Like many Americans whose parents lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, I’ve been thinking lately about that economic and social catastrophe.  It was never going to happen again, we were told, and certainly believed, but…….Anyway, this morning, the ninth day of the new year, I arrived at my desk feeling somewhat tired – which has been the case now and then over the past few months, as our once-booming economy has pursued its alarming downward course.  I’m not a pessimist by nature, and I try to keep things in perspective.  I’m keenly aware that these aren’t by any measure the worst of times, not when you think about 1860, 1930, WW II, and I’m really optimistic that the new Administration in Washington will provide the leadership we need to dig ourselves out of the economic hole we’re in.  But that doesn’t mean I’ve been whistling a happy tune on my way up the stairs to my study in the morning lately, especially after my customary hour with the New York Times and its steady stream of dismal economic tidings. (a typical article head in today’s business section, “For Stores, a Lump of Coal”).  My wife Barbara refuses to read the morning paper at breakfast these days, instead re-reading passages from Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention and thumbing through the various interior design publications she takes.  But I’m addicted to news, no matter how negative, and ignoring the morning paper is one trick this old dog isn’t capable of learning.

So there I was this morning – seated at my desk, mustering up the energy to fuel my day of mapping out business strategy, writing client reports and answering emails – the usual drill – and my eyes began wandering over the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that cover one wall of my study.  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just browsing while waiting for the adrenalin to kick in, when I lighted on a book my parents had given me for Christmas some 40 years ago:  the first volume of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr’s trilogy, the Age of Roosevelt:  The Crisis of the Old Order.  I turned to chapter 1, “Prologue:  1933.”  Schlesinger sets the stage:          

The White House, midnight, Friday, March 3, 1933.  Across the country the banks of the nation had gradually shuttered their windows and locked their doors.  The very machinery of the American economy seemed to be coming to a stop.  The rich and fertile nation, overflowing with natural wealth in its fields and forest and mines, equipped with unsurpassed technology, endowed with boundless resources in its men and women, lay stricken. . . .Saturday, March 4, dawned gray and bleak.  Heavy winter clouds hung over the city.  A chill northwest wind brought brief gusts of rain.  The darkness of the day intensified the mood of helplessness.  “A sense of depression had settled over the capital,” reported the New York Times, “so that it could be felt.”

“Well, things may not be that bad now,” I thought to myself, “but we really are in a mess, and I can pretty easily relate to that ‘sense of depression.’ ”  Then my thoughts turned to my parents’ all-time hero, FDR, and how, as Mom and Dad told me countless times, when they heard his words on the radio on March 4, 1933, their hearts were filled with hope for the future.  “We just knew,” Dad once said, “that things would be OK, no matter how terrible they were.”  So, I Googled “FDR inaugural 1933,” and – what a world we live in! – up came a link to that wonderful speech.  I actually felt a surge of positive energy just re-reading it.  Here are a couple of excerpts that I think will resonate with you as they do with me:

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.  Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.  This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.  So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. . . .

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance.  We are stricken by no plague of locusts.  Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we still have much to be thankful for. . . .

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well . . .

Re-reading these wonderful words, feeling the strong emotion they kindle in my own heart at a remove of 75 years, I am reminded of the tremendous importance of words – not as a substitute for resolute action, to be sure, but an essential prelude to action, supplying the inspiration and the energy that pave the way to action.  I’m looking for that inspiration on January 20, 2009; I’m sure you are, too.  Meanwhile, if you’re feeling down, you might want to Google “FDR inaugural 1933.”

In mid-October 2007, the Board of the Teton County School District #1 in Jackson, Wyoming, unanimously approved a number of recommendations of the Board’s High-Impact Governing Task Force aimed at strengthening the Board’s governing capacity.  Among the more important actions the Board took were adoption of a new standing committee structure and of guidelines to govern the new committees’ operations.  The new Board committees are now firmly established and functioning as very effective “governing engines.”  I recently talked with Teton’s superintendent, Pam Shea, about the work of the High-Impact Governing Task Force.

Q: Pam, what are the chief factors that account for the High-Impact Governing Task Force’s success as a board development tool?

Pam:    Above all else, the composition of the Task Force – headed by the Board President and including two other Board members and myself – ensured that three key Board members became strong owners of, and passionate advocates for, the recommendations in the Action Report.  Our process was the polar opposite of just hiring an outside consultant to identify issues, come up with recommendations, and try to sell them to the Board.  Also, the Task Force followed a meticulously designed, very logical and transparent process, including formally adopted “design assumptions” to guide our work and detailed analysis of governance issues.  We definitely didn’t jump to conclusions or fall victim to preconceived notions of what needed to be done on the governance front.  And we retained a consultant with 25 years of experience in working with nonprofit and public boards of all kinds to facilitate Task Force deliberations and to draft the various sections of the Action Report for Task Force review.

Q: How did the Task Force handle presentation of its Action Report to the Board?

Pam:    In the first place, Doug, we set aside three hours for the Task Force to present its recommendations at a special Board work session since we wanted plenty of time for questions and discussion.  And rather than just thumbing through the lengthy Action Report, Task Force members all participated in making a PowerPoint presentation that highlighted the recommended actions, with our consultant present as a resource but NOT a formal presenter.  So we set up a peer-to-peer situation.  By the way, the Task Force presenters met for a “dress rehearsal” the night before the special Board session, running through the slides and asking each other questions.  In light of the importance of the recommendations in terms of our Board’s governing capacity, we weren’t about to “wing it” as presenters, and I’m sure that the unanimous vote on each recommended action had a lot to do with the quality of our presentation.

The Board of Directors, a number of senior volunteers, and the executive team of the American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) participated in an intensive, daylong retreat in early November 2007.  Participants fashioned preliminary values and vision statements, explored strategic issues, and identified opportunities to strengthen the Board's governing capacity.  Building on this highly productive session, AADE has implemented a number of significant governance improvements, including a new structure of Board governing committees.  As you know, retreats don't automatically go well, and stories of the "retreat from hell" abound.  Who hasn't witnessed events that unraveled halfway through to the sound of rancorous debate, that wasted everyone's time in laboriously  word-smithing a three-sentence vision statement, or were written in sand, resulting in no concrete actions?  

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.