“You designed and delivered exactly what we needed to improve our board work. You used our own examples to help us understand the fiduciary, strategic, and generative roles of both a working board and a governing board.”

Governance as Leadership™

Board members use various ‘lenses’ to view their work, often without appreciating their differing approaches to board work.  This visual of fiduciary, strategic, and generative board responsibilities helps you understand these ways of approaching board work and to value the diversity that a full variety of approaches brings to better board discussions and decision-making.

Governance as Leadership

Carver’s Policy Governance™ crafts values into policies to empower board and staff.

• Boards learn to do what only boards can do: focus on outcomes and the future.
• Ends policies define mission: what needs are to be met, for whom, and at what cost.
• Executive limitations establish boundaries for means of implementation.
• Board-Executive linkage clarifies executive authority.
• Board processes determine specific board practices and board accountability.
  

Diagram of Carver’s Policies:

Chait’s Competencies of Effective Governing Boards

• Personal and Strategic Skills are more critical to board work than simply reflecting organizational functions among board members

• Adding value by: talking about what matters most, thinking aloud with the ED, allowing experimentation, monitoring results.

 

 Chait’s Board Skills

Board self-evaluation

• a first step toward observing what?s working and not working, assess strengths and weaknesses, and identify next steps toward greater accountability, efficiency, energy, and commitment, what brought members into the board room in the first place.
• Board self-assessment from the Corporate Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, free, http://www.thecorporatefund.org
• Board self-assessment, online, fee, http://www.boardsource.org
• “How Does Your board Measure Up?” fee, http://www.grassrootsfundraising.org