It was a strange meeting to dread. But part of me regarded it with apprehension.
I was president of Grameen Foundation, anticipating my performance review in December 2004. We had nearly doubled our revenue, from $6 million to $11.7 million, in a year. Our five-year strategic plan, adopted 13 months earlier, had met with success in other important respects. We had attracted talented new staffers, formalized many internal processes, strengthened relationships with partners around the world, earned terrific coverage in the Economist about our microfinance work in India, and convened a string of successful board and committee meetings during the year.
I knew that the board chair, Susan Davis, and the vice chair, Yvette Neier, would mention these achievements during my review, which they conducted on behalf of the whole board. While I knew that the highlights would certainly boost my ego, I wondered how much the board members grasped my deficiencies as a leader. If they did, how would they raise them, if at all?
The successful year, and my improved performance since Susan took the helm four years earlier, could have made it easy to overlook my weaknesses. These included poor decision-making in emotionally charged situations, driving my staff too hard, and difficulty retaining high-performing fundraisers.
On the one hand, part of me hoped that they would gloss over those issues in the wake of so much progress. On the other, discussing them openly would be something of a relief: a recognition that people in a position of authority understood my struggles, so I wouldn’t have to pretend they didn’t exist or grapple with them alone.
As I write in my book, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons From Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship, the trustees handled the meeting brilliantly. Susan and Yvette began by praising me for my role in our successes, then gently acknowledged my faults, gathered from their keen observations and by soliciting input from staff members.
Their next steps serve as a model for how board leaders should handle a struggling CEO: They offered a concrete plan to support my continued development. In other words, they gave me a vote of confidence that was grounded in complex reality.
Specifically, they proposed that we amend the foundation’s 2005 budget to include $30,000 for my professional development; they suggested spending it on a management coach of my choice (though they offered to help find one if I asked).
We were not far removed from the hyper-frugal early days of the Grameen Foundation, so the amount seemed like far too much to spend on my growth as a leader. Overall, though, I felt that their approach was thoughtful and found their offer affirming and supportive. They had acknowledged my weaknesses and taken a large measure of responsibility for helping me confront them.
They did not put the onus on me to come up with a development plan and figure out how to pay for it. They gave serious thought to what needed to be done and then properly — indeed, in my mind, generously — found money in the budget to pay for it. I left the meeting feeling appreciated, deeply understood, and supported as a leader and as a person.
After this experience, I realized that nonprofit leadership is difficult not only when times are tough (for example, a budget shortfall or program failure); it can be hard also when everything is going well. Success in fundraising, positive media attention, and mission-advancing achievements should be celebrated, but they can also bring unexpected risks. (For example, they can attract new media scrutiny, spark jealousy from peer organizations, and lead to internal turf battles about how to allocate and deploy the new financial resources and brand equity.)
10 Ways to Create a Positive Relationship Between Chief and Chair
For CEOs, whether dealing with the pitfalls of growth/success or of contraction/failure, few things are as important as a positive relationship with your board chair or president. As I wrote my book, I was surprised by how often I returned to the advice, input, and support of — and occasional arguments with — board chairs. Each one modeled leadership and set standards that I tried to adapt, adopt, and emulate.
Since then, I’ve spent time trying to distill the essential features of these healthy relationships. Here are a several key ways board chairs and CEOs can forge a strong partnership.
The chair must earn the respect of the board. Before she was elected chair and especially afterward, Susan earned the respect of the entire board — not through donations, which were modest given her resources at the time, but through hard work, fairness, exceptional listening skills, and willingness to push and challenge me, and individual board members, when needed. These qualities helped ensure that people took her compliments, suggestions, and occasional admonitions seriously.
The chair and CEO must engage deeply. There is no substitute for a board chair who is highly conversant in the organization’s work and willing to participate in it alongside staff members and clients when possible. Visiting project sites together, for example, can be an important educational and bonding experience for a CEO and chair. Conversely, the CEO must interact frequently with board members, both one-on-one and collectively. Actively and sensitively managing relationships with each trustee cannot be delegated to the chair or done sporadically or half-heartedly.
The chair and CEO must complement and substitute for each other. Take advantage of each other’s strengths and cover each other’s limitations. For example, I gave Susan many public-speaking opportunities, and another chair quite a few leadership roles in negotiating with third parties, since they excelled at those duties. When I was unable to represent the organization, or when scheduling conflicts prevented a chair from attending an internal meeting, we stepped in for each other.
As chair, be visible to, and inspire trust in, the staff. Ensure that the board chair is sufficiently accessible to, and trusted by, the professional staff. That can take many forms. For example, the chair can run interference for staffers when a board member oversteps his or her role, meet one-on-one or in small groups with staff members to elicit their aspirations and concerns, and send thoughtful messages to the whole staff during times of triumph or crisis to complement those circulated by the CEO.
Accept occasional tension as part of a healthy relationship rather than a problem. I recall a time when Susan and I were at odds on a few issues, and I asked Yvette, the vice chair, about it. Rather than taking a side, she simply noted that tensions and even a degree of conflict are built into the partnership. If they were absent, she felt, it would be more worrisome than comforting. I took her wisdom to heart in all my future roles as a nonprofit CEO or chair.
The chair has the CEO’s back. When a CEO is vulnerable, such as in the wake of a major misjudgment or funding shortfall, it is important that the chair express support both publicly and in private. There will be a time for constructive criticism later, but at the onset of a crisis, the CEO must see the chair as a strong and empathetic ally — unless the crisis endangers the viability of the organization, which may require a somewhat different approach.
Maintain regular communication — with some meetings focused on a tight agenda and others unstructured — and account for the realities of people’s lives. The frequency and manner of communication with my board chairs have varied according to the demands on their time and mine. But communication has usually been frequent and substantive. When one of my best chairs unexpectedly went from semiretirement to running a public company midway through his tenure, the frequency and depth of our conversations fell, and our partnership grew weaker as a result.
Agree on, and work together to attain, the desired board culture. My board chairs and I developed a culture that, in part, reflects conventional wisdom on board governance. For example, we encouraged dissenting views, occasionally allowed board members to take on work that usually falls to staff members in an organization of our size, and delegated more work to committees than many boards do. And departing from a widely accepted best practice, we used peer accountability techniques that evaluate whether each board member adds value to the mission to ensure that everyone on the board pulled his or her weight, rather than enforcing term limits.
Collaboratively manage conflict on the board, and between board and staff members. Conflict is inevitable — and in some ways healthy — among board members and between board and staff members. But when it erupts, it is essential that the chair and the CEO work quickly and collaboratively to understand the conflict and develop a pragmatic way to resolve or at least minimize it. These situations may require compromise. I served on one board where a conflict broke out between the founder, who served on the board, and a member who was brought on because of his expertise in board governance. This represented an important challenge for the CEO and the chair to manage. Sadly, they ignored the issue, leading to several resignations and additional unnecessary organizational trauma.
Understand each other’s roles, ideally based on direct experience. Susan had been a nonprofit CEO, and I had been a nonprofit board chair. We each brought those experiences to our work at Grameen Foundation. I think this helped us a great deal. We understood many of the ambiguities and occasional absurdities of the other’s position through our lived experience.
It takes hundreds of thoughtful actions and challenging conversations, over the course of many months, to create a healthy partnership between people in these two roles. Investing in that relationship is a prototypical “important but not urgent” task that a CEO and chair must emphasize rather than put off.
The payoff is more than worth the effort, yielding benefits that can make the good times sweeter and more rewarding for an organization’s mission and team, and the lean times significantly easier to navigate.
Alex Counts (@AlexCounts) is an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, a nonprofit consultant, and a writer. He is the founder of Grameen Foundation, where he served as president and CEO for 18 years. His new book is titled “Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons From Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship.”
