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On the subject of books/essays about the role of boards, I wanted to suggest Servant Leadership, the collection of Robert Greenleaf's essays on leadership and institutions. Specifically, the first three essays: "The Servant as Leader, "The Institution as Servant", and "Trustee as Servants" (note: the first essay, "Servant as Leader", has nothing to do with the question of effective nonprofit governance, but it's necessary to understand the other two essays; plus, it's one of the great essays ever written on the subject of leadership).
That said, I should preface this recommendation by warning folks that this set of essays is trying to do something different than Holden's very practical advice above (and what I suspect you will find in the "Boards That Lead" book which Holden recommends). Holden is giving advice for being effective in the kinds of boards that exist today.
Greenleaf, on the other hand, is calling for a complete rethink of the structure and role of both executive teams and boards in two fundamental ways:
- Transitioning from the traditional pyramid organizational structure with CEOs as supreme leaders to a primus inter pares (first among equals) model where leadership is far more distributed among the executive team.
- Developing an expectations that Boards become far more engaged than they are today, while at the same time having a very specific, constrained role that consists of setting overall organizational goals, appointing the executive team, assessing organizational performance, and acting upon that assessment when necessary to change the goals or executive leadership.
I find the argument that Greenleaf makes compelling (especially his description of why the current model for the CEO role is so destructive for both organizations and the CEOs themselves), but it's also worth noting that Greenleaf's focus was on large institutions (whether businesses, nonprofits, universities, or churches) and not small startups.
Actually, I think Paul gets it right. I think to be effective Boards needs information that doesn't come to them through the CEO and Management team.