This article is a short excerpt from our recent webinar, Board Revolution: Rethinking Nonprofit Governance for Organizational Impact, presented by Nic Gagliardi. Click here to watch the full recording and access the additional resources.
The conventional or most common model that we see for nonprofits right now and for the last 20 years, certainly as long as I’ve been doing this work, maybe longer, it’s what I call the board-centric model.
So, if we think about nonprofit governance as a system, the board-centric model assumes that the entire governance system orbits the board, the board is like the sun that holds everything together. In this approach, governance is about the board and everything else is secondary, including the organization’s core purpose. And anything that happens has to go through the board, or be of the board, or involve the board, or consult the board. The board becomes a big bottleneck.
When governance is about the board, you end up in this sort of funny place where it becomes really challenging to solve any kind of governance pain point because you’re stuck with this circular reasoning where the board exists for governance, and governance exists for the board. This leads to this very abstract, procedural kind of checklist-based approach to governance and this is where people start to feel sort of confused about governance and why a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around nonprofit governance. We think it’s something that we don’t understand because we don’t know how to define it in a way that’s accessible and helpful to people.
The board-centric model, this is the paradigm we live in right now and most people who sit on boards are truly not sure why they’re there, even if they have a high level of governance literacy. Many board members really struggle to understand like, “What am I doing here? Why does it matter that I am here? What is the point?” And really the answer that we keep giving people is, “because governance,” which is not a very helpful or satisfying explanation.
So, what I’m proposing is a shift in how we think about governance, where we put your organization’s core purpose at the heart of governance and the board is just one part of the overall governance system that orbits core purpose.
I’ll get into the implications of this shift in a moment, but I do want to point out why it’s so helpful to think about governance in this way, because it moves us out of that circular reasoning where governance exists for the sake of governance and we can actually start to understand the true role of governance, which is to advance your organization’s core purpose.
Every organization has a core purpose. And governance is your navigation system, it’s about keeping your organization moving in the direction of your core purpose. And when we look at it this way, suddenly governance and board issues become a lot easier to solve because you have a fixed point on the horizon that you can work towards, that’s outside of the board, and this is a much more intuitive and grounded way to engage in governance when we look at it from this perspective of advancing core purpose.
Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar video recording below.