A woman I know owns two restaurants 20 miles apart. I
asked her how she manages that. “It’s hard to rock two babies,” she said.
Brian T. Moynihan,
head of Bank of America beat back a serious challenge that would have required
him to separate his chairmanship of the board of directors from his job as CEO.
In the nonprofit world I inhabit I can't recall a single instance of this type
of duality. That's because the board of a nonprofit is an agency charged with
holding the organization's assets on the public's behalf. There are no
shareholders.
That is not to say
that nonprofits are better governed as a result of a distinction between
governance and management at the very top. In BoA one might surmise that
internal and external directors bring expertise to the board room and pretty
much leave the CEO alone to run the company. Of course then you get the
Volkswagen scandal. The tech-savvy CEO may be tossed out but where was board
scrutiny? W hat did the board know and when did they know it?
In a
nonprofit there is a fundamental ambivalence that inures to boards. Are
trustees there to give money, or to govern? Nonprofit CEOs, in my experience,
would prefer a board of donors over a board of governors. In the typical
nonprofit the CEO plays a big role in board recruitment - and why not?
Ideally a nonprofit is staff managed and board advised. Any CEO will tell
you that what they don't want from their board is micromanagement
nor interference in personnel decisions. In a nonprofit achieving good
governance, good giving and good getting concurrently is challenging and often
one element or another is weak or altogether missing
As a nonprofit
consultant and nonprofit trustee I think there are six key challenges for any
board or any CEO:
Vision
and strategy.
The
chairman-CEO relationship.
Succession
planning.
The CEO's
frequency of communications to the board. (There is a difference between data
and information).
What is
expected of trustees.
What
trustees expect of the nonprofit.
For all I can
fault in nonprofit governance and management I think we got
it right on this one.
