When and how should an Executive Director’s reports be shared with the Board? And what should be in the report?
We observe that Board’s tend to discuss the information that is presented to them. If you want a board to focus on issues of strategic direction and high level policy, then provide and organize the information provided to them accordingly. When Boards are only provided operational measures of output (counts of how much and how many), it often serves as an invitation to focus on issues of program and operational detail.
Some boards want to be kept informed about staff and committee activity. The challenge is to find a way to reasonably respond to this expectation without enabling the Board to sacrifice its responsibility to lead in favor of a desire to manage. Dysfunction will occur when the mentality of an unhealthy employer vs employee relationship – where each seeks to guard against being taken advantage of by the other – replaces a functional collaborative relationship. Leadership and oversight become subordinated to the management of detail and supervision.
We find that such conditions lead Boards and Staff to see each other as evil adversaries. When the rationale of both is that the organization needs to be protected from the other, the flow of information becomes contracted and manipulated. Adversaries keep secrets. Partners search for and share the truth. Abuse occurs in a context of secrets and misinformation. So, the adversarial culture usually produces the opposite of what its proponents seek to accomplish.
On the Board’s on which I serve, the CEO’s report is distributed in between Board meetings and is NOT on the agenda. It’s part dashboard and part narrative. We use online communication as a constant stream to eliminate discussions at meetings about what has already been done in favor of more time on what needs to be done next. When a Board member has a question, he/she hits the reply button and asks the CEO. If a lot of Board members have the same question and there is no good answer available, the item can end up on the agenda as a strategic or policy issue.
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