Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

October marks the launch of the third annual Dodge Foundation Board Leadership Training Series for Dodge grantees. The nine-course curriculum will take boards and executive leaders on a deep dive into effective board governance practices. Past participants shared how the workshops put them on path to success and the ups and downs of the journey in our spring guest blog series.

In preparation for our fall workshops we are introducing a new guest series by workshop alumni bloggers. They will tell their tales of the challenges and accomplishments of their board leadership experience. But first take the challenge offered by our lead instructor, Laura Otten, the director of the Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University’s School of Business. She loves helping boards, and she won’t hesitate to tell you the truth about what it takes to become an effective board.

Laura Otten
Director
The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business

Perhaps because I have spent the vast majority of my life in academic institutions or perhaps because as an adult, I started making my new year’s resolutions at Rosh Hashanah, I view September as the time of year to make new starts, new commitments, face new challenges. Thus, in preparation for the start of the new year, I am challenging board members everywhere to make a fresh start. I’m dropping the glove; will you pick it up?

Experience tells me that when you accepted the job as board member of the nonprofit in whose mission you believe completely (and if you don’t, you should resign now, as you are not doing anyone—from the nonprofit to yourself—a favor), you had no idea of the importance of the job or its magnitude. My guess is that you had no idea of the responsibility that was now placed on your shoulders. A magical board, comprised of individual board members who all understand their responsibilities and execute them, can help take a nonprofit to its next level.

An active, involved board doing its job (not that of the executive director) can make all the difference to a nonprofit. It can help to strengthen its operations through solid financial oversight, strategic planning, fundraising, and executive director oversight. It can help to build its positive reputation by fulfilling its ambassadorial role, building a compensation structure that attracts the needed talent, and strategically building the board so that it, too, attracts the best and the brightest. It can ensure that the organization stays focused on its missions, fulfilling its promises to its client base, donors, and the general public through strategic planning and evaluation of all of its programs, establishing a clear course for the future and measurable benchmarks for successful programs. And this list could go on and on, but I trust you get the point.

An ineffective board, one that revisits matters again and again but never moves off the mark, or one that is active doing the wrong things—such as using board meetings simply to gather data (i.e., hear reports) rather than to look strategically at that data or to do the executive director’s job and discuss where the new sign should be put or who to hire to mow the lawn—can lead an organization to stagnation and, ultimately, to defeat. These boards give the executive director, staff and other volunteers no direction, no oversight, no support, no guidance—none of the “extra” that a board is designed to bring to an organization. These are the organizations that are caught in an eddy, swirling round and round, working to stay afloat but getting nowhere; these are the ones that are on the way down. A strong executive director might manage to swim out of the eddy, but with no guidance as to the best way out may end up in a riptide—still struggling, still looking like a functioning organization, but still going nowhere.

What do you want your legacy to be? Helping the organization to flourish? Or to stagnate or possibly die? To achieve the former, a number of things must happen:

1. The board and executive director must be working in partnership, with neither dominating but rather working in a collaborative relationship of give and take, sometimes leading, sometimes following, etc.

2. Boards need to get educated as to what their real responsibility is—not what they hope it is, think it is, want it to be. Once educated, there needs to be the translation of knowledge into action, with benchmarks and accountability and assessment.

3. There needs to be a determination of whether the right players are at the table in the right positions. Is the executive director—be he founder, long serving, brand new and everything in between—the right person for the job as it is now and needs to become? Is the composition of the board right for/up to the task at hand? Is the leadership of the board right for these changing times? A board president has the ability to allow a nonprofit to languish doing nothing, to spin its wheels working at the wrong thing or to move in the direction of becoming a stellar board. A president’s collaborative leadership—not a dictatorship or an oligarchy—can help move the board, and, thus, the organization, to a higher level of performance.

4. The board must understand that high performing boards do not happen overnight and that once achieved require vigilance to maintain. This is a job for long-distance runners, not sprinters. But, as I’ve said before, the benefits are worth it all

Board members: the starter’s pistol has been fired. Will you go for it? If the answer is “yes,” you should check out the Dodge Foundation’s Board Leadership Series that offers nine workshops that will help a board become highly functioning and effective.

Laura Otten has been the director of The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business since 2001. She began her affiliation with The Nonprofit Center shortly after it was formed in the early 1980s, working as a consultant and trainer, primarily in the areas of Board development, strategic planning and program evaluation, and she continues to play these roles in addition to providing direction and leadership to The Nonprofit Center’s educational, consulting, and leadership development programs. She is a national expert in numerous aspects of nonprofit management and governance. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

If you’ve been following along the last several Mondays, you know that we’ve been hearing from grantees who have recently taken part in our Board Leadership Training Series workshops and are now telling their stories about how they are applying what they’ve learned to their organizations. Today, we hear from Eddie Rogers of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey who discusses his experience joining the board as it was going through major transition and how they’ve managed to increase both the quality and the quantity of their work.

Hard at Work at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

When I was approached to join the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, I had some not-for-profit board experience, but I had not been involved with any arts organization, and there was not much that could be said of my specific qualifications. The most important factor may have been that I was filled with a passion for William Shakespeare and for the classic theater that is grist for the Theatre’s mill. I had been a subscriber to the Theatre’s season for six or seven years, and I was a modest donor with a willingness to contribute more of my “treasure” to the Theatre’s mission. I knew one other Trustee and I had some acquaintance with Bonnie Monte, our remarkable Artistic Director. I soon found out that there was much about the Theatre’s mission of which I was unaware.

A word about our mission: utilizing a company of loyal and talented Equity actors, the Theatre produces a season of six to seven plays on the “Indoor Stage”—the F.M. Kirby Theater on the Drew University campus—and one play at the “Outdoor Stage” of the Greek theater at the College of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station. These productions are drawn from Shakespeare’s canon, augmented by other classic works.

In addition, the Theatre is an educational institution. A touring company called “Shakespeare LIVE!” carries skillfully abridged versions of Shakespeare’s favorites to schools throughout New Jersey and beyond. We operate a Summer Professional Training Program offering comprehensive theatrical training, both performance and technical, to young people seeking a career in the theater. And finally, we provide an introduction to serious acting for middle and high school students through our Junior and Senior Corps programs. The Theatre also offers residency programs to local schools seeking a more concentrated Shakespearean experience.

F.M. Kirby Theater at Drew University

The Board is as focused on the success of these educational programs as on the more “public” aspects of the Theatre’s activities. Not only do they open the way to a broad range of potential financial support, they also enhance the institution’s stature and, most importantly, lay the foundation for a new generation passionate about Shakespeare.

When I joined the Board , I was advised that the Board of Trustees had recently been through a certain turmoil, in the course of which about one-half of the Trustees had resigned. The Board was in serious need of “reconstituting,” and one could say I was part of the “reconstitution.” In terms of board “lifecycles,” the Theatre was pretty definitively in the “Turnaround Stage.” We were facing significant challenges:

• Finding new Trustees to fill the many vacancies;

• Financing ongoing operations in a hostile economic climate;

• Finding a way to eliminate a cumulative deficit;

• Finding new support facilities to replace the distant and dangerous scene-building facilities we had been utilizing.

The “old” Trustees (most of whom had considerable tenure on the Board) strongly believed that proper Board organization was critical to addressing these issues. The Board Committee on Trustees (since renamed the Governance Committee) had the unenviable task of assuring an adequate Board membership, and during 2009 virtually doubled the size of the Board. I might say in passing that having been in the position of attempting to recruit not-for-profit board members myself, I regard the accomplishments of this Committee and the Board’s leadership as awesome. The recruitment of quality Trustees was critical to the Theatre’s fundraising goals, but it was also important to find role players to spread the Theatre’s message. The Board was rigorous in defining the qualities required from any new trustee and unwavering in ensuring that all newly-appointed trustees met the very highest standards that we had set. Whatever success we have achieved has been the result of a constant review and culling of the candidate list by the Governance Committee and remorseless focus on the goal by a core of Trustees and the Artistic Director. (more…)

Wendy Liscow, Program Officer

I have been attending the introductory workshops of the Dodge Foundation’s Board Leadership Series over the past several weeks, taking copious notes and itching to share tidbits of wisdom I am learning.  It would be impossible to capture everything covered in the six-hour workshops or to adequately describe the discoveries and paradigm shifts in thinking that can only come from participation.  Still, I am committed to sharing some of the basic “aha” moments.

Laura Otten, the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business starts her Board Bootcamp workshop with a sobering statistic:  there are 43,697 nonprofit organizations in New Jersey.  At this point a hush descends over the group as they pause to take in the fact: “My organization is competing with 43,697 other nonprofits for funding, board members, clientele, and to have our message heard.”   That explains the reality nonprofits feel everyday and the constant push to find unique and effective ways to distinguish themselves amongst the crowd. The Board Leadership series is designed to help strengthen your greatest untapped asset in accomplishing this: your Board.

Laura Otten (and the Board training series) identifies a continuum of ways a Board can help differentiate the nonprofit organization it governs.  She began with the most basic thing that every single board member can do in their role as ambassador: she wants board members to go beyond the “elevator speech” and develop the “sideline speech.”  This is the speech board members need to have ready for parties, galas, and business functions or when they are on the sidelines of a soccer or football game and someone asks the inevitable question: “So what do you do?”

Ask yourself, “What percentage of your board answers that question with their employment history and then adds:  ‘AND I am a proud board member of a wonderful organization that does X, Y and Z and is important because of A, B and C.’?”   If you answered anything less than 100%, Laura contends, you are wasting a major asset.

But getting your board to talk about your organization is only half of the equation.  They also all need to be providing a consistent message.  Certainly each board member should and will have their personalized story of why they care about your organization, but at the end of the day, they all need to be telling the whole story of what makes your organization unique.

Board Presidents and Executive Directors: hear this clarion call and be sure that 100% of your board members are out in the world serving as your ambassador and have been given the proper tools to do it well.  It is a perfect use of board meeting time to work on this task, and it will not only yield a more engaged community, but a more invigorated and engaged board.

Also, consider attending one of the Dodge Foundation board leadership workshops that focus on other areas of governance:  Board Recruitment; Strategic Planning; Financial Management; Executive Director and Board relationship; Fundraising; and Succession Planning.  Then you will be the one bringing the learning back to your board  and colleagues.

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