I agree there’s a lot of diversity across non-profit goals and thus no one-size-fits-all advice will be particularly useful.
I suspect the binding constraint here is people on nonprofit boards are often doing it as a very minor part-time thing and while they may be directly aligned with the mission, they find it hard to prioritize this when there’s other tasks and deadlines more directly in their face.
And people on non-profit boards generally cannot get paid, so a lot of our standard cultural instincts tell us not to put a high premium on this.
Of course there can be exceptions when people are passionately aligned with the mission of the organization, and when their role is very much in the public eye. Or when it’s a social experience, particularly if there’s in-person get-togethers. But for organizations that you and I have led/been involved with, none of these are quite as strong as they might be for the “local afterschool children’s program/soup kitchen/pet rescue center”. Nor are many of these orgs super high-profile and in the public eye; they’re a bit more meta and niche I think.
With this in mind, I think what you’re suggesting—that the full-time staff/leader does need to do the agenda and priority setting—makes sense. With other people on the team chiming in with ideas and information the leader is not aware of … giving sanity checks and communications/comprehensibility feedback … which in my experience is indeed often very helpful
Mostly agree. I’ve been involved in local orgs a bit more than most people in EA, and grew up in a house where my parents were often serving terms on different synagogue and school boards, and my wife has continued her family’s similar tradition—so I strongly agree that passionate alignment changes things—but even that rarely leads to boards setting the strategic direction.
I think a large part of this is that strategy is hard, as you note, and it’s very high context for orgs. I still wonder about who is best placed to track priority drift, and about how much we want boards to own the strategic direction; it would be easy, but I think very unhelpful, for the board to basically just do what Holden suggests, and only be in charge of the CEO—because a lot of value from the board is, or can be, their broader strategic views and different knowledge. And for local orgs, that happens much more, the leaders need to convince board members to do things or make changes, rather than doing it on their own and getting vague approval from the board. But, as a last point, it seems hard to do lots of this for small orgs. Overhead from the board is costly, and I don’t know how much effort we want to expect.
I agree there’s a lot of diversity across non-profit goals and thus no one-size-fits-all advice will be particularly useful.
I suspect the binding constraint here is people on nonprofit boards are often doing it as a very minor part-time thing and while they may be directly aligned with the mission, they find it hard to prioritize this when there’s other tasks and deadlines more directly in their face.
And people on non-profit boards generally cannot get paid, so a lot of our standard cultural instincts tell us not to put a high premium on this.
Of course there can be exceptions when people are passionately aligned with the mission of the organization, and when their role is very much in the public eye. Or when it’s a social experience, particularly if there’s in-person get-togethers. But for organizations that you and I have led/been involved with, none of these are quite as strong as they might be for the “local afterschool children’s program/soup kitchen/pet rescue center”. Nor are many of these orgs super high-profile and in the public eye; they’re a bit more meta and niche I think.
With this in mind, I think what you’re suggesting—that the full-time staff/leader does need to do the agenda and priority setting—makes sense. With other people on the team chiming in with ideas and information the leader is not aware of … giving sanity checks and communications/comprehensibility feedback … which in my experience is indeed often very helpful
Mostly agree. I’ve been involved in local orgs a bit more than most people in EA, and grew up in a house where my parents were often serving terms on different synagogue and school boards, and my wife has continued her family’s similar tradition—so I strongly agree that passionate alignment changes things—but even that rarely leads to boards setting the strategic direction.
I think a large part of this is that strategy is hard, as you note, and it’s very high context for orgs. I still wonder about who is best placed to track priority drift, and about how much we want boards to own the strategic direction; it would be easy, but I think very unhelpful, for the board to basically just do what Holden suggests, and only be in charge of the CEO—because a lot of value from the board is, or can be, their broader strategic views and different knowledge. And for local orgs, that happens much more, the leaders need to convince board members to do things or make changes, rather than doing it on their own and getting vague approval from the board. But, as a last point, it seems hard to do lots of this for small orgs. Overhead from the board is costly, and I don’t know how much effort we want to expect.