morning everyone if i can have all of you just fine to see kind of in the middle there that would be terrific and we will get started thank you so much for coming this morning if you if you're coming in just come right on in so all right just grab a seat good morning and welcome to this great location this morning we are going to have a great conversation this morning on how to maximize the value of your board and we have an amazing panel so you're really going to learn a lot my name is carolyn jones i am the market president and publisher of the boston business journal and we in our partner belmont savings bank we really appreciate the opportunity to work with them on this and many programs that we've done throughout the year all about helping nonprofits maximize the value of any of everything they do we're really excited today to have you here to be a part of this really important discussion on how to maximize your board and find a great board and the value that that can bring to you and to your organization so you can really learn from some amazing people i do again want to thank belmont savings for their partnership with us at the boston business journal and for putting together this fantastic program today they are really amazing to work with and pretty much do all the work and let me come up and welcome you so i also really like to thank our panelists this morning they are amazingly busy people and we appreciate them getting up early this morning and coming to spend time with us so i will introduce them in one moment i just want to mention again that we really appreciate the option of work with belmont savings which is an amazing institution that's had incredible growth not only this year but over the past several years of course with these leadership and we hope that  take some time to take some of the information outside that they have left and also if you don't read the boss a business journal every day we hope you do wear a weekly print publication but we publish news all day every day digitally at boston business journal dot com so we hope that if you don't currently take a look at what we do you'll see you'll see this program and other information on our website so let me get started and introduce our panel i think i'll do it from like this way in so i'm going to start with and you guys can just come right on up once introduce you so i'll start at the end so mike durkin is the president and c e o of the united way of massachusetts bay in the merrimack valley mike provides the leadership and strategic direction that drives the united way toward achieving it vision mission and long term goals for the community the united way works to harness the power of all of us working together people companies nonprofits and government agencies to deliver innovative effective solutions and create lasting change to record growth and profitability and in one thousand nine hundred and six he co founded the center for board leadership which is a joint venture with the national association of corporate directors which many of you might be familiar with and he served as the center's chief c e o and then chairman leading its mission of developing best practices for effective board leadership so you're going to get some great advice from bob today john wallace benjamin is the former president and c e o at the well known home for little wanderers joan joined the home in two thousand and three as president and c e o and under her guidance the agency gained prominence in the field of child and family service providers becoming a leader in innovative programming for underserved populations and expanding its role of advocacy for all children prior to that joan was president and c e o of the urban league of these eastern massachusetts for eleven years so she really has a broad spectrum of experience from the board perspective she took a short detour just interesting enough from the home in two thousand and seven when she answered governor deval patrick so thank you that helps the call has john hard to see his or governor deval patrick's call to service chief of staff on his transition team and in the st months of office she has served on the board of directors of bridgewater state university and was appointed to governor by governor patrick to co chair the family and children be quite an assistance advisory board she's a former board member of city fresh foods a trustee of wellesley college and a member of the board of overseers for the heller school for social policy and management so again only from her board but you get to see get to hear the experience of this group on boards that they are on as well and last but of course not least gloria larson who is just very recently the former president of the university and currently the president in residence at the harvard graduate school of education gloria currently serves in that role and she's also a director on boards of two public companies unum group and boston private as well as several nonprofit boards so again you see the breadth of knowledge you're going to get today but from two thousand and seven until june  glory glory was president of bentley university and during her tenure bentley achieved university status was ranked a top ten undergraduate business school by bloomberg business week and ranked number one for career services by the princeton review while a bentley she also launched the center for women in business with the mission to advance women in the corporate world the bentley board of trustees named the center in her honor at the time of her retirement and actually before joining bentley glory had her amazing career in law public policy and business she was the co chair of the government strategies group at foley hoa ag the secretary of economic affairs under governor william weld and the deputy director of consumer affairs for the federal trade commission in d c so welcome to our panel you can see we have an amazing group and then finally last but truly not least our steamed moderator the best moderator in the world bob moni who is the president and c e o of belmont savings bank who helps really to get this group together and put this all together massachusetts after serving twenty two years in various domestic and international put management positions at the bank of boston he's held several community leadership positions he's a past chair of the united way board of directors and serves on the u mass amhurst foundation board he's also a chair of the financial services committee of the finance council of the roman catholic archdiocese of boston please welcome our host moni and thank you do these exercises in educational forms for nonprofit well it turns out that i'm profit industry is the single largest industry in massachusetts is one of every six companies in massachusetts is a nonprofit so it's a it's a big the st question you might ask is why do we even have a born why is this necessary when the fact is it's the law you have no choice but that will work if you run a profit if you are a five a one c three you have to have a board and why is that well the reason is because the public grants certain benefits the non profits that doesn't grant to anybody else it grants you the ability to take an income and not pay taxes on it grants you believe take money from donors and they get the doc to give you the opportunity to take money better but the board has a as a few roles one it has that it has the responsibility to act on behalf of the public on like a a for profit where they're acting on behalf of the shareholders in this case the board act behalf of the public to make sure that the organization is living up to its mission and executing its strategy and that's got a two part piece to it one is is it really doing the work well into really doing the right work and the both of those questions have to be answered by the board are we doing their work work well you know we're doing the work the right work and so we're going to get into that a little bit today with our fabulous panel who have great experiences and all sides of the board so i'd be a member of management being a member of the board and recruiting board members in the big way so i'm going to start letting them share their thoughts of we're going to start with this question of of successful boards and gloria i'm interested you've been involved with a number of them i'd be interested in your comments on the characteristics of the best boards of the valborg so thank you st of all for letting me do this so bright and early this morning it's really fun and i if i actually admitted to bob i didn't have to because now that i'm in i've been told don't use the r word it's not retirement i'm now at work and i think a portfolio of things to do and part of my portfolio is this gig i'm doing at harvard's graduate school of education where i teach a three hour seminar every wednesday morning and so i've been staying overnight because my husband and i are in yarmouth port massachusetts currently and so i stay overnight at the sheraton commander which is about ten minutes away from here and my seminar was just a morning i had a lunch after that and i said why not stay another night so i think i had the shortest commute this morning that doesn't mean i'm the best rested but i have  commute so the best sports and you use the plural but i'm going to use this in the singular context because for eleven years this is the st time i've had my own board reported to a board and you know the essential sign meant for any board for profit nonprofit is to hire and hopefully not have to fire and replace the c e o but to have some thoughts around succession planning so i'm just i can't tell you how pleased i was with the way the board that i started with over the last eleven years really migrated more and more toward becoming i think in effect a corporate board all of my trustees say for a couple of academics from other great institutions a bit like rats all very successful tackled you know a really tough set of business disciplines and did really well in the outside world when they left bit late so to return to bentley they fully understood the responsibility to the school their over the moon about our mission which i think is essential in the nonprofit world doesn't necessarily have to be as so as essential the e q part of it and the attachment and passion on a corporate board but for a nonprofit to genuinely believe and understand the mission is served for me rule number one but the nd thing is to have a group of people who really know what they're doing when they arrive and to have this group at bentley who understood extraordinarily well because they had had their own boards they had been on a number of particularly corporate and nonprofit boards so they understood governance at the at the deepest level not just the high level but at the deepest level they understood their fiduciary responsibility they understood what a high functioning board should look like and more and more the expectation that nonprofit boards should be functioning boards just as you hope the corporate world is i'm excluding corporate boards like wells fargo of course but but the point is nevertheless that the kinds of lessons that you can take or think are really important the nd role for me beyond this understanding this context of fiduciary and accountability attachments to the board is to have a really great board chair and i was blessed to have two great board chairs very different people but both understood that they were there to be a coach for me they were there to challenge me they were there to work well with the other board members they were there to work well with my senior management team but really understood that the relationship between the c e o and the chairman of the board needs to be a tight one and that you need to have expectations laid out well and i think i was extraordinarily blessed to have that but it's now i really look for when i'm sitting on other boards when we're in the midst of succession planning what is that relationship going to be with respect to the full board again what we really started to look for i would say maybe six hundred and seventy eight years ago was to  build a real culture of inclusion on our board so we have we really work hard off the grid what kinds of skill sets do we need we needed greater gender parity coming especially in obese context we need greater gender parity we wanted racial parity we wanted l g b t q we wanted cross economic sectors so that we were well represented including three academics from other institutions and again we wanted this direct commitment to making bit only the best it could possibly be and everyone on my board had a very clear expectation that we wanted one hundred percent in terms of philanthropic support and will support and campaign support and we set expectations early in terms of what that meant different people coming in at different levels of their career certainly with the expectation that they would grow not only in their capabilities on the board but they also grow their capability to give back to a school that had given them so much the other thing that i think is more and more important when you're thinking about a high functioning board is to make sure that their future focused you're building on the past successes but you really don't want to dwell on the past you take the lessons learned and i want to board members were very much focused on the future of higher ed and where we wanted to go when you look at the horizon that needs real attention to it or price risks understanding the challenges both externally and internally to the to the  institution and i would say the last thing is the development of next generation leaders we paid a lot of attention to our pipeline and we've brought in a number of younger trustees i think the last couple of trustees are right at that edge of  older millennial and i think to have that generational level of understanding of the marketplace the endor standing of the school and where higher it's going but also where the marketplace is going was extraordinarily important for us so you put all of these things together these component pieces and i think you have a group of people were excited to come they understood the time expectations that's another important thing they understood most of the real work gets standing committee in committees so we had a wonderful set up plan for how you develop people within committee so that they can take on the vice chair and chair roles and the combination was i think for certainly the last half dozen years that i was that bentley just an extraordinarily successful board that understood clearly the distinction between the role of the board and the role of senior management i know we can launch into a discussion of the occasional micro manager in a few minutes but but and there's no board i think that's without one or two you know that's a piece of it but that's what we were looking for but experienced in the sense of business savvy and understanding what board roles are they need to have not necessarily sat down in a high level board in a large scale organization like bentley previously they were graduates of bentley so they were learning the ropes more about the d n a of the school than that but they understood coming from the business world that they did with the fiduciary responsibilities and i think more of about governance than sometimes boards have when they have people from the community join you've been involved with a number of boards and i have i think the think of you're the most successful well actually i you know i agree with everything that gloria talked about i think the  see they're supposed to support management in their decision making and actually be cheerleaders and sort of p r representatives for the good work in the mission of the organization so i agree with everything that you said they are one of the things i would the nonprofit human services sector so in my thirty seven years of working twenty seven of which i've been a c e o of human services organizations i would add particularly in the last five to ten years this became an issue and i guess it could be considered a little bit controversial is that board members in human service organizations have to that's particular that serve poor and marginalized people need to be comfortable particularly in the case for example at the home where we were not only a service provider but also an advocate they need to be comfortable with the advocacy role that the organization has to play now you're not trying to determine what party any of your board members belongs to but they have to be comfortable with the organization speaking out about those public policies and practices that are hurting and do a benefit in the people that they're serving sell the affordable care act for example the minimum wage all of the things that at the home we worried about in terms of the people we were serving to ensure that there was funding for those kinds of things that you know you may have boyd people that don't agree with that or board people that think politically that you put the care of portable care act is not a good idea but if that's the case that i really believe they should evaluate whether or not they want to be on a board in which this advocacy role is being played or they need to sit silently and not say anything about it and certainly do not have the right to curtail  what i as the c e o in the spoke person for the organization with the post to do or are advocates the public policy office what we were supposed to do we were fortunate to have at the home of a paid lot to paid lobbyists on the staff that run a gran that public policy and advocacy department when they were up at the state house all the time they were you know looking at legislative issues and we often came back to say you know the governor doesn't matter in fifteen years there was more than one governor that i work with you know is not on track with this particular policy that they're getting ready to promulgated and it was our responsibility to speak about that and so i just think board members should be comfortable with or research in deciding whether or not they want to come on the board research what the policies and practices have been that the organization supports because trying to tamp it down once you're on the board that is not appropriate to you actually have litmus tests as you are recruiting board members in terms of their philosophy one no actually that's what i'm saying this is what i learned so i'm telling you we don't have to go in with all or if i wish i had done that and i think you know people don't you pursue a lot of things about you know you you research board people and where they're coming from you know how much money they make with who they give to when they work at the wealth metric and you do all of that and i would just say that i think you shouldn't turn a blind eye to the political orientation of your board members either just let them know this is this is the position we take on this this and this and i will continue to talk about this than this and so i hope you can be comfortable of the very ugly for the very important  bob you interact with hundreds of boards have been directed at hundreds of boards i'm sure you've seen them dysfunctional but i'm interested in the characteristics he thena the functional board through google where they have in common i let me let me try to build on and we didn't rehearse but these are some great great comments but let me try to put it into a into a framework because bob said i've had many exposed to thousands of of boards and tried to be a student of what  boards should do but when i try to put them in buckets so i can help understand it there are some boards that have absolutely no impact and as boards that are good producer is that in check all the boxes are all the compliance and then there is an elite group of boards that are true strategic assets of the company and a source of competitive advantage so how do you do that and just think in our backyard which board in corporate america has destroyed the most value just mentally throw that question out but to build a board you know that it's a true an asset is start with the mission of the board that has to be that it's not because we have to it's not the legals that we have to you know it's the mission of the board is to be a strategic asset of the company so it starts with the right people on the board and those people as glories that are future of the user we take a look at the company in a really does not make a difference of  not profit or for for profit where's the company going what are the challenges try to simulate how the board is going to be helpful done by what skills and competencies are networks are going to be most helpful genda you know for the board so we have to put the right agenda in front of the board you know members so they can add value then what do you have to do was not the right jen you have to give them the right information you invent it have to be the right structure the board in the right culture the board it's a it's a very it's not easy to have a board that is a true strategic asset but you have to start with knowing what a the characteristics so as you went down your board looked like you had a lot of a lot of those characteristics but any one of these can thrown off i can i can guarantee you that every low performing company i can go into that model and see something that they've done wrong you know just will go back to the g e example you look at the board members they all are very accomplished but they destroyed more value than any other company in the united stated they destroyed a legend so where did they go wrong so if you go around that framework i can point to several things that they did wrong so it's a very complicated thing it's very very hard and as you mentioned you know having the right leader on the board is so critical but you know that that that that's the really the ban your years so that's just in terms of our framework that's how we think about it and one thing is the ring true for me the concept of giving the board enough information so they can be strategic that becomes an asset then you come to a board meeting and we listen to bob and his leadership team make presentations all day we haven't added any value you know better you so don't just come to a board meeting and present things you want in gauge discussion the concept is you get all the people around the table and you have total diversity of ideas and bob comes in with you know a great idea or something that you've been having nightmares about of a problem so the idea comes in here you don't come into the board meeting with everything baked is that this is what we're going to do said all right i'm going to use this this group so bob comes in with his team i said gee this is what we're struggling with and by and these are the sumption is that we may and by the end of that discussion it's a better decision now that's real bad but you but you off of given them all the right information you've given them your assumptions and you and you want them you don't want group think you want them to challenge your team but in a respectful way so that's it's a maturity by the business what folks said here at i think one of the things that is key is to get understanding of mission and then only to your point the context for it you know to give you an insight or board united way there's forty people and key is to have a leader as the board chair and others who are able to along with the c e o to set the framework set the context of where we're calling you know i was reminded a long time ago in a board another community that was working with the board chair said you've got to understand you do this day in and day out your board comes in and they see your work at that board meeting and maybe on some committee meetings so you you know it's show time at a board meeting and again the point about context i think is really key what i try to as board members to think about when they come on or what i term the three r s that they can help us with one of them is around resources clearly you know the fundraising piece has been alluded to but there's a whole lot of other resources that have to be in the mix and you know i think joan and gloria both mentioned around risk and around advocacy i think those are two areas that again for a lot of human service nonprofits those we don't understand risk and risk management and would be asian and advocacy i totally agree with jonah and you get a set the constant context on that continually with the board that might think it means picketing you know the state house when it can mean so many things way before that so to me the idea of how you bring resources to the table include fundraising the nd piece is relationships you know what i as board members of think about as you play in a world with a lot of people and a lot of organizations and our organization could benefit from some of those relationships not to pick their pockets but really pick their brains to pick their ideas of how we could advance so help us establish relationships and then the rd one and it goes back to do with the right work and doing it the right way is the results help us to make sure we're setting the target for the right kind of results the organization should have and if we're able to do that then the whole help to hold us accountable for that i've been fortunate the board members that we've had in the main have taken the attitude of what we've got here is pretty good what we've got to do is try to make it better and so there's a learning and a growing that comes with that you know the alternative in the horror story is if board members committed they think everything's got to be recreated or at the worse recreated in their own image then you've got a real problem so i think it starts with the the right kind of leadership the right kind of context setting and then understanding board staff relationships and we've talked  over a period of time it's a bit of a dance a good one with the board chair and management and you've just got to make sure you cultivate that as you move along to to keep it good and make it better intently on that in terms of what mike  d bob said it's for the executives in the room in order to ensure the value that you want to get out of a boy we have to be clear and purposeful about what we offer if you do not want the board members in the we then don't give them we've information if you want strategic him put and you want to teach it participation looking at big problems and helping the board just i mean the organization navigate through those then that's the level at which you work with the board and i think so often in organizations we're so hungry to figure out what when we don't say at this quarterly board meeting what are we going to do that you end up giving too much detail frankly to board members and then we get angry when they meddle around the details well that's what you gave them and so you have in your own delivery implied that that's what you want them to say to you and that's where you want them to participate and so you get what you get so i would just say to executives at that if not just board members needing to know exactly what they do but the c e o needs to know what they want them to do and then fashion the information and engagement with the board around things that are is we've taken one board meeting off the calendar and it gives us a couple months to have small group board discussions eight or ten folks who would have probably three of those meetings and the focus is on a critical issue really trying to look at how do we don't deeply into an issue that we've got advance of the organization and what's been amazing with the what we've taken away from that at a management level has been huge and board members so much more enjoyed that so we're trying to more of the ongoing board meetings away from the for do series into the generative discussion and to create those moments where you can really do i think another really effective way to do that is to make sure that on your schedule of meetings that you have an opportunity for a retreat with your board when you think about the ability to really not get in the weeds so much as to get deeply into the strategic imperatives that are being referred to here because that irregular board meetings the other lesson takeaway that we should all have reports of wrangled with this monster for a long time is getting away from the eight hundred pages of reading material and details so that you can give what's needed the financial details are important but beyond that the mound of information that's needed your team is not to give hour long presentations to state what they're there for what the purpose of the conversation is and then open that to a real discussion but a retreat allows you to take that strategic  generative thinking to another level and to also really deep in when you're only meeting three or four times a year you have an opportunity really deeply dive into that again future facing set of things that you're trying to pull off joan have you had cases and outlining specifically what the board so its board members are recruited and walk in the door that they know what they're supposed to do but yes i have had situations where their board members have stepped over the line into management it's interesting because the person and people who know that best is the c e o i mean on the other employees in the organization have no idea what the board member has stepped over the line but the c e o and senior management they do and so you get into the issue of managing the performance of your board as the executive that's hired and fired by them and that's a very very sticky wicket it's a tough place to be and so you do need to have on the board other board members with whom you can share kind of  transgression look you know i list them as you ask they're well the one that are the ones that you think kind of get it and would not want that to be the experience you can list them in understanding what you're experiencing as the executive and let them sanction the board member said something or interfered in a personnel action in the organization that resulted in a potential for a lawsuit and the employee went to a lawyer and the employee had a wonderful case for discrimination and so to avoid going into court we ended up paying a handsome fine infeed to the employee because of the mistreatment but because the public and the law don't see the board  member terribly distinctly different from management so if a board member opens his or her mouth and says something to an employee told word or tries to correct performance the the law says well he or she is an official officer of this organization and yes it was the c e o s role to manage this but if the board member jumped in the fray then the organization is at risk and so and i would just add to again and also all of this is you know i  struggle is more pronounced and i've been on five college boards i was on a small company board is more pronounced in human services because there is this assumption in the market that human services professionals are not as professional as well trained educated as for profit people and that which which couldn't be further from the truth you look at executives and profit particularly large ones now their doctors their lawyers th d their m b a s i mean that the leadership ranks are really very very different than they used to be you know thirty years ago when i started my career and so there is the temptation and i haven't seen that so much in the arts or so much snob in the college much as the temptation to tell management what to do not because you have a particularly better idea but because you don't think they know what needs to be done or that they're they're just doing sort of god's work and they don't wake up with any kind of real sense of what it means to serve people and serve people well and in a in a financially appropriate way that you know i do think it varies the setting that you're in what kind of interference you have from  managers throughout and it's usually just one or two on a board but any time and specially true in the nonprofit corporate board sense talking of about a board that's anywhere from nine dollars to thirteen dollars people you get these bigger boards and it's just the of you know sort of the numbers the nature that you're going to have some micromanagers so just a couple of very quick snapshot examples of what it looks like so on the bentley board at one point i had somebody who would  a presentation was being made say about the competitive landscape this person would google have their i pad in their lap and be googling information to try to counter what was being presented at the table and that you know like a snap shot you know to back on follow quick snappy responses based on you know some bizarre data collection done literally while well the presentations was being was being made a different person decided that when we announced a big internal study that they knew something about the subject matter that they should be on the premises helping us conduct the internal survey which we would then you know come back to the board and share the results and was literally trying to manage it in an entirely different direction because that had to do with compensation and the suggestion was we really were compensating people well enough and we knew from our own just you know again snapshot of a landscape that we needed to do a deeper dive because we suspected we weren't compensat in certain areas well enough so somebody with an h r background thought no no i can do this much better and i think we're just fine the rd example is a different person who chaired a committee decided that they should call the vice president responsible for that particular subject area on a weekly basis and go through the agenda and figure out what the decision making process was and what the decisions were and offer suggestions as to well no i think you should be doing that you know x y or z so i had me it's a variation on your theme showing my thing goes back to having a really strong relationship with the chairman of your board each time that and it's also picking your battles because sometimes the micromanaging  is just small potatoes stuff it's just not worth picking a fight someone micro manages a little bit they offer a suggestion you smile politely and you go about do exactly what you're going to do anyway but when it got too deep in some of these things that i just mentioned i would wait until it was clear to me that this was happening and very often it would be you know the vice president almost in tears in my office or something you had to stop the madness so i would call my my chairman and we would sit down and talk about it and he was extraordinarily reasonable about this and there is something that's a good human nature about peer to peer communications so there are two parts this st of all because he could use just the right style of conversation he'd go to the person they'd have a conversation sometimes they didn't know they were doing it you know other times they went yeah you're right i was so excited about it i just got into deep won't happen again not sometimes that didn't happen again and you know you try not to repeat the same thing over and over again but the other thing is the relationship that you have with your board members and you alluded to this to joni the you know hiring firing the evaluations you should not be the person responsible for having these communications with meddling members of the board it is literally part of the responsibility of the chairman of the board to do that it's should never be you you're the person who needs to have the right kinds of relationships with meeting my feeling is that i don't know if anyone is read the book zap anybody read the book z a p p get the book so the role of  that the board that there is a board me really excited about the board me because of the energy that the board they're very respectful they don't do the got judge they don't you know read the report and find one little error and they want to get someone just to show that they read the material in the front or so the board's role once you get the right leadership in the company  profit you want to energize you want to support that group you don't want any gotchas you don't want to sap the energy i mean that is in terms of the vision of a of a board that what you want and then the line blurbs the question the lying liars and the little bit different with a non nonprofit because then if that if that five million dollars donor wants to go over the line a bit of course they're going to go in a bit and you're going to be because they want to feel that they're contributors but they may have not have background so the line blurs a little bit then you take a deep breath and so they're they're well intentions of long as they're doing it in a respectful way but then if they're not doing it in a respectful way then it goes back to you're the director but it clearly cannot be the c e o those years that point i mean love the terminology size small ish nonprofit in i have a board that i'd like to augment and i get you to go over visit with me and what questions would you ask me before you launched into the process of helping me add to my board so with the backdrop of already my comments you can imagine that i would ask a lot of questions i'd be i'd be sitting down with you would terms of the organization i would really push out the organization strategic plan over the next two to five years down the fire really what the challenges are going to be and  big global nonprofit here in boston now we have plenty of capital we've got a we've got fifty million dollars of capital we don't need money so our plan  i'm in charge of building the of the new board we have a board but in terms of adding people so we have this long term plan we have to know what's on the mind of us a id so who the ministries of health in africa oh he's coming can we talk to you personal friends with the head of usa id he knows what they're thinking and what countries what areas do you think that's helpful then you know we operate around the world so financial controls and disciplines pretty important so we track the truck ducking door who was the just retired c f o of the video global health care company so very surgically we have added people like that on the board now my other favorite among the border friends of children that my guess is children age five who are going to the worst schools and have dysfunctional families and we take them at age five and we coach them we mentor them or their families for ten years to get them through high school now we don't have any capital or a start up but a twelve year old start up and you i'd say probably two or three of you know about the organization in this room so now in building that board that's totally different this is where you we need people who are passionate about what we're doing but we need we need frankly help so our dog around it we need to get people now all these people can have functional help we do we do need a lot of help in marketing and branding so we get some of that industry but it's a bit of this is not you know in my going out and plain golf with someone that and and everybody that's the board or you are one of the board that doesn't work everybody on this board has to be connected to something that can add to it so it's a little bit different otoh so create that framework and i i guess the only question i have is how hard is it to get a non performing board off your board and anybody find dust secret here that that's their last question that's your last question i just one thing before that and what do you do with a bad board member of those board problems i think gloria's point was really a good one sometimes a while ago somebody reminded me and reminded others on the board that the board is responsible for governing the board the c e o is not i mean you see goes a lot in put you've got a lot of influence but the old the end of the day the board as opposed to govern itself so that's you know that that point is is critical and it also leads t corollary that you better have a good chair absolutely and you better not just pick your best pal of the chair because he or she may not have the wherewithal to manage that for some of them but you know i think just to his or you know part of the question to know i think what bob was talking about about sort of the matrix you would have of what do you need to do how do you get there remember that that doesn't all happen in one cycle of recruitment or governance is going to take a while sometimes to get the right person or to get the right mix of there to get a look a little bit at the long game and that's the challenge of the the current times we live in the other thing too i think is the real intentional with why you need that board member you know what what can they bring and also have a discussion about what would they like to get out of the board experience so you can begin to to shape that but i think you know  great nominating committee your governance committee leadership is also a top flight thing here the final thought if you can do somethin fairly quickly or someone sort of begins or tenure of the board to give them a task responsibility to engage in right away so they don't feel like you know they're going to sit on the rd team until they can get into the game they're doing something and they're bringing value right away so they can feel accomplished and they get better stay in the organization jo give and that i think and this is from pick up savation that i don't really think executives or the nominating committee needs to stay aware of who the personal friends are of the c e o and board members i don't think that the c e o should put friends on their board i don't think that the board chair should put personal friends not colleagues not people that you know have professional value to bring but i mean friends  think it's wonderful set of relationships than i had when i was at the urban league and sam kirsten the late sam person who was from findings basement was my board chairman i mean we developed the most wonderful and warm friendship and he was a mentor and a close friend but it came as a result of the work together i did not know him when he was recruited to be the boy chair but got to know him and so i think you want to keep the friendship piece and i think non profits in small ones tend to fall into this trap because that's the that's the easiest person you can get your hands on or yes you need help you're so desperate ok i'm going to let me let me grab sally and bobby and billy and put them on the board and i just think it's not good practice that often when it doesn't work it works ok until it doesn't work and when it doesn't work it's very very messy so i would just i would leave that in my opinion leave that out of the recruitment process t i said at the very beginning we had a matrix a grin that we worked up because we so want to diversity of thought and that meant the demographics had to cover you know now about one hundred different categories but and that included the age demographic about making sure you were developing and giving key assignments to the up and comers as you thought about succession so when we were thinking about succession we also thought about a pipeline and so some people would get added to the pipeline opportunistically it could be parents and alumni i met on the road and folks that showed some promise but we weren't making an offer to them but expressing interest in getting more involved in the university and the pipeline also came though and i think this is true of larger foundation boards and larger organizations to be sure in the nonprofit world certainly for colleges and universities advisory boards can be one of your best sources we had one for arts and sciences and we had one for business disciplines and there were key people who showed so much promise on those boards almost always a lot but some really great parents too who should our time be moved on to the larger governance fiduciary board so we did that many other last thing i'd say is around expectations my chairman and i always met with the person that we were tea g to become a new board member and had a very long breakfast or a very long lunch or occasionally dinner to make sure that their expectations could be met should be met and that our expectations were real really really clear i know others have said this but and that included the base level of annual giving to the board so they understood that and we also discussed you know obviously campaign when we got to you know a quiet phase of a campaign what the requirement would meet it was at different levels purposely because you're bringing in somebody who still has kids at home on their way to college they may have a great income now and are rising up to the ranks of their organization but we're not going to ask them to give the same money that folks are giving it  you know at a higher level of capacity but that setting that expectations i know we're talking about fundraising just took away a world of woe that can come later when people just say well nobody was very clear with me at all about what you actually wanted from me in addition to the strategic thinking and all the things that are sort of baseline so let's get into that because many of these organizations are fund raising is a key part of the board recruitment process so mike how do you have that conversation with a new board member or a board member who frankly hasn't delivered what your expectations are how clear are you the way for them to get in gauge how do you play that card we probably  not being clear enough a lot of those pieces you know it's a it's an issue mix for us because you know our image is well established around the fund raising piece and a lot of the people on our board come to us from representative asians that you know are supportive of united way i make the point that we don't have any guaranteed seats so you know big company x that gives a lot of money a person retires they will get a new person just because of that because we're looking at the mix of what people would bring i think we look at it in two ways one we do have the conversation up front about individual giving but we don't we don't have a price tag on it you don't know we let people know how many of our folks are to ten thousand dollars level we would like everybody to be at a leadership level which for us is as a one thousand dollars so we put it in that context the other piece that we look at very seriously is how can they help us back to the three r s with the relationships that can get to other people we've got a big big project going on now i was talking to carolyn earlier it's our united way board about a sales force philanthropic giving platform little really transformed what we do what we need is help from board members of advancing that project into donor companies and if somebody could help us to do that that could be the gold standard so for us we should be better or more clear  with the expectation we look at is a mix of individual giving and depending on where the folks come from and then the other piece about from a corporate side what can they do to help us advance in their own company and others they can come in time to give or get yet very much situation it's certainly friends of children where the number one is is the networks and their i'm four total transparency and openness a front for us because it's  in terms of what the expectation is but to do that you know we do a lot of research up front there has to be if there is a passion for what we do and actually when you know what we do with hard not to have a passion i really question who you are if you feel no passion about what we do but you have to have a passion for what we do and then it makes it easy to say gee this is the expectation you know you're you know you're working with pricewaterhouse we'd love to get you know you know price waterhouse involved in and use your network and if their passion what we do though be more than happy to do it but i'm i'm for total transferred dollars to me you know say you hundred thousand dollars person well it's not it's not the person you know it but it's not the personal but or your or you know like for for us we give parties out in the over invite everyone you know you know you know we just show them a we do it once and we have the kids come out packet and so when the boy chair and i've gone intentionally to see somebody as part of that the job and it makes it it makes it easier because oftentimes the specifics of the job description are hard to come out of your mouth while you're reading and you got to figure out how the nicely work into the conversation but you can say to the woman there is a job description for your participation in the packet please take a look at it and then we've got it you can if you have questions let's talk about it i mean you're not necessarily always shaking hands at the people from all different kind of financial situations that's just the reality of it and you're not going to get a one million dollars from somebody that can give you a one million dollars so you have to be you know sensitive to that but the fact that there will be something to your capacity should be stated pretty clearly as he got into one of my pet peeves all of that i think i'd love to get that job scripted into the show but going to events and taking table they again going back to the message you're giving to the leadership team you're the board you 're there is your they spend all this time never trying to put this annual and the board members don't take the table no no i mean hopefully i think of the message that you're sending to the team of smokes and i think that you know an expert team to take a wild guess of right you know within within some number what someone is capable of the know i just sit here because i don't want to disappoint i don't want to have that cloud or it for a board i think we're all saying the same thing which is subtlety around expectations for for being a donor or whatever capacity works for you is incredibly important and is i mean subtlety just doesn't work and when i got to bentley no one had set expectations for the past the older members who were on the board so you had some people who are giving generously because they've had one off conversations where a friend at golf and said hey i'm giving x you should too as opposed to setting those expectations at the breakfast or lunch we had we also did the job does scription with the various elements and then reinforce that once somebody agreed to it the on boarding process is equally important where you bring them in and really say remember these are the things in addition to giving them the tutorial and all the areas where they're going to be working and hopefully not meddling you're also giving them the again the underscoring those expectations and i think another thing about one hundred percent is really important it's important for a sign of you know that everybody's on board including our academic members you know former associate dean of harvard business schools on the bentley board and he gives generously but he gives an appropriate level because you know he's giving to harvard in forty five dollars other organizations non profits i'm sure so whatever that expectation is could be you know for a for it could be a one thousand dollars for an academic member but it's going to be we set the intrigue level in this era for those who were coming up through the ranks of whatever corporation or business they were in at twenty five dollars k for our board members and it was clear that it but when you say it in a very you know in a diplomatic way our expectation is for you to do this what's important about it i think is that that builds in the right mindset for your campaign as we all have campaigns and at the campaign level it's extraordinarily important for other donors for you to be able to say we raised forty percent of the one hundred million  board going into it so i think again that's clarity around that then gives you that momentum going into an important campaign and i think you're also particularly around the fund raising which gets a little sticky you also have to evaluate whether your board on the board ship the board members are out of a lot of dimensions not just the fund raising but around the meddling around the role it's they don't do the greatest job managing themselves and banks themselves they just don't i mean they they do ok hire and fire and the c e o so well maybe they don't even do that well in that that's something boyd said wake about when someone really needs to go they don't are but they don't pull the trigger quickly enough but but particularly board member saying to other board members you  signed on to this thing and you haven't done your part you didn't come to be a bit you have written twenty five thousand dollars check and you're not on a committee somebody has to say something but i think board members need help maybe initial boy training once through the groups assembled company kind of walks through that because they have to develop a comfort level in telling people they're not doing a good job when we all do that even in our professional lives it's not an easy thing to do to fire people so you do have to have a process where you really hard i too would love to begin to even in my chairman who was phenomenal getting the meddlers to stop meddling phenomenal at making sure people were living up to their pledges had a terrible time asking  renewal process so in a staggered board with every three years but sometimes their status has changed and they are far away and they're not coming to the meetings and there are other things that can go awry and they're just not participating in having that conversation and what our board chairman did and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't was he would sit down with the person in person and say do you because of your circle do you really want to continue on this board and have a frank conversation and sometimes the person would say boy i had a hard time figuring out how i was going to tell you i need to leave the board it's like yes we got through it's good discussion other times they tell you know i'd really like to sign up for another term and then we'd say ok the board chair would ok we were not very good at it i mean you're talking from bentley college i mean you're making we're making the assumption that organizations even have a committee structure when i arrived home it was no committee structure there was no nominating committee there was no govern committee there was no finance committee we had board members who had been on the years and saw their role as board service to go out to one of the programs and shoot hoops with the kids i mean real it you know and here we are now an eight hundred dollars person organization you know eighty million dollars in revenue and you're playing basketball and there i mean i think you are so so putting a committee structure even if you're a small nonprofit and i've worked in both so i know the real big differences between the two most likely advance names because the development people are always mining the environment the c e o is engaged in lots of relationships with the business people and the nominating committee chair is getting you know recommendations from members of the and we had we stuck with them and you got to stick with them even with the board members so they get to the sixty year you have to rotate off the board for a year with the past i believe that if the nominating committee and the organizer decided you could come back to the   you know i think that it's obviously it's a tough issue to broach and i do think the board leadership's got to be involved i've found there been times where you know i haven't seen this person engage and having the discussion with them about how do we get you more engaged and that could go you know either a delightful way where they really want to get i can do more or they could say you know i just haven't been able to do this i think it might be time to step off the board and you're kind of her for another ten years because you've done all the interesting things there but having ten years you know and i think will go to that is having twenty three year ten years then we have just to establish a chairman or a board a emeritus program you know and we want to celebrate them keep them involved send the material get them to the event and have them you know celebrate them in it you know after three or four years you couldn't bite them back but you know the two terms i think is is good because the ones that you are the ones that you would want to leave will stay for forty years me fortune we we started with a pretty good board so it's not a total retraining for sure but there is having but that's clearly you know we can move up i mean i mean to me when i joined the board frankly we were graced with an exceptional you know c e o and at that point you know frankly because we were having a rocky period you know we know the mission was great we were executing very know so our number one challenge there was to get the exceptional c e o but now we have one and now we're raising the bar on the board in terms of expectations and we're putting i'm putting together a long term succession plan for the board so everyone we're raising the bar in terms of expectations and we're trying to be more strategic around you with the backgrounds that we have so i mean everyone on our board is accomplished but we we need in the fact that my guess is that probably none of you have even heard of the organization and we're probably doing the best we're not of all you were doing good work and there were touching a lot of lies and we're changing lives right in our backyard so we should be able to to move move up the we have a plan to do that are there are there any rd party organizations that help nonprofits with their board enhanced meant there boredom is anybody know of any just focus on iraq and say well i know in higher ed there are groups like education advisory worry it be and others that we've used in retreats to come in and get not just outside perspective but also a deep dive in particular certain subject matter but in addition to that i think in  house two you can do a good job beyond onboarding the tutorials that you get as a brand new board member if you're entering in a brave new land with your future facing efforts i mean you know when i was leaving bentley we were doing about the future face of work so machine learning and all of the things that are happening really important for board members to be up to date on those things so we would bring them into all of the in house things we were doing with our faculty and others and so i think it's iterative it's lifelong learning i mean your board needs to go back to earlier preface there i think board members might welcome it and if you frame it in there's big opportunities out there we need to advance the mission where the best ways we do that and there's some great skill learning you know i've gotten rid of the whole term of no one wants to be evaluated but everyone wants to learn so i've instructed here i work a lot with boards and create a culture of if you weren't weren't cysteine that the leadership team are continuing to learn and grow and as role models of a board you know we do annual sort of assessments of how well we're doing and just in terms of continuous improvement here the things we can do better he yourself in the rabbit hole right because they start to micromanage they ask you for a lot of details you give them a lot of details you're down to ten thousand how do you start to get back away from it because once you're giving them a lot of information you know that you need to pull back i think with the board chairman and the leadership team on the board the chair the vice chair the you know the top executive committee some conversation about the need to reframe how we're engaging board members and i think i think the executive to admit you know i i got way down here with the board and we can't stay here it's st of all it's killing the management team you're right i mean the we used to have at them a monthly meeting home i got we spent two weeks of the month for parents of the month two boys you know it was a disaster  management team and the c e o and maybe senior staff people to say ok t v time out we've we've gone off the rail here a little bit let's see if we can all together get back on course that i think you have to do it with the boy the c e o trying to get it back thoughtful discussion