Board Complicity in "Founder-it is"

There's another thing that I have seen happen in nonprofits that are suffering from "founder-itis" in both early and later stages. That is the inability or the unwillingness of the members of the Board of Directors to take seriously their role as supervisors and managers of the organization's chief executive officer. This happens principally for the reason that the CEO is the founder who originally asked these board members to serve.

The CEO is the charismatic presence that dreamed up the idea, motivated other volunteers, put the organization together, and maybe even invented the methodology used in serving the target population. Thus the CEO is someone the Board members believe in, and someone to whom the Board members look for leadership. They believe in the founder's cause, in the person and the rationale for service. Why, then, should they want to manage, much less try to discipline, their founder/executive. They find themselves in a role that permits no easy solution. The result? They basically ignore that role, and let the founder/executive do as he/she pleases. And that's a major source of trouble on several fronts.

1. Board become micro-managers. The Board, having refused, albeit informally, to be the founder/executive's supervisor or manager, now becomes the micro-manager of the organization along with the founder/executive. Together they focus on the daily issues of program details, budget, hiring practices, the staff, and even staff hiring and performance. They focus on the special event details, and on the grant proposals written to foundations. They take apart, digest, mull over and discuss every aspect of the organization's life; every aspect, that is except the founder/executive; that position is left untouched, because it wasn't in the unwritten job description when they started, and the political situation doesn't lend itself to such work.

2. Board relinquishes the fundraising role. Since the Board is micro-managing the organization, it has little time, but also little inclination, to perform as the chief fundraising arm of the organization. Once you see all the inner workings of any nonprofit, all the bad stuff and the good stuff together, it's so complicated and so multi-dimensional, that a board member has a hard time climbing back up to the kind of eagle's-eye view of the organization's work that gives them the excitement and motivation necessary to go out and cultivate and solicit friends and colleagues. The view of all the minute details is also very often counter-productive for the continued personal giving by many of those board members. So they stop giving, and they stop cultivating and soliciting gifts.

3. Board never has time for strategic planning. Each meeting is full of micro-managing details of running the organization. It's the golf outing, it's the auction. Maybe it's the hiring of a new staff person. Maybe it's the production of the annual report. It could also be the new program, with the matching grant application to the local foundation. Whatever it is, no matter how often or how long the Board meets, this type of agenda fills the time.

They never give themselves a chance to step way back, take the eagle's-eye view and ask the strategic questions:
"What do we want to accomplish in the society."
"What steps must we take to ensure that this result happens?"
"What are the ways we will evaluate progress toward this goal," and
"How will be define and initiate mid-course corrections that need to be made in our strategies?"

By the time it gets to this stage, the Board is so mired down in daily operations that it cannot view the organization's situation strategically. Thus it does no strategic planning. After all, it's easier to leave that up to the charismatic founder who really has the answers on what we need to be doing and when and how and for what purpose. It's easy just to buy into that dream, that vision, as originally articulated very long ago. But that's going to spell no end of trouble for the nonprofit within a relatively short time. And this will be especially the case with regard to fundraising and the ability to build capacity in that area.

Still more on this to come on this complex aspect of "Founder-itis"….