Strong Board, Strong Executive Director

BTMAD 06


The board must speak as whole and not as individual members. The Executive Director (ED) is the board’s link with the staff. So it has a personal relationship with the ED but deals only conceptually, through policy, with the whole organization. There can be chronic problems unless both the board and the ED both have strong, separate functions. The challenge is to keep the roles separate and complementary. Many times ED’s are encouraged to be either manipulators or Milquetoasts. A strongly designed ED position helps the board avoid the intricacies and short-term focus appropriate to management, and instead work exclusively on governance of the whole and long-term goals.

All board authority delegated to the staff is delegated through the ED. All accountability of staff, as far as the board is concerned, is the accountability of the ED. If we make the roles clear, then the board has only one employee – the Executive Director. The ED is accountable for the entire organization’s meeting expectations. The relationship between board members and ED is as colleagues and is not as individual board members. The relationship has three parts: board/ED/staff. The board does not direct or judge staff performance, the ED does that.

With the board operating at policy arms length from operations and delegating so much authority to the ED, it must therefore carefully monitor to know that its directives are being followed. The board monitors through the flow of information. There are 3 types of information: decision, monitoring, and incidental.

Decision information is the data need to make decisions (not judgments), e.g. budget policy. Monitoring info is used to gauge whether board directives have been satisfied. Incidental info everything else but often masquerades as monitoring performance and lacks criteria to judge the information received. There is nothing wrong with this kind of global info and it may help us to make better decisions and policy. The danger is that incidental information may delude the board into thinking it is properly monitoring the ED’s performance.

Good monitoring of ED performance is necessary so the board can relax its fears about the present and turn its attention to the future. Setting criteria ahead of time is critical to good governance. It saves board time by having pre-established criteria. Also criteria are needed to insure fairness in judging performance and results. This is best done as a two-step process: debate, then decide. Then the board need only judge whether performance matches the pre-established criteria.

“If you haven’t said how it ought to be, then don’t ask how it is”, is the principle that forces a board to monitor rather than meander. The board monitors using one of three methods: executive report, external audit, and direct inspection. The ED’s job is to make everything come out right. That translates into achieving the board’s Ends without violating its Executive Limitations. Monitoring and evaluating are continuous processes.

The roles of the board and ED are totally different. Boards make policy and EDs implement policy. Neither should interfere with the responsibilities of the other. Boards should not intrude on staff performance and EDs should not tell the board what to do next. Asking the ED, “What do you want us to do next?” should not be a governing board’s approach. The foremost expectations between board and ED are for mutual support and respect for each other’s responsibilities. The board has a right to expect performance and the ED has the right to expect clear rules and how to play by them.