How to Keep Board Members
By: Debi Peverill
Tags: Governance, Board, Meetings, Productivity, Goals

Board retention is key to having a fully functioning effective board. There is a time commitment and cost to training board members and there is period of time before a board member is fully versed in the ways of your organization.

An effective board has a mix of people with different skills and experience. You want to have a diverse group. The reasoning is that better decisions are made by a group of people than by an individual because the group has more experience and skills than one person could have. Having said all of this, keeping board members for their full term helps accomplish having an effective board.

Why do board members leave the board before their term is over? Some suggestions:

- they feel like the board is wasting their time

- the time commitment is more than they expected

- they don’t feel valued by the organization

- they don’t like spending time with the other people on the board

- they don’t agree with the goals of the organization

There are other more personal reasons why a board member would leave, such as a change in their health or the health of a family member but for those reasons there is little that the organization can do to assist. What can you do about the other reasons?

I want to talk about the last one first. What do you do if the board member finds out that they don’t agree with the goals of the organization? You would look back to the recruitment process, did we make it clear what the organization was about? Hopefully we did not skip that part of the recruiting mission and end up with a person who is pro-life on a pro-choice board. Assuming we did the recruiting part right, did the goals of the organization change since the board member joined the board? Organizations do change and it is possible that your organization is no longer a comfortable fit for all of the members. A board member should resign if they find that the board has made a decision that they cannot support.

What about the not wanting to spend time with the people on the board. This sounds interesting. Why is that? If the board meetings are being handled in a respectful way, then it is not likely that board members are bullying or interrupting other board members. Could the views of a board member be offensive to other board members?

A board member not feeling valued could be a mismatch of board expectations. Did this person join the board with the idea that much praise would be coming their way simply by showing up? What was the board member expecting? If you establish that, and their expectations were reasonable, then the organization needs to take a look at how they are expressing their thanks to their board members. Do they actually take a little time to thank them, is there a board appreciation day? The board member feeling a lack of appreciation could also be if they feel that none of their views are being listened to. A single board member might feel that whenever they make a suggestion none of the other board members listen to them.

The first reason on the list being that the board is wasting your time, could be fixed with more effective meetings. No one likes to waste their time. Figuring out why board members are leaving is the key to determining how to improve retention the questions I raise in this article are a good first step.