’s key jobs is to develop and keep updated a detailed profile of the ideal board in terms of its composition, and to consciously use the profile in recruiting board members to fill gaps of one kind or another. Let’s take a real life example: a regional economic development corporation serving three counties in a metropolitan area. The board’s governance committee, in a recent meeting I sat in on, dealt with the following questions when updating the profile of the corporation’s board:

To what extent should our board reflect the population of our three counties, in terms of gender, race and ethnicity?
What stakeholder organizations should be represented on our board (for example, the boards of county commissioners, chambers of commerce, postsecondary institutions)?
What is the appropriate mix of business representatives on the board (small, medium large businesses; engaged in manufacturing, financial, legal and other services; retail)?

It’s important to keep in mind that your board’s composition not only affects the quality
of board member involvement in planning out-of-the-box change, but also your board’s contribution to implementing Change initiatives in your organization’s CIP. On more than one occasion over the years, for example, I’ve seen board members who are prominent community leaders play a major role in securing funding from key stakeholders, such the local community foundation. And I’ve seen well-connected board members enlist the support of stakeholder organizations that are critical to the success of particular Change initiatives. One recent example is a school board member’s playing the leading role in securing a chamber of commerce board’s endorsement of the school district’s upcoming capital levy, and the chair of a public transportation board convincing the regional mayors and managers association to support the development of a downtown trolley line.

A very important related question is whether it makes sense to increase the board’s size in order to achieve the diversity that we need and want. In my professional opinion, larger boards – up to a sensible maximum size – tend to make a more powerful contribution to out-of-the-box change, very simply because they bring more resources to the change game. Can a board be too large? I suppose so, but I’ve found that a far more common problem is boards that are too small, limiting the contribution that the boards can make to planning out-of-the-box change. This is to some extent the result of wrong-headed consultants traipsing around the country preaching board down-sizing as a board development strategy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the obvious costs of traveling down the slippery downsizing slope are pretty steep: less brainpower, knowledge, and expertise; reduced stature and visibility; less diversity in every sense; fewer connections in the wider world; less access to resources; to name some of the more important. And the benefits are not only few, but dubious: a board that’s easier to manage (or, often, to control); that’s less expensive to support; that’s more cohesive (hardly a virtue when you think of identifying out-of-the-box issues). What’s too big a board? There’s no scientific answer, but I’d suggest that a 21 to 30-member board leaves room for considerable diversity without the risk of unwieldiness.

Adapted from Doug Eadie’s new book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (www.leadingoutoftheboxchange.com)

What Board-Savvy Chief Executives Know

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:22:26 GMT

The relationship between nonprofit executives and their board members is evolving: Newer, younger board members tend to value direct participation and palpable, meaningful results that justify their commitment to an organization.

Maureen West hits the nail on the head in her article in the September 16, 2012 issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Maureen quotes two nonprofit CEOs I have worked closely with over the years who have been highly successful at actively engaging their board members in making high stakes governing decisions and judgments: Sue Buchholtz of Evergreen Life Services and Virginia Jacko of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind. Click here to read the whole article: http://www.dougeadie.com/userfiles/file/ChronicleOfPhilanthrophy0912.pdf.

Sue and Virginia are keenly aware that an essential ingredient in a really rock-solid board-CEO partnership is board members who feel like owners of their governing work, and they know that active, meaningful board member engagement is the surest way to transform their board members into owners. Sue and Virginia both learned early in their CEO careers that merely feeding their board members a steady stream of well-prepared documents and oral briefings wouldn’t be much help in building the board-CEO partnership for the simple reason that audiences for even the most outstanding staff work tend to feel little, if any, ownership.

Sue and Virginia, along with many other board-savvy CEOs around the country, have learned that one of the most effective board member engagement tools available to them is a well-designed structure of board standing committees that correspond to the major streams of governing judgments and decisions that a nonprofit board makes: planning; performance monitoring; and external/stakeholder relations. A contemporary committee structure enables board members to dig into governing work deeply enough to foster strong feelings of ownership. Committees can also serve as a very effective vehicle for engaging board members in designing their governing roles, which tends to strengthen ownership tremendously. For example, Sue and Virginia have worked with their board planning committee to map out how board members will actually participate in such critical processes as strategic planning and annual operational planning/budget development. And they’ve worked with their performance monitoring committee to fine-tune performance reports that the committee will be reviewing.

Announcing the Entwined Lives blog!

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:34:27 GMT

Doug Eadie has created a new blog – Entwined Lives: Reflections of a Returned Ethiopia Peace Corps Volunteer. You can check it out at: EntwinedLives.com. The five blogs that appeared on this page as part of the Addis Ababa Homecoming series have been removed from this page and are being re-posted at the Entwined Lives blog.

The Change-Savvy Innovator-in-Chief

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Mon, 14 May 2012 03:49:53 GMT

CEOs who succeed in the Innovator-in-Chief role are what I think of as change-savvy. The change-savvy CEOs that I’ve worked with and observed:

• Are technically very knowledgeable about best practices in the rapidly changing area of change
planning and management, which means she isn’t wedded to conventional planning wisdom and out-of-date approaches. You’ll never hear a change-savvy CEO extolling the virtues of traditional longrange (or strategic) planning as a change tool, much less catch her fondling a ten-pound five year plan.

• Realize that successfully bringing off out-of-the-box change against all odds requires that she make leading the change planning and implementation process a top-tier priority. In practice, this means that the change-savvy CEO makes a firm commitment of time to leading change from the
top and never tries to delegate one piece or another of this leadership role to lieutenants.

• Recognize that leading out-of-the- box change as Innovatorin-Chief of the organization is
more psychological and political in nature than technical. Not only does the change-savvy CEO
understand that fear is more often than not at the heart of staff resistance to change, she
also takes strong, visible steps to allay that fear through the clear articulation of vision and other motivational steps that are intended to inspire and energize participants in the change process. The change-savvy CEO also pays close attention to the transformation of key stakeholders into ardent change champions.

•And command the respect of staff members and key stakeholders, primarily by playing a very aggressive and visible change-leadership role and practicing what she’s preaching in the change arena. A change-savvy CEO knows that her leadership credibility
depends on walking the talk, never contradicting in practice what she’s saying publicly.

Read the rest of Doug's article from the May/June 2012 issue of Association Leadership Magazine

Teamwork At The Top In Spokane, Washington

admin@dougeadie.com (Admin) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:24:44 GMT

I recently recorded a podcast featuring Al French, Spokane County Commissioner and Chair of the Board of the Spokane Transit Authority (STA) and Susan Meyer, CEO of STA. They describe, from their different perspectives, how they worked as a really cohesive leadership team in getting a truly high-stakes, out of the box change initiative accomplished at STA. What happened under their leadership was the transformation of the STA Board of Directors into a higher impact governing body, primarily by putting an updated Board standing committee structure in place.

I was fortunate to work closely with Al and Sue in strengthening STA governance, so I was able to see the “Al and Susan Show” in action close up. Four factors appear to account for their functioning as such a productive Board Chair-CEO Leadership Team:

1. Both Al and Sue are united by their passionate commitment to the STA vision and mission, and they don’t let narrower, more parochial agendas get in the way of serving STA’s customers and stakeholders.

2. Al and Sue not only have tremendous respect for each other, they also very consciously help each other succeed in carrying out their related, but different, leadership roles as Board Chair and CEO. Over the course of the several months I worked closely with them, I never saw Al and Sue compete with each other. I don’t mean to say they never disagreed; of course they did. But compete with each other? Never!

3. They clearly understood and observed in practice the basic division of labor governing their roles: that the Board Chair leads the Board’s deliberations, the CEO is responsible for all international operations, and they share the external relations role.

4. And they never kept their distance, communicating openly and frequently and taking the time to work through complex issues.

Over my quarter-century of working with nonprofit and public organizations, I’ve identified the board-CEO partnership as one of the preeminent keys to organizational effectiveness and success over the long run, so STA is, indeed, fortunate to have the “Al and Susan Show” playing in Spokane.

Listen To Podcast Here