What Healthy Nonprofit Boards Do
Effective nonprofit board governance is critical to organizational success. Organizational success means the nonprofit is fulfilling its mission in the community.
The first step of effective board governance is to ensure each board member understands the board’s role. The board is a strategic policy making body, it does not lead or guide operations. Often boards are so eager to *do* something that individual members go beyond the boundaries of the board’s responsibilities and inflate the role of the board. This can happens when a board member chairs an event and begins to direct employees or the board requires approval of new hires, program decisions, or employee-specific compensation. These are all operational matters for the CEO to manage.
The board is important, indispensable even, but it does not run the organization. It ensures at the highest level that the programs of the nonprofit can operate.
Healthy nonprofit boards of directors do the following:
Execute the work of the board and do not depend on the CEO and staff to do it, including determining board agendas and running meetings.
Allocate the board’s time to strategic issues such as mission, vision, values, and strategic planning.
Take responsibility for ensuring the CEO and organization has the financial and other resources to succeed.
Participate in board development on a regular basis.
Actively engage with the CEO and staff through engaged committee work.
Ensure active board governance committee.
Recruit, vet, and select qualified board members using an intentional process.
Offer an engaging and meaningful new board member orientation.
Evaluate the board’s performance on a regular basis.
Evaluate the CEO/Executive Director using a documented process and establish annual compensation using comparable data and a replicable process.
Review the bylaws on regular intervals.
Good boards of directors assess themselves and engage in constant improvement to avoid responsibility creep and dysfunction. Good board work is a lot of effort for a volunteer position, but it is critically important to the work of nonprofits in every community.