A New Approach to Board Legacy

Serving on a board is not an easy lift – and if you are an officer or the Chair, you have committed to a role akin to a part-time job. Whenever you give so much of your time, your insight, and your energy to an organization, there is a natural tendency to want to know if it was worth it.

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“Was the time I committed meaningful?”

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“Did my efforts impact the health and mission of the organization?”

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“What legacy am I leaving behind – how will my time in office be remembered?”

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Any nonprofit strives to ensure volunteer leaders see their role as advancing the strategic priorities of their purpose-driven organization. When we see officers elected on personal-issue platforms, we experience annual swings of priority that can derail efforts, or make key initiatives take longer to accomplish. Even these strategically-aligned volunteers desire to experience the impact of their efforts.

?The truth is, the impact and potential each class of leaders and officers creates is often not realized until years after their service has ended. Yet, our systems of recognition for service focus on the period of service – for example, the one year serving as Chair.

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How can we expect our leaders to see their work as building to a future and for a generation to come when our efforts to recognize their accomplishments, their legacy, occur at the end of their year of service?

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If we want to change this point of view, then we have the responsibility to redefine what it means to make impact as a leader of an organization. Instead of only articulating the accomplishments of a year, when an organization celebrates achievement they should tell the full story of the leadership who enabled the moment through the full time it took to come to fruition.

?A timely example of this, and an opportunity, is the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown. We are only a few months past the time when our organizations faced a pandemic-induced lockdown, radically transitioning how we worked, the value we provided, and where we found resource stability. All alongside a time of fear and loss. Take a moment and reflect, where is your organization today? Has it survived, and perhaps even evolved, from the depths of challenge? Is it, in some capacity, even stronger because of the experience?

?How will you use this anniversary moment to recognize the leaders, many of whom did not choose to be on the board at the onset of a pandemic, whose crisis leadership built the path to the stronger today? Is there a greater opportunity to establish a new pattern of legacy recognition – calling back to the leaders who helped navigate moments of opportunity and trial to the successful present?

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If we want our leaders to aspire to a legacy that is not measure by what they accomplish during their term of service, but one whose impact is realized in the time after their term, a legacy where their contributions lead to greater achievements, we need to structure recognition beyond a year of service.

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Fulfilling mission takes time, it takes the effort of many, and it takes leaders who have the humility to work for a future they may or may not see. Let’s reshape how we recognize their efforts not just for the months they were in office, but by the better future they seeded during their time.

#leadership #Boardofdirectors #CEO #nonprofits #associations

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