Games Board Members Play -- Part 1 of 2

When we first started this thread on board development, we asked the question “Why is it that we are reluctant to provide our nonprofit governance boards with standards of performance and regular performance review?”

Well, another thing we know about human nature is that humans sometimes like to involve themselves in “game playing” behavior. Some of you readers may hark back, as I do, to the mid 1960s when a fellow named Eric Berne came out with a book called “The Games People Play.” His book was a popularized version of what at that time was called “transactional analysis,” which was developed as a way to explain the interactive behavior of humans as a series of “transactions” between our inherent “parent,” our “child” and our “adult.”

You might also remember that, for a variety of reasons, our inner child and parent tend to skew a transaction in such a way as to rather illicitly derive or force something for themselves out of the interchange at the expense of the other person, whereas our adult tends to deal straight-up, without such manipulations that favor self at the expense of the other.

In my practice, I have seen numerous nonprofit boards where both board members and staff would be horrified at the thought of performance standards for the board because they were involved in a series of games from which the members of these boards were deriving more or less “illicit” or manipulated personal aggrandizement – of a purely psychological nature, please understand – from the various transactions that go on in the course of doing a board’s business.

Would Board members of a nonprofit organization really do that? Would they really have their own agenda that would override consideration of the agenda the Board is supposed to be working on? Sure they would... and do! Regularly. Yes, even these stalwart pillars, these leaders of the community, business owners, institutional heads, self-giving volunteers who are brought together to govern a public trust (which is what a nonprofit is). They can and do bring their own agendas into the meeting and press those agendas, in some cases, to the exclusion of all else.

Your reaction, dear reader, may be "But wait a minute, John, I've been to lots of Board meetings and the people on those boards are quite serious and down to earth and ready to help. After all they're volunteering their time to help the nonprofit. How can you say that?"

This isn't something they necessarily do consciously. Most of them don't come into the meeting and purposively give the charity's agenda short shrift. They are intelligent, for the most part well-educated, frequently very dedicated people. They don't really set out to sabotage the work at hand. If you asked any person around the table, they would stoutly deny that there's anything untoward going on in their heads. But here's how it works.

What are the sub-conscious questions each person in any group of people is asking during a meeting? The first internally asked question is, "What do I think of myself in this group, how do I see myself, what is my image of myself in this context? Each person around the table has a set of self images upon which they draw, depending on the group they're in. These images are the sum of the "role" this person has elected to play in the life of the group. They will, quite naturally, keep this set of self-images in good repair, and it is through this role that they derive what they want from the group's interaction.

Second, every person around the table is very interested in "What is the image that the other person (each other person at the table) has of me? How do they see me? What do they want/need from me? What is their role regarding me"

Third, every person at the table is also asking "What is my image of that other person – what do I think of them? What do I know about them? What do I think they want of me, what do I think I can give to them?"

Fourth, again, every person at the table is sub-consciously going to go to the next level, which is "How can I either alter that person's perception of me, or confirm that perception? What do I need to do or say to bring my images of myself, my image of what that other person thinks of me, and what I think about that other person into some kind of harmony that I can accept?" And this goes on around the table ad infinitum throughout the board meeting.

This internal assessment and adjustment mechanism goes on at a subliminal level or a more conscious level depending on many factors in the particular board member's or staff person's life at that moment. Lots of factors influence that. But it is operating nonetheless.

Into this arena, then, the individual board member’s “child” or “adult” finds it easy to interject itself in a variety of ways that are designed to bring to that person rather ill-gotten or manipulated psychological gains at the expense of others in the group or at the expense of the nonprofit and its mission. Resisting that temptation takes a powerful conscious ability to deal consistently with others on an “adult-to-adult” level of transaction. And this is the thing that Berne pointed to in his book "Games People Play."

Let’s see how this might work in a typical interpersonal transaction during a board meeting in tomorrow’s post.