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.