I have written extensively about nonprofit governance, based mainly on my positive and negative experiences serving on or close to actual boards of directors. I have also tried to absorb as much of the literature on this topic as I can. BoardSource, for example, has some wonderful books and articles. In any case, I believe this is an area where a lot of mission-driven organizations fall down, sometimes very hard.
Yesterday, a woman named Ann Hendrix-Jenkins flagged my Stanford Social Innovation Review article on governance last year as part of the commentary on a more recently published article on the topic. This latest contribution to the literature estimates that one-third of nonprofit boards are helpful, one-third are useless, and one-third are actually harmful. I wish I could say that my own rough estimate was more optimistic than this author’s. I can’t.
When I was winding down my time as President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, I vowed to set a better than typical example for a founder stepping down from running the organization they established. Furthermore, I wrote an article about what I thought should be done in founder transitions and how the board of directors of GF and I put those ideas successfully into practice. I think the article still holds up well today, more than five years later.
One of my points was that founders (and CEOs in general) should not serve on the search committee to select their successor. I still believe that. Recently I heard another reason that this is best avoided. Sometimes a search committee, when talking with a headhunter or interviewing top candidates, may want to say that they are looking for someone who is strong in areas where the departing CEO was weak. This can be awkward if the outgoing incumbent is part of the search process, and as a result is likely to remain unsaid. Better to have them not be involved so everyone can be completely candid.
At the same time, I believe that many of the guidelines I presented in my original article may not apply to every situation. But if you are part of an organization that chooses to not follow one of my suggestions, I recommend you ask a lot of questions about why. Is it grounded in solid analysis of the needs of the organization, or is it some kind of easy copout or a path of least resistance? Answering that question honestly can save nonprofit boards immense amounts of grief.