No need for Fear when Evaluating Board Members’ Performance

Continuing on this thread, one of the other things we observe about the general attitude of many nonprofit executives and staff members about setting standards of performance for their boards, is that they are deathly afraid of anything that might affront or challenge a board member.

Why is this? Well, probably for fear of losing their jobs, or losing the board member and all that influence and potential money. After all, the board members serve in a volunteer capacity for which the nonprofit ought to be grateful. Even many board members seem to harbor internal thoughts like, "Who are these staff people to come along and try to impose some kind of performance standards and then force an evaluation process?! Whatever I give out of my busy day should be satisfactory enough!" And then there's the secondary fear of maybe getting a tough reputation around town as the only charity that evaluates the performance of its board.

But let's examine this a little more deeply. Fear of losing a job suggests that the nonprofit organization is somehow the last bastion of the old fiefdom system, where the executive and staff are working for the knights and royalty of the realm and are little more than indentured servants. And it further suggests that some board members are acting like a bunch of tyrants – unable or unwilling to take responsibility for holding up their end of the workload at the charity. So that may seem to make performance standards seem like an imposition and an indication of ungratefulness. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

As for the board members who give generaously of their time and talents, no question, but what these are needed, and welcomed. But it's not the executive and staff who should be suggesting that the board have performance standards and evaluation; it's the board members themselves who should be mandating performance standards for themselves and their peers, and who should be devising and executing a regular performance evaluation on themselves. This is the genius behind the establishiment of the whole charitable sector: that volunteers do a good job of policing the organization so that government doesn't have to do that job.

You see, the nonprofit organization is a public trust. The board of directors is appointed or elected on behalf of the whole society for the purpose of providing governance for the nonprofit on behalf of the whole community. They are in charge of steering the nonprofit in the right strategic direction in order to accomplish some specific social aims that this board has told the society this charity will accomplish. Then they're job is to do the strategic planning, hire the executive, and make sure that program and finances are going in the right direction. No one else can do that. The executive can't do that; the staff can't do that; and outside people or agencies can't do that.

So the only people who can perform the tasks board members are asked to do are the board members themselves. So why shouldn't there be specific performance standards in place that measure how well the board is doing its job? And why should it not be the board members themselves who insist on having, and go through the process of devising and enforcing, performance standards, so that they know, objectively and publicly, when they have done a good job?

That, as we said above, is the way to help human beings really do a good job, have a wonderful feeling of success, and feel proud of their organization. The mere fact that it might have been the executive or staff that came up with the suggestion of performance standards, and may have created the first draft of such standards, should in no way be held against them. Board members should, rather, be grateful that they have an executive and staff smart enough and creative enough to give them some assistance in coming up with this kind of governance tool.

There should be absolutely no question of fear in this, whatsoever.