Principles of Good Governance: Be Responsive

Last week, we explored the second Principle of Good Governance, which is to “Be Transparent.” This week, we will review the principle behind one of the top criticisms nonprofit CEOs report about their boards of directors. If I ask what frustrates them about their boards, the practices that top every list are either that they 1) micromanage, 2) do not contribute financially or help with fundraising, or 3) they are simply not responsive. Ironically, once a member becomes President of the board, the third issue often becomes one of their top complaints, as well. Fortunately, a few simple policies and practices can help alleviate this frustration.

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The principle “Be Responsive” would seem to be the most basic one we will cover. It simply asks board members to communicate and follow through on what they say they will do. Unfortunately, since board service is an additional responsibility to a volunteer’s regular job and is not top of mind every day, without deliberate attention it is all too easy to fall short of expectations.

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Starting with communication, does your board have a primary method of sharing information among its members? For most, this will be email. However, it is often the busiest people who find themselves serving on nonprofit boards.? This means they likely have torrents of email coming through their inboxes daily. If board members do not have adequate systems in place, messages from their colleagues on the board or CEOs are easy to miss.

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As a CEO, I sometimes struggled to hold my tongue when a board member would complain in a meeting that they never received my email.? Since I always used group aliases (such as [email protected]) to send email to the board (and I included myself in the group), I knew that if I received the email so did everyone else - they just didn’t see it. To help mitigate this problem, I would recommend setting up auto sorting rules for their inboxes as part of new board member orientation. I reviewed how to create a folder or label for the organization (depending on the email platform) and make rules or filters so messages from me and other members of the board were automatically identified.?

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Helpful tip: To keep the folder from getting lost in your favorites, start the name of the folder with a number 1 or a period. This anchors that folder at the top of the list.

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Directly related to properly organizing your inbox, do you RSVP to meeting notices? Think about how many times you have been in a board meeting and the CEO states they do not know if there will be a quorum, because only three members RSVP’d.? The conversation goes something like this, “Well, Bill normally comes, so he will probably be here, but I don’t know about Shirley.” Then someone else says, “I think she’s on vacation, but when I spoke to Eric yesterday, he said he would be coming.” What a frustrating waste of time. Just hit reply to the meeting invitation, and this will never happen.

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To encourage responsiveness, I recommend implementing a policy that board meetings will be cancelled without a confirmed quorum at least two days prior to the meeting. Behaviors will change quickly when members realize they were the reason a meeting was cancelled unnecessarily.

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The other major part of being responsive is following through on tasks. Since tasks are assigned during meetings, one practice to increase everyone’s responsiveness is to send out meeting minutes in a timely manner.? Contrary to common practice, this does not mean sending them out with the reminder for the next meeting (which only comes out a few days before the next meeting - if you are lucky). It does no one any good to get a reminder to do something without giving them the time to do it. Instead, follow a policy of sending the minutes out within a week of the meeting just held. Unfortunately, you may be at the mercy of your board secretary, so your board president must firmly enforce this policy. However, if this policy is implemented faithfully, not only will your board be more responsive, following through on assigned tasks can fairly be incorporated into annual board evaluations to further reinforce another Principle of Good Governance: "Be Accountable."

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Next week, we will examine how to “Be Consensus-Oriented,” which is my fourth Principle of Good Governance for Nonprofit Boards.