The Nonprofit Secret: The Six Principles of Successful Board/CEO Partnerships

By Jonathan D. Schick

Sometimes, the secrets of success in any organization can elude even the best executives. It's often not easy to come up with the best combination of leadership, collaboration, strategy, and stewardship that foster success. This is especially true in the nonprofit and association world: the executive/board dynamic is often riddled with political and functional challenges that creep into the running of the organization, conflicting with operations and inhibiting efficacy, despite everyone’s devotion to the same set of goals.

In this article, I'll be sharing an excerpt from my book, The Nonprofit Secret: The Six Principles of Successful Board/CEO Partnerships, to help illustrate one of the key secrets of success that can unlock your organization’s potential and lead to successful board/executive partnerships.

First, the six principles I outline in my book include…

With that outline in mind, the following is an excerpt from Principle III – The CEO Has Only One Employer - on pages 34-36 of my book.

How Many Bosses Do You Have?
When I get to Principle III in my seminars, I pose two questions to the CEOs in the room. “How many board members do you have?” is my first question. The answer varies—sometimes it’s a number like fifteen or twenty; sometimes it’s more in the range of seven to nine, depending on the size of the organization. It’s when I ask the next question— “How many bosses do you have?”— that things really get interesting.

Sometimes “one” is the response I get. But sometimes the answer is a long way from one. A lot of times the same number pops up as the answer to both questions—for example, a CEO will say that he has fifteen board members and thus, fifteen bosses. The executive committee and the board chair often exert their own distinct voices, and sometimes each individual is positing his or her own ideas.

The answer to the second question should, of course, be one. And that “one” is not the board chair. As we discussed at the outset of this chapter, if all is functioning as it ought to in a nonprofit, the CEO has one boss: the board as a single unit. And a unified board doesn’t mean you have to dance around the table at board meetings, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” It simply means that each member of the board gets one equal vote, and only one. After they’ve cast that vote, they act as one body, and any lingering disagreements or individual concerns must be set aside for the good of the whole board. For a number of nonprofits, this means changing the whole paradigm they’ve been using for years.

At many organizations, there’s a kind of unspoken understanding that the board chair, or other powerful board member, gets more than one vote. Though it’s never verbalized, this latent belief can still have an incredibly detrimental effect on an organization. The Six Principles model reframes the role of the chair because so often, CEOs live and die by the chair. I firmly believe that it’s capricious to have a system where every one or two years, when a new chair is appointed, a whole new cycle begins, bringing with it a different set of expectations. Suddenly an organization is relegated to operating under the chair du jour, which often translates into the whim du jour—not very conducive to long-term vision or planning.

The way to avoid this kind of upheaval is to always be wary of assigning a disproportionate amount of power to the board chair. The chairman’s role is undeniably important, but instead of spearheading the board, the role should be one of cooperative facilitation. It is the chair’s job to facilitate a strong relationship between the collective board and the CEO. After all, it’s not the chair/ CEO partnership that concerns us; it’s the Six Principles of Board/CEO Partnerships.

© Jonathan D. Schick, All Rights Reserved

Jonathan D. Schick is President, GOAL Consulting and author of The Nonprofit Secret. Mr. Schick was recently the moderator at NYSAE’s CEO Connect event.