Shifting from Reactive to Strategic:
Creating a 3-Year Board Recruitment Road Map
As your organization moves from launching to sustaining, you need to ensure that you are building strong, repeatable systems and processes. This is the crux of our capability maturity model, also known as the Path to Excellence.
Building a sustainable and predictable process for finding and recruiting new talent for your board is essential. Even the most effective boards experience regular turnover of trustees. Factors such as term limits, burnout, and the busy lives of volunteer board members can lead to annual attrition.
Your BoardOnTrack Membership includes a straightforward way to assess the strengths and areas for improvement in your board’s composition. It also provides a quick method to develop a long-term, strategic recruitment roadmap for your board. This guide will help you leverage the resources available through your BoardOnTrack Membership effectively.
What is the Members Report?
The Members Report takes skills, demographic, and term limit information from your voting board members in BoardOnTrack and turns it into an interactive report that gives you a three-year look at your board’s composition. It highlights strengths and areas where we recommend you consider adding additional skills. Our recommendations for board size and composition come from our national standards that were developed through work in the trenches with over 500 charter school boards.
Generating the Data
Individual Trustees
All voting board members should click on their profile located in the upper right-hand corner of BoardOnTrack and complete the skills and demographic inventory questions. For the report to be accurate, you need 100% of your voting board members to complete this task. It takes less than three minutes, so this should be a snap!
Term Limits
Next, one person on your team with BoardOnTrack administrative privileges will enter your trustees’ term limits in the team section. Once the individual trustee information has been created and the term limits populated, you will see a completed Members Report located in both the team and report sections in BoardOnTrack.
Key Components of the Report
Skills
The skills outlined in the report represent categories we have found are essential for effectively managing a multimillion-dollar public entity. Beneath each skill category, such as Academic Excellence, you will find subcategories, including closing the achievement gap and analyzing state test data. Boards often have a false sense of security thinking that having “educators” on the board is sufficient, but they may fail to recognize that specific, targeted educational skills are necessary. The report also tallies other key qualities such as problem-solving and group process skills, which will help when identifying ideal candidates for recruitment. While some candidates may have abundant expertise, they might lack these crucial qualities. Be sure to assess both aspects during your selection process.
Demographics
When boards think about diversity, they often focus primarily on race and ethnicity, which are indeed vital aspects. However, a comprehensive conversation about diversity should also encompass gender, age, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and geography. The goal is to create a strategically assembled team with the skills, temperament, and life experiences necessary to govern a multimillion-dollar public enterprise. A more diverse board helps reduce groupthink and enhances creative problem-solving.
Term Limits
Term limits are essential to ensure there is a regular influx of new talent, energy, and perspectives on the board. As start-up organizations, charter schools are susceptible to “founder’s syndrome”, where founding members stay beyond the point of effectiveness. This can be a lead founder who is the CEO or can refer to a group of founding board members. Term limits are an important safeguard against this.
Typically, a two-year term renewable three times or a three-year term renewable two times works well in the charter school context, as charters are given for five years, and this ensures a fair amount of continuity during that time period. Once these terms are up, a trustee should take a minimum of two years off before being considered for re-nomination. This waiting period ensures there will be an influx of new talent, voices, and perspectives on the board.
A board can always make an exception to this rule if necessary, but these are our recommended guidelines.
How to Use the Data - Action Steps
The BoardOnTrack mantra is Knowledge + Action = Results. So, generating the data is great but is only as good as the actions you take with that data. Our recommended action steps include the following:
Governance Committee Review
Ideally, your board has a governance committee. This is the committee that is tasked with finding and recruiting new trustees, organizing board education and new trustee orientation, and focusing on the overall health and functioning of the board. The governance committee should meet and review the Members Report in detail. Before jumping to the end result and setting a board expansion goal, the committee should spend some time isolating the key strategic questions/issues raised by looking at the data. Often, this includes questions such as:
What are our organizational priorities over the next 2-3 years? What are the most important things our board will do to add value to the organization this year? What about over the next 3 years? If form follows function, who do we need on our governance team to achieve these goals? Where are the gaps?
Is the size of our board sufficient to meet those priorities? Our board is much smaller than the ideal size that BoardOnTrack recommends. Do we understand their rationale? Are we ready to move to a larger board doing substantive work in between board meetings? How important are functioning committees to achieving our strategic priorities?
Do we have the right skills to meet those priorities? Where do our skills match the BoardOnTrack recommendations, and where do they differ? How do we want to approach this strategically? Where are our biggest risks? Where do we need to build bench strength?
What qualities should we look for in new board members? The committee should look at the qualities you want or need on the board. Are there enough trustees with a good sense of humor? Will the “devil’s advocate” be rotating off at the end of this year? Are there enough entrepreneurial trustees on the board that thrive in startup situations? What are the additional value-add characteristics that new trustees could bring to enhance the functioning of our team? Are there qualities that we think all trustees should have?
Does our board represent diverse perspectives? What does the report tell us about the current levels of diversity on our board? What role should diversity play on our board? How does our current board makeup align with our organization’s mission and vision? How does our current board composition align with our student population, service area, and broader community?
Is succession planning a concern? How urgent is succession planning? For board members in general? For board officers?
CEO’s Input
Ideally, your CEO plays an active role in the work of the governance committee and was part of the discussions above. Make sure that your CEO has a chance to weigh in on the board expansion goals and timeline. Your board should have skills that complement the skills of the organization's senior management team and should serve as a valuable thought partner to the CEO. It is vital that the CEO is aligned with the board on the skills and perspectives that would be most helpful to them.Committee Input
Form follows function. The governance committee should connect with each committee, discuss their prioritized goals, and learn what additional skills those committee members think are needed to round out their team and tackle the priority issues over the next few years.Draft Board Expansion Goals
Based on the results of the discussion above, the governance committee should formulate a clear set of board expansion goals.Full Board Alignment
Once the committee and CEO are in agreement about the recommended path forward, the final step is to review and discuss the strategic questions with the full board and to request a vote to approve the board expansion goals. If done right, finding and recruiting trustees takes a significant amount of time, and it is vital that the full board is in agreement about the strategic priorities and timeline. Getting this alignment now will save a great deal of potential frustration later on.
Who Is On The Hook To Find and Recruit New Trustees?
As we like to say, governance is a team sport. Everyone should lend a hand in finding, recruiting, orienting, and retaining great trustees.
Full Board
The full board should both approve board expansion goals and actively weigh in on strategic questions around board composition, such as the right size, skills, and demographics for your board. As a team, you should all know the priorities and be actively engaged in seeking new team members.
Committees
The governance committee should lead the charge in finding and recruiting trustees, but all committees should play an active role in board recruitment. If you are moving forward with the technique of building a farm team/having candidates first serve on a committee before being nominated to the full voting board, then task committees with helping to find and screen candidates. For example, a finance committee is typically populated with trustees with financial acumen. If this is what they do in their day job, chances are they know lots of others with the requisite skills and have a better network to tap in the financial sector than those on the governance committee.
Individual Trustees
Everyone should know the board and committee recruitment priorities and be on the lookout for potential candidates.
CEO
Your organization’s leader should play an active and engaged role in prioritizing the skills, qualities, and demographics needed on the board, as well as assisting in finding, screening, and orienting candidates.
Composition of High-Performing Boards
Boards that reach the high bar of board composition share the following characteristics:
Board Size
- 11 to 15 trustees.
Previous Governance Experience
- 75% or more of the board have previous governance experience.
Skills and Expertise
- 100% of the skills needed to govern effectively.
Diversity
- Board membership reflects the broadest level of ethnic, racial, gender, and geographical diversity.
- The diversity of board members heightens the credibility of the board in the broader community's eyes.
Level of Objectivity
The board is able to maintain a very high level of objectivity when governing because:
- No trustees have any personal or business ties with the CEO, staff, or each other that could result in a conflict of interest (real or perceived) during decision-making.
- Less than 25% of the board members are parents of students currently enrolled in the school.
- The CEO is the only employee of the organization that is a member of the board.
Assessments
You may find it helpful to look at the results of the Board Structure, Board Composition, and Board Recruitment sections of your Board Assessment. Your board’s results will highlight strengths and areas to improve and also provide relevant resources, articles, and templates to help you strengthen these areas of governance.
Sample Board Expansion Goal
GOVERNANCE Committee
Overarching 3-Year Goals:
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Board Annual Governance Goals
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CEO Annual Governance Goals
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GOVERNANCE Committee Action Plan
Action Plan Goal #1: Expand the board by 2 trustees by December 2018 and by an additional 2 trustees by May 2019 with the prioritized skills of human resources, fundraising and finance. |
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Key Actions |
Due Date |
1. Solicit input from trustees and develop a screening action plan |
September 2018 |
2. Create a written screening process/nominating process |
September 2018 |
3. Begin screening identified candidates |
October 2018 |
Updated