Earlier this week, my wife Barbara and I hosted a reception at our home for a friend and colleague who is running for a seat on the Pinellas County Commission here in Tampa Bay.  It was an opportunity to support someone we really respect while also promoting higher-quality government in our region, but we also welcomed the opportunity get to know our neighbors better and make some new friends.  In addition to greeting guests and making sure their glasses were full, I was to introduce the candidate.  Now, this clearly wasn’t a big deal:  only some 35 people, most of whom were acquaintances, in an intimate setting, with the mellowness that comes from ample libations.  Keeping in mind that I am a practiced workshop presenter and conference keynoter, you can see that this wasn’t much of a test.

But it turns out that it was!  When I tapped on a glass to get everyone’s attention, and the room quieted down, I suddenly found myself short of breath and my hands trembling.  The first words out of my mouth were a bit strained, but – thank heaven for experience – I quickly settled down and acquitted myself reasonably well, covering the major points I’d wanted to make about our friend’s experience and attributes.  However, I was aware the whole time of a feeling of danger, of being at risk – of suffering what is commonly called performance anxiety. 

As I thought about the experience later that evening, after seeking reassurance from Barbara that I didn’t really appear to be nervous, I realized – not for the first time – that, deep down inside, a fear of being judged and found wanting still lurked, even after 25 years of facilitating workshops and speaking to audiences in large ballrooms.  I’m not into psycho-babble, but it does seem like a scared little boy still lives inside a guy who’s a pretty aggressive and self-confidant professional.  Now, it’s true that, when I first started speaking in public settings a quarter-century ago, I had to grapple with tremendous performance anxiety and almost gave up on my dream of building a national consulting business.  But discipline and ambition, and, of course, constant practice, got me over the hump. 

However, that little boy who’s so frightened of being judged and rejected apparently still lives somewhere inside and probably won’t ever go away, no matter how many audiences I satisfy.  And what I realized earlier this week is that intimate settings can be far more threatening to this little guy, who’s normally pretty unobtrusive, than facing a thousand strangers in a ballroom, probably because I’m not encased in my normal suit of armor.  Maybe that’s not so bad, and maybe it’s not so unusual.  Whatever, it’s definitely a part of me, and perhaps some of you reading this share my occasional sense of being two-people-in-one.

By the way, I don’t believe the little fellow is really an enemy, despite the title I’ve given this  piece, but his occasional reappearance can feel like sabotage nonetheless.

Not long ago I was chatting with the chief executive of a medium-sized association in the health care field about the nature of the board-CEO partnership.  When we began discussing how the board and CEO might work together on the planning front, I asked her:  “So, how have you involved your board members creatively in the budget preparation process?  I know it isn’t easy, since budgets are largely administrative documents without a lot of room for intensive board involvement.”  “Well, Doug,” she responded,  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘creative,’ but I don’t think I could do much more than I am without inviting micromanagement.”  She went on to say that she presented the board’s planning committee with a complete budget document two months before the beginning of the next fiscal year.  The committee thumbed through this finished budget, asking for clarification and occasionally suggesting adjustments in line items.  “I guess you’d call my approach ‘review and react’,” she pointed out, “and I’m not about to open Pandora’s Box by inviting them any further into the process.”  When I asked her how satisfied her board members appeared to be with their involvement, she acknowledged that several of them had seemed pretty frustrated at the end of the just-concluded budget preparation cycle.  But when I suggested that she open up the process a bit by, for example, involving the board in an operational issues discussion early in the process, before any numbers had been put on paper, and that this would almost certainly turn her board into stronger owners of the ultimate budget, she reacted pretty negatively.  “Look, it’s my job to generate the budget and theirs to review it, and I’m not about to blur the lines!”

Now, this CEO is a really smart and capable person, and I wish her well in her CEO role, but I fear that she’s eventually going to fall victim to her need for control, which is pretty obviously overriding her creativity, at least where the board is concerned.  She’s so concerned about preserving her executive prerogatives and keeping the board from “micromanaging” that she’s lost sight of a tremendous partnership building opportunity: to strengthen board members’ feelings of ownership and satisfaction by orchestrating a work session at which they can examine – and offer input on – operational issues as a very practical and benign way of helping to shape the budget document.

I’ll let you know how she does, but, meanwhile, be on the lookout for situations in your own life and career where your need for control (and for the psychological security that being in control provides) might be limiting your creativity and, very likely, impeding your personal or professional advancement.  Ironically, as you’ve probably learned, in dealing with strong people like board members, attempting to exert too much control is the best way to lose influence over the long run.

I’d be interested in hearing about similar control-creativity conflicts that you’ve come across in your personal and professional lives.

A couple of weeks ago the chief executive of a nonprofit serving adults and children with disabilities called me to discuss my facilitating a 1 ½-day strategic planning retreat for her board and executive team.  She asked what I thought about our devoting 3 or 4 hours of the retreat to developing her board’s governing capacity, in addition to our visioning and issue identification work. I agreed that a governing session made the best of sense, and we got to talking about governing issues in her agency.

She kicked off our discussion by saying, “At the top of my list is getting my board downsized.”  “Oh really,” I responded, “why is that?”  It turns out that she’d recently attended a conference workshop at which the presenter, a board consultant, had observed that the “ideal” size of a nonprofit board was 9 to 15 members tops, and anyone with boards much larger than 15 should seriously consider downsizing.  “Well, Doug,” she said, “by that standard, my 25-member board is an obvious candidate for downsizing.” 

To make a long story short, after I pointed out that I had worked with any number of boards with more than 25 members that functioned as really high-impact governing bodies, and that reducing her board’s size would come at a steep cost in terms of diminished diversity, brainpower, access to resources, and political clout, we agreed that she should avoid the slippery slope of downsizing.  We agreed that it would make better sense to concentrate on clarifying her current board’s role, updating its committee structure, and mapping out processes for more effective board involvement in such critical governing processes as strategic planning and performance monitoring.
 
Why tell you this story?  Because it’s another example of how much really bad advice – what I call “fallacious little golden rules” – is floating around in the governing arena.  My advice to my board development clients and other colleagues is “caveat emptor” – buyer beware!  Be a cautious consumer of governing counsel; always be on guard, never take such advice at face value, and always, always, always think more than twice before acting.  Take board downsizing, whose advocates more often than not, in my experience, base their fallacious small-is-better wisdom on a negative premise:  “Boards are dangerous, always capable of  ‘micro-managing,’ they think, “and so we’ve got to keep the board small enough to maintain control and contain the threat.”  They seldom put it quite this baldly, but, believe me, that’s where they’re coming from.  So “caveat emptor” should be your watchword in the governing business.

One reason I’m writing my newest book, Becoming Really Board-Savvy:  10 Tips for CEOs and Top Executives, is to provide you with sound, thoroughly tested advice in a high-stakes arena – and, of course, to help you become a more discerning consumer of governing wisdom.  The book will hit the streets in June and will be available on our  Books and CD ROMs page.

In January 2007, the Governance Task Force of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, consisting of several Lighthouse Board members and the CEO, Virginia Jacko, recommended that the Board take a number of steps to clarify its governing role and strengthen its structure and processes.  The Board overwhelmingly approved the Task Force recommendations, including a new standing committee structure, and in the 13 or so months since then the recommendations have been fully implemented, with Virginia’s enthusiastic backing and strong support. I was privileged to work closely with Virginia and her Task Force colleagues in my capacity as “Governance Counsel” to the effort, and I have stayed in close touch with the Lighthouse since then.  This might sound like another consulting case study, but there’s a twist, as I’ll explain.  Let me back up a bit.

In late summer 2006 I found a message on my voice mail from a senior executive at the Lighthouse, saying that their CEO, Virginia, was interested in talking with me about strengthening the Lighthouse Board of Directors’ governing capacity.  I was pleased, but not terribly surprised, since a few months earlier I had spent an hour talking with a couple of senior executives from the Lighthouse after a workshop I had presented for the Broward County United Way, and I knew they were enthusiastic about putting the board development ideas I’d shared to work if they could swing it.  When Virginia and I connected by phone a day or two later, she explained that, as a new CEO, she was very interested in building a really strong partnership with her Board and that she was determined to have her Board play an active role in setting strategic directions, rather than just sitting back and reacting to finished staff work.  Convinced that Virginia and I could work productively together, I sent her a proposal that was accepted, and we arranged to meet at her office a week or so later.

Thus began my collaboration with one of the most visionary, insightful, and energetic CEOs I’ve been privileged to work with in many a year.  Oh, one other thing, Virginia is totally blind.  Experiencing gradual vision loss while she was serving as Director of Financial Affairs at Purdue University, where she spent 24 years, Virginia realized that her life, professional and personal, was at a dramatic turning point.  She could retreat from the wider world, falling victim to a health catastrophe, or she could take action to ensure an active professional life that capitalized on her substantial expertise and extensive experience.  Virginia tells me that she never for a moment considered retreating.  In 2001, she relocated to Miami to receive vocational rehabilitation training at the Miami Lighthouse.  Having successful completed her rehabilitation program, she became a public spokesperson for the Lighthouse, eventually joined its Board, and served as the Lighthouse’s interim President & CEO before her permanent appointment.  She’s done an outstanding job since taking the helm, securing the largest single-donor gift in Lighthouse history - $1.1 million – growing program participation, expanding the facility, and more.  In May 2007, Virginia was named Business Woman of the Year in the Nonprofit Leader Category by the South Florida Business Journal. 

What an extraordinary leader!  Meeting after meeting in Virginia’s office over the months we worked together, I found myself forgetting that she was blind, reminded every now and then when I noticed her guide dog Tracker lying beside her chair.  I’m sure her success in a challenging role has much to do with her keen intelligence and rich professional experience, but many people equally qualified would probably have thrown in the towel, content to retire from active professional engagement, and very few, I’d venture to say, would have tackled the CEOship of a major nonprofit agency under the circumstances.  What really made the difference, so far as I can tell, is Virginia’s fundamental optimism and tremendous self-confidence.  Can this be learned?  I’m not sure, and I’d be interested in the reader’s opinion. 

Checking my voice mail a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving 07, I was startled to hear a voice I immediately recognized, even though I had last heard it over 40 years ago:  “Mr. Eadie, I am your former TMS student, Tariku Belay.  I am living in Minneapolis and hope you will call me."  What a rush of emotion I felt.  Tariku Belay and two other students had lived with me and my Peace Corps housemates for three years in the mid-sixties in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  They were students at Tafari Makonnen School, where my housemates and I taught.  Tariku and I parted in 1967, when I returned to the States for graduate school and Tariku began his senior year at TMS.  His photo on my bookcase, along with a flask made from animal horn – his parting gift – helped keep him fresh in my memory.

Tariku and I corresponded now and then for two years or so after my returning to the States, and then fell out of touch.  Ethiopia, you might recall, descended into a dark period in the seventies.  Emperor Haile Selassie, “Lion of Judah, King of Kings,” was overthrown in a military coup and eventually executed, and the brutal Mengistu regime came to power not long afterward.  From news accounts and talking with the occasional Ethiopian I met in the States, I was aware that thousands of students died during this sad era in Ethiopian history.  Hearing nothing from Tariku as the years passed, I assumed that he had fallen victim to the regime.  Until November 2007, that is.

When I returned Tariku’s call that evening, I learned that he was teaching high school math in the Minneapolis Public Schools and planning to begin graduate work in spring 08.  He had, he said, searched for me in his early (pre-internet) days in the States, but eventually gave up.  I also learned that his being alive, much less doing professional work and living comfortably in the States, was nothing short of a miracle.  Imprisoned for over a year in Addis (“Life didn’t seem worth living,” he told me), Tariku managed to escape, went underground in Addis for several weeks, moving from home to home just ahead of the police, and then walked for several days and nights to Sudan, where he lived for four years before coming to the States as a political refugee. 

My wife Barbara and I are looking forward to Tariku’s visit this coming summer, when we plan to invite several friends to our home to meet Tariku and hear his dramatic story, and also to learn a bit about Ethiopia.  I’ll let you know how the reunion goes.

One more thing.  My former student became my teacher only a couple of days after our telephone reunion, when I flew to Chicago to facilitate an association board retreat.  The board meeting went quite well, but the trip was anything but pleasant.  Arriving at O’Hare two hours late, I was already tired and irritated when I checked into my hotel downtown, only to find that there wasn’t any telephone service in the room.  Unpacking in my new room an hour later, I found that the heat wasn’t working (in November!).  When the heating unit was finally repaired, and I sat down to a room service sandwich, it was midnight, and my meeting the next morning was to begin at 7 a.m.  Exhausted and frazzled, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself – until, that is, Tariku’s amazing odyssey came to mind.  “Give it a break,” I said to myself, “quit whining and just appreciate how privileged your life has been:  a lovely wife, a comfortable home on the water, work that you love – and all of this achieved without anything remotely close to the kind of suffering that Tariku went through.”  I fell asleep feeling truly blessed, thanks to Tariku’s incredible story.  It will be so good to see him again and let him know how the student has educated his teacher.