I probably spend more time than the average person sitting in nonprofit board meetings. It’s a consultant’s occupational hazard.

If you’re a consultant like me you attend a lot of client board meetings–either to be interviewed prior to getting a project, to engage the board in a discussion related to a project, to provide a training on some aspect of governance, or perhaps to present a report upon completion of a project.

You may also sit on one or two boards yourself, where you spend much of your time biting your overly-opinionated tongue and trying to remember that no one appointed you to ensure the tasks of moving the discussion along, shortening the committee reports, focusing on strategy rather than the minutiae of operations, or ending on time.

I’m not complaining, I actually find board meetings fascinating. I find myself playing the game of “Figure Out The Board.” This is especially fun if you are attending a particular organization’s board meeting for the first time. Is the chair chairing or is the executive? Who is driving the agenda? Is there an agenda? Is anyone taking minutes? Are they recording the meeting so some already overworked administrative staff person can later transcribe every scintillating word of the discussion? Is there a focus to the meeting, a big issue?

You get the idea.

In the end, a board is simply a group of people trying to do what’s right. They may have forgotten that fact in the heat of the moment, and often they have no idea what is truly right, or best, in a given difficult situation, but they are trying. And our work, as consultants, is to give them the tools to do it better. The tools and the encouragement.

Gotta go. . . there is a board meeting I have to get to!

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 5:13 am and is filed under Governance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.