The Indispensable Role of the Grumpy Board Member

“Dissidents anywhere have an interesting time, particularly on boards of directors.”
Walter Cronkhite, A Reporter’s Life, p 371.

Every board needs one member who is contrary, challenging and skeptical. And every board struggles with how to harmonize that board member’s behavior with the rest of the board. Ouch.

Why does the board need this grumpy board member?

There is a story reported in Newsweek about a small plane whose image appeared on the military radar screens in Moscow in the 1980s. The military technicians had a hard time identifying what this green blip on the screen really was in the air. Was it a group of birds? No, the birds would be migrating north at this time, not south as they blip on the screen traveled. Could it be hail? No, no clouds in the vicinity. Then, everyone in the group agreed that it would be birds, even though nobody believed it.

Group think.

Boards are susceptible to group think. Everyone on the board wants to get along with each other (witness the low number of split votes on any issue), they often have pre-existing social relationships with each other and they generally don’t want a lot of conflict in their volunteer work.

A contrary, challenging, skeptical board member can help avoid group-think decisions. This board member asks uncomfortable questions. He raises red flags. He slows down runaway processes. He looks at things perhaps as a banker would: would he lend money on this idea? This grumpy board member, by virtue of his world view and neurological wiring, isn’t going to let anything slip by.

It may not be that this board member wishes to be combative. His brain just works a little differently from his colleagues’. Some people sort information by similarity. Picture a row of six red dots and one black one. You might see six red dots. You sort things by how they are similar. Your grumpy board member sees one black dot. He sorts things by how they are different.

In a board meeting, as the members are circling around an imminent decision, the grumpy board member is likely looking at what’s different and not lining up, not how the decision is coming together. He’s asking questions that begin with the word “but…” He’s a pain in the neck in getting decisions nailed down. He can’t help it. He’s wired that way.

And that wiring is important to having the board avoid group-think mistakes. No decisions will sail through unassaulted. They’ll all go through the gauntlet. Good.

Another form of grumpy board member behavior is advancing nasty question, “But how will it work?” This board member may sort information more toward the fine-detail end of the spectrum, away from the big-picture side.

The big picture people are already launched toward their next agenda item, having painted with a broad brush a compelling vision of how great the future will be when the decision at hand has been implemented. They are driving down the road looking at the mountains in the distance, and the wonderful puffy cumulus clouds above them. The big-picture people are gazing at the clouds but missing the potholes.

The detail-oriented board member wants to know, yes, grand vision, but also how exactly will it work and what exactly do we do tomorrow to move this decision forward? The big picture board members say, “That’s just a detail.” The detail-oriented board member replies, “Exactly.” This detail-oriented board member’s question deserves an answer. If the board can’t spec out the details, maybe it doesn’t understand the decision. It’s not looking out for the potholes. The detail-oriented board member will help the board look down from the clouds toward the road bed.

A third grumpy board member behavior is about avoiding trouble. Most board members are more motivated to take action by moving toward desirable things that the organization does not yet have, rather than by moving away from things that the organization doesn’t want. This is opposite from the make up of the general population. At least in North America, 85% of us are more moved to action by getting away from what we don’t want. Hence all the negative campaigning that political candidates engage in—they work with most of the people.

Many board members are exceptional people in that they are in the 15% of move-toward people. They are more prone to Polly Anna optimism, seeing the bright side and overemphasizing the positive facet of the issue. They can make errors of grandiosity and avoid sufficient diligence.

The move-away board member helps prevent pies-in-the-sky by bringing up potential snags, hiccups, bear-traps, tangles, snares and pitfalls. This board member’s questions also often start with the word “but.” “But where will we get the money? We don’t have the available capacity. This will get us cross-wise to the county commissioners.” And a host of other issues.

The board needs to listen, consider the issue or question sincerely and to make sure that the concern is covered.

The grumpy board member is odd in the organization, lonely on the board, and utterly indispensable. The rest of the board views with member as a pain.

The real pain is to not have someone on the board filling the role of contrarian, argumentarian, detail-monger, black-hat, stone-hearted banker.

Most of us are trying to get along on the board, smooth out relations, looking at the big picture, moving toward what would make the world a better place. We can miss the trouble spots, problems and details.

The lone grumpy board member is a vital asset to the board. Listen to him. Take him sincerely. Make better decisions (but make them) with his questions in mind. And don’t forget to tell him that he’s important, even when overruled or outvoted.

And if you don’t have one such board member, go get one.

Make Board Service Fun

“If you ever get stretched to the point of being discouraged, pick up an annual plan and see how much you have done. If that doesn’t do it, walk through the village green, which was a dump of abandoned cars and watch the weddings happening there now and take time to smell the roses.”
Dick Brant, member of the board, Leelanau Conservancy

Non-profit board members do not receive any pay for their time, efforts, interest and expertise. Some people might ask, “why would anyone serve on such a board? What do they get out of it?”

Why indeed.

While the rationale for board service is unique to each individual board member, some themes do emerge. Some are in it for the networking opportunities, to rub elbows with influential people. Some are in it to learn new skills applicable to their jobs. Some are in it because they couldn’t say no to a friend who asked them to join the board.

Most agree to serve on a board because they believe in the mission of the organization and believe that they can make a positive difference to the effectiveness of the organization. They perceive the reward of making the world a better place.

I don’t know many board members who joined because they thought it would be fun. Rewarding, maybe. Fun, I don’t think so.

Should board service be fun as well as rewarding?

Adult learning and performance theory says that people learn and perform at higher levels when they are smiling, laughing, loose and relaxed. How did you learn to spell when you were a kid? With a ruler aimed at the back of your head, or embedded in a game focused on the names of African animals? Would board members perform better if they were having fun?

On the off chance that this is true, what can you do to make board service more fun?
1. Break bread together. There is something magical and deep-seated in the psyche about sharing food together. Explore starting board meetings with a half-hour tea, cocktail, ice-cream social. Or including a meal in the middle of the board meeting. Or having a social event for the board itself with no business agenda.

2. Start board meetings with ten minutes to list all the things that are going right with the organization. This exercise sets a positive tone and helps the board realize that progress is being made.

3. Give goofy awards for board contributions, the more light-hearted the better.

4. Give the board members a chance to get close to the mission. At The Watershed School in Boulder, Colorado, a half-dozen students come for the beginning of the board meeting to say what is going well for them at school and how the school could improve, giving the board an up close source of important information about how the school is doing.

5. Give the board members tasks that are both indispensable and which they are suited to do, then reward them appropriately for completing them. The reward part should follow the Platinum Rule, which differs from the Golden Rule in an important way: “Do unto others as they wish to be done to.”

6. Perhaps the most important way to make board service fun is for the organization to make significant progress toward its mission. This requires having a clear sense of what constitutes progress (a vivid vision and way to monitor achievement).

“It’s truly fun to be part of an organization that really makes a difference.”
Craig Miller, member of the board of the Leelanau Conservancy

Hiring Right

The most important thing that a board can do to assist the success of the organization is to hire the right executive director.

If you have the right person in the job, there isn’t much you can do to mess it up. If you have the wrong person in the job, there isn’t much you can do to make it better.

Consider an executive director who has trouble raising money, setting a clear direction for the organization, getting along with staff, engaging partners and working with board. What is the board to do?

Consider an executive director who gets along well with donors, incites the staff and volunteers to greater performance, runs the finances crisply, has a clear sense of the relative roles of herself and the board and makes progress in implementing the strategic plan, which is a good one. What does the board need to do?

So how do you find a good executive director?

Deepen the pool of applicants.
First, there aren’t that many people out there who have the capacity and willingness to do this kind of job. The hours are long, the pay is (usually) low, and these jobs are complex. So, the pool of applicants will be shallow and the good candidates in that pool will be few. That means that anything the board can do to deepen the pool will help. Even in the internet era, most job applicants find out about the opportunity through word of mouth. Use your network. Sure, post on Craigslist and other job sites, but also ask everybody you know to spread around the job description, and circulate it as widely as possible. Keep asking the question of everyone in your network, “Who do you know who we should send this job description to?” Remember what Metcalfe’s Law says: that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of members. Then allow time for the network to work and for enough good candidates to apply.

Organize the work into a doable job.
A good job description is pivotal. Non-profit executive director job descriptions look like a description of the unicorn. We all want to believe in a single individual who can raise tons of money, work with elected and appointed officials, serve as an inspiring leader and mentor to the staff and volunteers, keep the books squeaky clean, develop an insightful and brilliant organizational strategy, display superior oral and written communication skills and do all this for $40,000 salary. We all also want to believe in unicorns.

It’s okay to wish for all this in the job description the board uses to recruit candidates. If that’s what the job truly takes, then ask for it and search for it. Just don’t expect to get 100% of it.

Know what functions and expertise are genuinely indispensable for success in this executive director job, be explicit about them, and seek them out. Some other traits might be nice to have, and it’s okay to list them, but keep them in perspective. The must-have traits are truly must-have, and candidates without them should not receive further consideration.

Identify the secret sauce.
In every job there is a certain something that will spell success for the candidate. It might be deep passion for the mission, or ability to pull together disparate interests, or the ability to get things done on time without fail. Look into the organization’s culture for these certain somethings. It’s the special sauce that often decides between success and failure.

In one organization, the special sauce is—the willingness to work the hours necessary to get the job done! One director now struggling in his job came from a charitable foundation in which he just didn’t have to log the hours to tackle the workload. In his new job the workload is heavy, but he hasn’t invested the necessary time to address it, in contrast to his colleagues in this organization whose culture is to work hard. Don’t expect him to last.

In hiring, identify the secret sauce and design the interview process to seek it out in the candidates.

Check references with a critical ear.
Checking references has become a perfunctory task. It’s a mistake to just check it off as a task on the to-do list. In many cases now, the references are instructed by the corporate lawyers and Human Resources Department to do no more than acknowledge that the candidate actually worked there once. But many references will still talk with you openly. The purpose of checking references is to test your hypotheses of where you think the candidate is deficient. You know why you think he’ll succeed. You also have to ask why you think he’ll fail, then test it with references.

If you think the candidate might have trouble getting buy-in from a difficult staff, you might ask, “Have you ever seen him in a touchy situation with other employees? What was the outcome, and what did you see him do or hear him say to create that outcome?” You want to get observable behaviors here, and not so much what the reference thought happened—you be the judge.

You can also check the references of the references. As the references supplied by the candidate for some references: “Who else should we talk with?” Then follow up with those folks to further test your hypotheses.

Listen to your gut feelings.
If your gut instinct says something’s not right, listen to it. You already know why you like the candidate. So then ask yourself why you think the candidate will fail. Be honest. Because there are no unicorns, you will find something not quite right about every candidate. Don’t be afraid to ask and to listen honestly to the answer. The result may be trivial, such as “he reminds me of my brother-in-law,” or it might make all the difference: his lack of fundraising experience is a deal-breaker. In the novel The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, the protagonist has a little mantra to get through life: lead with the head, follow with the heart.

Hire slowly, fire quickly.
As Will Rogers said, “the secret to making money in the stock market is to buy stocks, and when they go up, sell them. And if they don’t go up, don’t buy them.” If something tells you that you don’t have the right candidate, then don’t buy.

The secret to hiring the right executive director is to keep looking until you find one. The temptation is to go through the designed process and hire the best available candidate, even if the best one doesn’t feel right. Resist.

It will be easier to run the process again than to have to fire someone and then run the process again. Hold out for the right person.

The board’s job is to organize the work into a doable job (manifested by a job description), hire the right person and then support that person. So if something isn’t going right, it’s the board’s error in one or more of those functions. Where boards often go astray, quite understandably, is to try too long to provide support when the mistake is in the hiring decision.

Let’s face it, hiring an executive director is a lot of work, but firing one is truly painful. Not only does the board have to do the firing (nobody’s favorite thing), but also has to manage the transition period with an acting director, and then go through the hiring process all over again. Yuck.

Take your time to hire the right person (but not unduly, to avoid missing good candidates). And also pay attention to the first three months of the new executive director’s tenure. My experience is that you can tell in the first six weeks if the executive director is going to make it or not. Most job failures are not a lack of execution in technical functions, but the inability to function well in the culture of the organization and get along with the staff, board and volunteers. You can tell pretty much right away if the new executive director “gets it.” If she doesn’t still get it after six or eight weeks, she probably won’t get it any better after six or eight months.

Fairness dictates that you let go of the new executive director fairly quickly (perhaps three months) if she shows no signs of progress toward the shortcomings that crop up early in her tenure. The board should try everything it can to support the new executive director, but be open to the possibility that she is the wrong person, and if she doesn’t hit benchmarks for improvement that strengthen that feeling, get out the job description and mobilize the network.

After hiring, throw away the recruiting job description and write a new one.
Chances are, you got a good candidate and are excited about your new executive director. Chances are also that she is not a unicorn. Of all the traits you wished for, you only got some of them and not all. Recognize her as a human being. Draw up a new job description by leaving in the functions truly reserved for an executive director and which this candidate can do well. Figure out how to get other necessary functions done by delegating them elsewhere, reducing their importance, or dropping them altogether. Then, after a three month orientation period, sit down with the executive director and establish a set of specific performance objectives so that the executive director and the board both know what the expectations are.

If the board is going to succeed, it absolutely must select a competent executive director. It’s the most important decision that boards make. Do well.

Strong/Weak Combinations—does it have to be that way?

If the executive director is strong, does the board have to be weak? And if the board is strong, does the executive director have to be weak?

Many (most?) organizations seem to fit in one category or the other. In the strong ED-weak board model, the executive director basically runs the organization: making strategy decisions, setting policy, and raising most of the money. The board basically goes along with the executive director’s ideas, suggestions and initiatives, doesn’t ask a lot of questions, and doesn’t rock the boat. If the executive director is competent, the board doesn’t have anything to worry about, and in truth maybe not much to do.

In the strong board-weak executive director model, the board develops the strategic direction, creates policy and raises most of the money. The executive director administers programs and implements board decisions. If the board knows what it is doing and the executive director is a good administrator, this model can be effective.

Obviously, things can go wrong if the strong party isn’t performing up to the level necessary for its strong position. A controlling board that doesn’t establish strategy, direct policy, ensure implementation and adequate results, won’t allow the executive director to do it either (and vice versa). And somebody has to do those things or suffer mission failure.

But does it have to be this way? I can think of a few (but only a few) examples of a strong board and a strong executive director functioning well together. Maybe this is the situation that people talk about when they say “the board sets direction and policy, and the staff carries them out” and other ideal models.

What nags is that there are so few of these ideal models out there. Is that why so much of the literature about boards sounds good but doesn’t actually apply in the real world?

In all cases, the board chair and executive director need to figure out how to work with each other and how to develop strategy, advance policy initiatives, ensure results and raise the money—together. Executive directors often serve different board chairs during their tenure. Board officer positions have term limits, generally a couple of years, and executive director positions do not. Therefore, the strong-weak dynamic may change within limits depending on who is in the board chair seat.

Within limits. It seems unlikely that a new board chair will reverse the balance of power on a strong executive director. It seems equally unlikely that a new board chair will abdicate the strong board’s position to a weak executive director.

A board can be deliberate about which role it chooses when hiring an executive director. One hiring committee faced with a decision to hire a candidate who had passion for the mission, a great network within the served population and a lot of promise, but lacked experience that you generally look for in an executive director. We had a frank discussion about how the board would have to step up for a year or two and help this candidate—should we decide to hire him—to provide leadership for the organization and mentorship for the candidate. This we decided to do. The executive director, now seven years in the job, is seasoned and effective.

So, which situation describes yours? And are you comfortable that the balance of power has found its optimal balance in your organization?