As Board President, you are always concerned with the Board’s success and its governance of your school. With this in mind, consider the following nine strategies that are likely to lead your school to failure in terms of:
- reduced solvency;
- weakened organizational stability;
- increased bureaucracy; and
- ineffective personnel management approaches (and the lowered faculty and staff morale that inevitably accompanies such approaches).
Failure Strategy #1: Set tuition annually, and do so by leading with the question, “How much of an increase can the parent body stand next year?”
Antidote: Develop a multiyear strategic financial plan by:
- describing the characteristics of your ideal school four to six years from now;
- “costing” that ideal school; and
- determining the (net) tuition gradient necessary to pay for it.
Failure Strategy #2: Select your new Trustees by asking each spring, “Does anybody know anyone who’d be willing to serve on our Board next year?”
Antidote: Form a Committee on Trustees that will profile the characteristics of the individuals likely to successfully carry out the Board-level implications of your strategic planning document. You can then approach potential new Trustees with statements of this sort: “We have identified you as the best person in our metropolitan area. May I tell you about our plans, and your potential role in them?”
Failure Strategy #3: Have many standing (not ad hoc) committees, and use only current Board members on them.
Antidote: Form most Board committees each May or June in response to the questions, “How shall we organize ourselves to accomplish our Board agenda this year?” and “Who would be the best individuals (Board members or not) to help us meet our goals?”
Failure Strategy #4: Use a generic form (preferably not specific to private-independent schools) for Board self-evaluation, and ask each Trustee to complete the form each year.
Antidote: Ask your Committee on Trustees to rate the Board’s performance annually, based on the Board’s successful or unsuccessful completion of the annual Board agenda (derived from your strategic plan) the previous summer.
Failure Strategy #5: Use a generic form for evaluation of your School Head, and ask each Board member to complete the form each year. Distribute a version of the same form to your faculty each annually, and, finally, to your parent body.
Antidote: Ask your Head Support and Evaluation Committee to assist your School Head throughout the school year based on the Head's progress on goals agreed on the previous summer and derived primarily from your strategic plan. Use the data sources implied by each goal, not simply to “evaluate,” but to enhance the Head’s (and, thus, the school’s) performance.
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Failure Strategy #6: Make sure your full-Board meetings are “current-events” focused, with the Head’s report as the centerpiece each time.
Antidote: Be sure you create an annual Board agenda each summer. Place action on a Board committee proposal (not Board committee report) at the heart of every full-Board meeting throughout the year, just as has always (presumably) been the case with your annual budget-approval meeting.
Failure Strategy #7: Try to focus your Board’s energies on your school’s curriculum and instruction, and, under this focus, form as many Board-level “education committees” as possible (e.g., Academic Committee, Character Development Committee).
Antidote: Since Board-level direction and oversight of faculty and student programs is inherently confusing to faculty and staff members, who (correctly) view the School Head as the “boss,” establish a Board-level policy calling for all student- and faculty-related committees to be “School Head committees.” Such committees may, when appropriate, have Board members serving on them, but they remain the School Head’s committees nonetheless. Enhanced organizational clarity will result.
Failure Strategy #8: Place as many “constituent representatives” (e.g., a Parent Association representative, faculty representative, student council representative, and alumni representative) on the Board as possible. Make sure each is elected by the appropriate constituency.
Antidote: Continuously educate your constituencies on the fact that the Board itself is not a constituent representative body, but a self-perpetuating trusteeship charged with underwriting the school’s mission for the long-term future. Your Committee on Trustees “profile” should attend to the representation of the overall mix of Board members. This is altogether different from asking your constituent groups to supply “representatives”—congressional style—to the Board. Your Board is not a congress, but a trusteeship.)
Failure Strategy #9. Amass as much debt as your lenders will allow.
Antidote: Write a strategic financial plan that works from the premise that debt is nearly always the wrong solution to any problem. Institute aggressive major gifts and cash reserve development programs as the desirable “big dollar” solutions.
Three Follow-Up Steps
Examine each of the failure strategies listed and discussed above. Then, if any or all of them apply in your Board’s context, consider these three steps.
- Analyze each failure strategy in your annual Board agenda-setting and committee-formation exercise so that your Board’s function and structure consistently reflect the avoidance of the items on the list. For example, make sure you determine your committee structure and full-Board calendar after completing the Board agenda for the coming year.
- Feature each failure strategy in your annual new-Trustee orientation program. Explain each of the antidotes in as much detail as your new Trustees require to become clear on their implications. For example, regarding the antidote for Failure Strategy No. 3, you, as the Board President, should describe the process used to establish the Board committee structure for the upcoming school year.
- Ask your Committee on Trustees Chairperson to “grade” your Board on any of the failure strategies you find especially threatening in a full-Board meeting. (Do this in writing, perhaps in the form of a student report card. Include recommendations for correction and improvement, much as your teachers would with their students.)
