In this month’s Nonprofit Quarterly there is an interesting study of chairs of a non-profit boards. Are you shocked to learn that 51% of the chairs said they had no preparation prior to becoming board chair?
Those who did prepare appear to get most of their training outside the organization, through generic resources for boards. We suggest that you take a proactive approach to assist a new chair in being as effective as possible.
How is your board chair prepared for taking on that role? It may be useful to work with your current chair to develop a transition plan for an incoming board chair. Here are a few possible components of that plan:
- Develop a notebook of useful information, such as bylaws, agendas, a calendar of your organization’s events, a list of committees and their chairs and membership, etc. (Such a notebook could be developed for all board members as an orientation, but at a minimum it should be available to the chair.)
- Have the current chair invite the chair-elect to participate in the process of developing the agenda(s) for a month or two before the new person assumes office. We recommend that the chair work with the executive director in this process. Seeing that collaboration will set the tone for the incoming chair to continue to work with the ED to develop the agendas.
- The incoming chair could attend at least one meeting for each active committee and get a feel for committee work.
- Your incoming chair can sign up for our SILC or IL mailing list at www.ilru.org or can subscribe to this blog and get articles regularly, right to their email
What if the current chair isn’t doing a very good job, either in running the meetings or in fulfilling (or overstepping) the duties of the chair? You want your incoming chair to do better, but the example s/he has observed is a poor one. A written description of what the chair is expected to do can help with this. Arranging for the incoming chair to meet with or observe a counterpart in another nonprofit could also be helpful.
Here are some subject areas that the surveyed chairs found helpful and links on these topics:
- Boards and Governance
- Leadership (Not necessarily board-related)
- Teams/groups
To read the entire article that prompted this post, go to nonprofitquarterly.org