Design Your Board (Or It Will Design Itself)

Rob Acton on the three foundations of effective boards, why less than 5% of board members receive training, and what separates boards that work from boards that don't.

I’ve worked with enough nonprofit boards to notice a pattern.

Some boards are force multipliers. They ask the hard questions. They open doors the CEO can’t. They show up when things fall apart. They make the work easier, not harder.

Other boards are an anchor. They second-guess operations they don’t understand. They demand reports they won’t read. They shut down smart investments in the name of financial responsibility.

And here’s what I’ve learned: The difference isn’t about finding wealthy donors or well-connected people.

It’s about design.

Most nonprofit boards are set up to fail. Board members don’t have clear expectations about their role or responsibilities, or where they have influence and where they don’t. They aren’t trained on the very real skills required to sit on a governance board. And they’re shoved into systems that are built in good faith, but don’t allow them to bring their best strengths to the table.

But when you actually design a board — with the same intentionality you’d bring to building a product or shaping a strategy — everything changes. Because building a highly functional nonprofit board might be the single most important thing you can do to build a sustainable social impact organization. It might even determine whether your organization can actually deliver on its mission.

To explore what designing effective nonprofit boards looks like in practice, I wanted to talk with Rob Acton.

Rob founded Cause Strategy Partners 11 years ago after serving as a nonprofit CEO and watching boards either multiply impact or drain resources. Since then, he’s placed over 3,000 board members across 1,500 organizations. He wrote Becoming a Causey, a roadmap for effective board service. And he’s spent a decade figuring out exactly what separates boards that work from boards that don’t.

Full Interview:

Eric Ressler: I’m really excited today to dive into all things nonprofit boards, specifically governance boards. I’ll start by saying we’ve had a lot of board exposure working with social impact organizations and our clients. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that we often look at the board as a barrier to getting good work out the door — which I say carefully and intentionally and not with disrespect. But it’s been a challenge for us. I think we’ve seen it oftentimes be a challenge for our clients as well, where the board feels like this invisible hand that has influence in sometimes not a very constructive way. But I’ve also learned through working with you and through studying the work that you do, that there is a better way and that a board can also be an incredible asset for organizations. I’ve seen that firsthand too. So what I’d love to start with is just to get your opinions and your perspectives and your experience around what is it that makes a nonprofit board constructive and helpful and a force for good instead of something that feels more like a barrier for social impact organizations?

Rob Acton: That’s probably one of the core motivators of why I launched Cause Strategy Partners 11 years ago. I served as a nonprofit CEO for 11 years and had the opportunity to see what it looks like when you have the right people in the right seats who understand the role and are doing the role — how that multiplies a leader’s opportunity to drive mission impact versus a board that becomes a net drain on the organization.

I can’t think of anything worse than a nonprofit organization — we don’t operate around the edges of society, we’re taking care of homelessness, kids, the sick, the environment — to have a board that’s actually draining resources instead of contributing. It’s just not appropriate.

Top of mind elements of a great board: First, high expectations have been set. We’re not embarrassed to say this is a real set of commitments — a meaningful amount of your time, your resources, opening your network to the organization, contributing the core talents you bring to the board. I’ve seen people apologize for the roles and responsibilities and expectations. That makes me sad. There’s no apology. You’re stepping into a role where you’ll be one of 10, 12, 15 people shepherding this important work.

Second — and this is the theme of today’s conversation — designing that board. Not just “who do we know?” or “does anybody have a friend who might want to serve?” But really being thoughtful around what is the right mix of backgrounds, experiences, skill sets, industries that we need represented in these strategic conversations. Really designing that board instead of letting board development happen to you.

Third, great boards are well-trained and have a culture they invest in. It’s not a group of strangers who show up at four meetings a year. A great board invests in becoming a team. They know one another, trust one another, communicate with each other. I chair a board — Broadway Inspirational Voices — and we have two meetings a year. We take the first hour at those in-person meetings, literally says on the agenda “board culture time,” and we engage with one another around fun activities, go-around questions, getting to know one another, because it matters that you’re a team.

Eric Ressler: I’d love to dig in a little bit more about something that you said that’s a little bit surprising to me around you shouldn’t apologize to the board for setting a big ask, essentially. And I know that what’s interesting to me about that is that it does feel like board positions are often volunteer positions, unpaid positions, I would say in 95% of cases for nonprofits, if not more. And so what I’ve experienced also is that it can be hard for younger professionals, professionals who don’t have the means to dedicate extra time and energy to show up and do that volunteer work, especially in a meaningful way, especially when oftentimes there’s a spoken or unspoken expectation that part of the role of being on a board is to give money or to open your networks. And yet there’s also this drive, and I think this is really core to your work as well, around making sure that boards aren’t just a bunch of old rich white people, to put it bluntly. So how do you manage those two sometimes contradictory scenarios?

Rob Acton: The nonprofit sector has really shifted over the last decade. I don’t see a lot of organizations anymore that are like “who can write the biggest check and those are the only people we’re interested in.” There’s a lot more awareness that diversity matters. When I say diversity, I mean across a range of spectrums. Racial and ethnic diversity of course matters — that’s been an area where the nonprofit sector has traditionally fallen behind. Look at the community the organization is serving and then their board, and it’s not reflective. We have to change that.

But there are many other aspects of identity — gender and sexual identity, living with disabilities, age. Then we need to look at skill set, industry, sometimes geography if the organization is serving multiple geographies, and life experience. Being thoughtful around building that board that will serve our organization well is what matters.

We need money to run nonprofits — you’re keenly aware of that as much as I am — but that won’t get you the whole way. When a board has delegated everything else to the CEO and their team and said “okay, we’ll just raise money,” they’ve really lost track of their core responsibilities. Boards shape strategy. Boards ensure that strategy’s coming to life. Boards leverage their core skill sets in the boardroom to make wise decisions in a complex operating environment and sometimes in crisis. Boards provide fiduciary oversight, financial sustainability, and manage the CEO’s efforts.

It’s about much more than writing that big check, and I’m happy to say I’ve really seen acceptance of that reality. That said, it doesn’t happen automatically. That’s the work we do at Cause Strategy Partners — we help organizations get well outside of their existing network and find talented professionals at great companies with wonderful skill sets who are passionate about the organization’s mission. We train those board members, set high expectations, and set them up for a strong track record of success.

You have to work at it. You have to set a strategy. You have to design this. You have to find partners that can help you identify candidates. You can’t just rely on your own network of board members sitting in the boardroom today if you really want to build that kind of board.

Eric Ressler: I know that this is going to be a little bit of a tough question to generalize, but I’d like to try, at least for listeners who are trying to understand how they can have a more constructive board and a constructive approach to their board. What should fall, in your opinion and in your experience, generally speaking, in the board’s set of influence and oversight versus staff? Where do you see those lines being drawn in a healthy way?

Rob Acton: Great question. The CEO has a great amount of responsibility to lead and shepherd the day-to-day work of the organization. But in almost every aspect of responsibility, there’s a corollary board role.

Take strategy. The board cannot set strategy on their own — they don’t have enough information, don’t have day-to-day operational experience, aren’t working with clients on the ground. But we need that diversity of experience, insight, and wisdom brought to the strategy shaping process. So it’s a collaboration. The CEO brings reports, landscape analysis, competitor analysis, SWOT analysis built with the team — they’re providing core insight, but they’re not doing it alone. The board has an important role.

So they’re collaborating around strategy, around ensuring resources are coming into the organization, around ensuring those resources are being well-utilized and the strategic plan is coming to life, around making sure the organization has the right talent in key positions and can develop them in their positions.

In every element of this, there’s a “you do / we do / we do together” conversation. But you’ve got to define that upfront. You can’t just operate assuming that everyone intuitively knows “this is the CEO’s work, this is the board’s work.” You’ve got to talk about it.

Eric Ressler: In your experience, because you’ve worked with so many nonprofit organizations specifically on helping to place candidates for the board, what would you say from your purview is the general state of board and staff relationship right now? Are most nonprofits generally happy with their board but need a little bit of work? Are most nonprofits mostly dissatisfied with their board and see them more as an anchor than a force for good? What’s the benchmark right now? What’s the average?

Rob Acton: I can give a data point here that boards get a B minus to a C plus from their CEOs in terms of “do you have the right board in place to accomplish the mission?” That comes from BoardSource’s Leading with Impact, a biannual survey of governance in the nonprofit sector. So not a failing grade, not a D. A B minus.

There are a lot of organizations that come to us where the CEO is very unhappy with their board. They really don’t think that their board is getting the job done. That’s troubling. That actually makes me sad for that CEO and that organization, because it’s already a lonely job to run a nonprofit, but to have a board that doesn’t feel like your partners in mission but sort of an adversary — there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement across the vast majority of nonprofits we see.

That starts with who’s in the boardroom — designing the right board. But it also moves into training. I think nonprofit board service may be the most important responsibility that almost nobody ever gets trained for. In the workplace, you would never elevate somebody to a new role they’ve never been in before and provide no training. But we do that in the nonprofit boardroom all the time. I would venture to say less than 5% of all nonprofit board members serving in the country have ever received any governance training at all. Maybe they were onboarded to the organization — they saw the strategic plan, met the senior staff, toured the facility — but did they receive training in how to read financial reports? How to engage in fundraising efforts? Around strategic planning?

We just say “you’ll figure it out.” We can do better than that. At the very least, we should be regularly training our boards to perform the roles and responsibilities they take responsibility for when they step onto a board.

Eric Ressler: Where does the burden fall on that training? Should that be coming from the nonprofits? Should that be coming from the philanthropic sector at large? Should foundations be funding open source board training materials as a service to the sector? Is it a mix of all of those things? How do we fix that problem in your opinion?

Rob Acton: I’m trying to think of where the buck stops. The buck stops with the board itself. They typically have a governance committee who is charged with — most boards, I should say, that have broken off into committees have a governance, maybe it’s a governance and nominating committee — ensuring that good governance is happening at that organization. That’s the starting point for me.

At Cause Strategy Partners, we’ve placed 3,500 board members on 1,500 boards across the United States and United Kingdom. All of them have had access to good governance training at three or four stages in the process while we help them find their board. We’re not interested in placing folks on a board who don’t know the job, aren’t committed to excellence, and may not even show up.

I once had a CEO that I was on the board of an organization, and the CEO used to say, “Look, I’m going to take care of the day-to-day of the organization board. I need you to take care of yourselves.” That was sort of blunt, but also quite powerful for me. Why is Sharon needing to take care of 15 grown adults who are pretty solid professionals in their own right? Can you just take care of yourselves? Can you grow the board? Can you ensure that you meet your fundraising targets? Can you make sure that you get the training that you need? I think that’s a relatively fair comment. We can step up as a board and really ensure that we are operating at the level that we should.

Eric Ressler: So as we wrap up here, I know it’s been a big year in the social impact space. There’s been a lot of change. The landscape has changed rapidly. I imagine there’s been a lot of motion and turnover and change as it relates to nonprofits and their boards and their board chairs and all of that. Despite all of that, I’d be really curious to hear what are you seeing forward-looking, future-looking, that’s getting you really inspired right now, that’s helping you get up every day, even amongst things being really difficult, and feeling motivated to continue towards this work, to continue working in this sector. What are those things for you right now?

Rob Acton: High-capacity people like to deal with challenges. They don’t like to sit on boards that are rubber stamp boards where they attend four meetings a year, go to the gala, sell some tickets, and call it a day. High-capacity people are motivated when a complex challenge shows up and they need to sort something out in a manner that’s critical and timely, and they’ve got partners in that work.

If we have high-capacity people on boards that are trusting one another, communicating with each other, and working well together, there’s a different level of engagement. In the challenging environment we’ve been operating in, I have not seen the boards I’m connected to — any board members backing away and saying “this is getting hard, I didn’t sign up for this.”

An organization I’m involved with had to do substantial layoffs in the recent environment. I didn’t see any board members say “that’s not what I signed up for.” I saw board members lean in, strategize, want to solve these challenges and problems, and have very strategic discussions.

That’s what I’m inspired by. I think an environment like this actually creates the opportunity for us to engage high-capacity board members in a way they might not otherwise be engaged. And that sort of leadership will get us through the challenges we’re facing. I’m really genuinely inspired by that.

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Rob Acton is the Founder and CEO of Cause Strategy Partners, where he’s placed over 3,000 board members across 1,500 nonprofit organizations. He’s the author of Becoming a Causey: Champion Your Cause Through Nonprofit Board Leadership. Learn more at causestrategypartners.com.

Eric Ressler is the Founder and Creative Director at Cosmic, a creative agency for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. Learn more at designbycosmic.com.