If you serve on a board, you may see your role as limited to supervising and managing the highest-level staff person such as the CEO, Executive Director, or Lead Pastor. But what if your board’s actual job is to shape meaningful futures for those your organization serves? That’s much more important to those you serve than merely supervising or managing the CEO. It also requires a board to have robust capabilities to achieve the following three key outcomes:
1) Role clarity: What is the board’s role and what is management’s role and how do those two relate to one another?
Role clarity allows clear accountability from management to the board and from the board to those on whose behalf they govern. Without role clarity, you will not have accountability.
When it comes to the roles of the CEO and the board, which best describes your organization:
- Role confusion?
- Role overlap?
- Mutually exclusive roles?
- Role accountability?
2) Which approach best describes your board’s approach to protecting its assets:
- Firefighting?
- CEO-planned?
- Board-established policies limiting the CEO from allowing illegal, unethical, and imprudent conditions?
- Proactive board-directed asset protection?
3) Which approach best describes your board’s approach to the future:
- Annual goals?
- Strategic plans?
- Board-established results expected to be achieved by the CEO?
- Strategic foresight?
Your board’s performance improves as it moves to the last bullet point for each of the above outcomes. In doing so, you will achieve visionary governance.
Don’t be content to act as a supervisory board. Don’t get caught believing the myth that good governance requires hands-on control. The truth is good governance is informed control.
Those you serve deserve so much better! Your work will be immensely more fulfilling as you move toward becoming a visionary board.
Visionary boards have high role accountability for both the CEO and board. They engage in proactive risk management. And they use strategic foresight to become informed of alternative possible futures.
We have worked with hundreds of boards as they improve their ability to shape meaningful futures.
When your board is ready to learn about the nine capabilities of a visionary board, please reach out to us here.