Virginia Jacko, President & CEO of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind, is a truly outstanding nonprofit chief executive.  She’s also blind, by the way.  On her watch, the Lighthouse has dramatically expanded its revenues while launching a number of innovative new programs.  I originally got to know Virginia well when I served as her governance consultant at the Lighthouse, helping her to transform an already good Board of Directors into a higher-impact governing body.   A couple of years later, we wrote a book together telling her inspiring and amazing true story – largely in her own words:  The Blind Visionary (www.theblindvisionary.com).  This brief excerpt from The Blind Visionary illustrates one of the traits that has helped to make Virginia an extraordinary nonprofit CEO:  Keeping her ego in check.  And after you’ve read this short piece, you might want to listen to Virginia talk about leading change at the Lighthouse in this recent podcast:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdiFyEzOnY&feature=player_embedded. 

 

A skill that’s made a real difference to me over the years is not to be ruled by my ego, especially not to personalize things or hold grudges.  To me, it’s the future that matters, not the past, and you can’t afford the negative emotion of nursing grievances or, worse, looking for revenge.  Over and over again taking this positive approach has paid off.  You reminded our readers of the department store dining room incident, and earlier in this book I’ve talked about other times I could’ve gotten huffy, like dealing with security people going through airport check-points.  Keeping my ego in its place has paid off on many other occasions, and it’s probably helped me age a little slower.

 

 

Let me tell you another story that’s on-point.  It was my first year as CEO, but I don’t remember if I was still serving pro bono or was permanent.  One of our volunteers said to a Board member, talking about my appointment, “Can you believe the inmates are now running the asylum?” referring to me as an inmate.  I didn’t hear this directly, but another Board member I trust repeated it to me, and a blind Board member who heard it was outraged and asked other Board members, “Can you believe what so-and-so said about Virginia?”  At the time, I just chuckled to myself, it didn’t seem worth getting angry about.  Well, this particular volunteer who’d made the comment came to the Lighthouse to see me one day and said, “Virginia, I’m so upset with you that you can’t take a joke.  This whole thing is being stirred up with the Board.”  I responded, “I’m really sorry.  What you said was pretty inappropriate, but I’m not the one who’s been talking about this with Board members.  However, it’s not going to do you or me any good if we hang on this, if we don’t work together and try to have a collegial relationship.  So, I’ll make a deal with you.  I’ll forget what you said, and then you forget what some of my Board members said about you.”

 

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.

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.   
     

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!  

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.  


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). 

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)

  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.