Videotape Your Next Board Meeting

Okay – I am kidding.  But wouldn’t it be interesting to watch if you did?  And instructive!

The football season is upon us.  After every game, coaches and players huddle around TV monitors to carefully review videos of the game.  “What did we do well that we need to keep doing?  What did not work as well?  How can we improve for the next game?”  These are important questions for football teams – and also for Boards.

While videotaping a Board meeting may be unrealistic, there are other things you can do to regularly evaluate how well the Board is working as a “team.”  One of my common recommendations is a Board Self-Assessment.  BoardSource, a nonprofit which provides services to help nonprofit boards work more effectively, has a great self-assessment tool (http://bit.ly/pz352d) you can purchase so that Board members can provide their confidential input on how well things are going.  The report provides summary data so that Board members can see what they think they are doing well and what they can improve upon.

If you don’t want to invest the money on a self-assessment tool (though it’s well worth it!), then at your next Board meeting ask this question of all Board members:

“What behaviors do we need to model, as Board members, so that our meetings run smoothly and we effectively carry out our responsibilities as a Board?”

Make a nice long list of those behaviors and then, importantly, pull the list out every now and then at the end of a Board meeting and take ten – fifteen minutes to ask one another:  “How are we doing?  What’s working well?  What’s not working?  How can we make what’s not working, work?”

This list of ideal Board behaviors will help you to work together more effectively and it’s a great thing to share with new Board members during orientation.

A more effective Board helps an organization run more effectively.  Try some kind of Board Self-Assessment sometime soon and help your organization make even more of a Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

A Cool Tool

It’s free, it’s been out for about ten years, and yet I think it is still a tremendously underutilized resource.  It is the McKinsey/VPP Organization Capacity Assessment Tool.  To download your free copy, go to:  http://www.vppartners.org/learning/mckinsey-vpp-ocat

The OCAT was developed by consulting experts McKinsey & Company for Venture Philanthropy Partners as a diagnostic to help nonprofits review their operations and identify areas for improvement.  You can use it for:

*SWOT Analysis.  I find that SWOT analysis is often not very rigorous.  Ask your staff, board, and other stakeholders to complete the tool as part of identifying your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats.  It will give you a much more reliable way to assess your capabilities.

*General Management.  I tell people that if I was still a CEO I would keep a copy of the OCAT in my desk drawer and pull it out quarterly to monitor progress on various items.  It gives you an objective tool to monitor your progress.

*Teaching Organization Effectiveness.  Part of our job as senior leaders is to help people understand what it takes to be excellent.  I suggest using the OCAT in orientation of new employees as a way to say:  “This is a picture of excellence – and we are pursuing high scores in every area the tool assesses so we can make even more of an impact.  You have joined a team committed to excellence.”

I have used the OCAT in numerous courses I have taught for nonprofit executives and they always comment about how helpful it is.  I have also used it in many consulting engagements – both for strategic planning and for general management improvement.  The best thing about the tool is that it often uncovers weaknesses that are not obvious to senior leaders in an organization. 

One outstanding aspect of the OCAT is that it is thorough.  I was talking with a group of consultants a couple of years ago who told me that their clients complained that the OCAT was too long and time consuming.  My response was: “Organizations are complex and a thorough tool is needed to assess them.  Also, my clients aren’t wimps and don’t mind doing the hard work needed to achieve excellence!”  Okay, maybe I went a bit too far there.

Check out the OCAT, see what it tells you about your organization and the improvements you can make to enhance your Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

Your Leadership Pipeline

Next week I will be teaching a two day course on Leadership Succession for NeighborWorks America (www.nw.org) in Atlanta.  A few years ago the leaders at NeighborWorks – a national network of organizations which work to provide affordable housing across the country – realized that their local organizations needed to be prepared for the inevitable retirements of Baby Boomers.  They asked me to create a course as one way to help their organizations to be prepared for this big change.

Is your organization prepared for this?  It might hit you sooner than you think.  A recent study by The Meyer Foundation and CompassPoint, entitled “Daring to Lead” (http://daringtolead.org/) found that 67% of the nonprofit CEOs surveyed said that they plan to leave their jobs within the next five years.

And this is not just an issue for CEOs.  Baby Boomer retirements will hit organizations at many senior levels.  The first Baby Boomers, born in 1946, are turning sixty-five this year.  The retirement wave will start slowly at first, and then cascade upon us.  We had about 3.4 million births in the US in 1946 – an increase of more than 20% from the year before.  That number kept growing until it hit 4 million per year in 1954 and did not fall below that until 1964 – the end of the Boom.  That is a ton of senior leadership in organizations – and vast institutional knowledge – that will be leaving the workplace.

What should you do to prepare?  I suggest you do two important things: 

*Talking about the possible departure of a CEO or any leader can be a touchy subject.  I recommend that organizations dip their toes in the water on this topic by making sure they have a well thought out “Emergency Transition” plan what would be implemented when any senior leader unexpectedly cannot perform their duties – either for the short term or long term.  This will get the organization thinking about succession and is simply good business practice.  The people at Transition Guides have a nice template I recommend in their Emergency Succession Planning Workbook (http://www.transitionguides.com/publications).

*Next, and most importantly, invest in the development of your staff team!  This is a difficult thing for some organizations to justify when budgets are so tight, but I will suggest that there has never been a more important time to make sure that you are developing your leadership pipeline.  The younger people on your staff are going to be called upon sooner than you think to step up – and they need developmental opportunities now to help prepare them.

Make sure that your organization will have the leadership it needs to make a Mission Impact in the future by preparing for change and investing in Your Leadership Pipeline.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.