Every keystone needs an arch to hold it. Your board is part of that arc
Advisory for boards, and for the leaders who answer to them.
For Board Presidents, Chairs, and Trustees
Both Chairs.
I have sat in your chair. I have also sat in your leader’s.
I have chaired or presided over boards for most of my career: the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis, the Southern California Board of Rabbis, and two organizations I founded. Both of them have no staff, so chairing them means doing the work too.
I also founded a congregation and led it for more than thirty years, answerable to a board the whole way. I served as interim executive director of a national nonprofit. I held it steady, and I helped its board face the hardest decision a board can make: that it was time to close. And I am certified in interim ministry by the Interim Ministry Network, which is transitional leadership as a trained discipline.
So I am not going to explain your job to you. I have done it. I have done your leader’s. And I am trained in the part that sits between them.
What this is.
Structure, not feelings
This is not coaching for the board.
It is work on the structure. Where decisions sit. Whose expectations are being met, and whose were never written down. Where authority and accountability have quietly come apart.
In most organizations none of this was ever decided. It accumulated, one reasonable choice at a time, across years and several people’s terms. Nobody is to blame for that, and nobody needs to be.
The Idea.
Four things, each of them twice
I work with the EGER Framework: Expectations, Governance, Environment, Results. Each one lives in two places: out in the organization, and inside the person holding the seat.
When the two line up, leadership holds. When they don’t, the leader carries it privately as a personal failing, and the board experiences it as a personnel problem.
That is why a structural conversation is usually a relief to everyone in the room.
How I hold both sides
Your leader is my client. My work is to make the structure around them hold, which is what the institution is paying for.
What your leader tells me in confidence stays with me. What this board tells me does not travel back to them unless you send it. I am not a channel between you. If I were, neither of you could speak freely.
What I do carry between you is structure. Where decision rights are unclear, and where authority and accountability have come apart.
I do not evaluate your leader on the board’s behalf. The one exception is when performance goals are written into the agreement before we begin, and everyone in the room knows it going in.
What the work produces
Three kinds of engagement, one way of working. Each is a defined scope with named deliverables, never a number of sessions.
The Role Rebuild
When the Role needs rebuilding
One quarter. Sessions with you and your leader together, plus one with the full board. You end with three documents: the role as it actually needs to exist, the case to put to your board in language you can use with each other, and a hiring strategy that widens the field rather than narrowing it to who is already known
Governance Realignment
When the board itself is the work
Decision rights, board behavior, and bylaws that describe an organization you stopped being some years ago. Also the line between governing and managing, which is where most of the friction lives and which most boards were never taught, through no fault of their own. Phased over several months, with the first phase scoped on its own. Either of us can stop at the end of it.
Succession Advisory
When a leader is going to leave.
Timing, terms, overlap with a successor, and who is told what in what order. Often two years. The sequence is the work. The moment a departure is widely known, a leader’s effectiveness begins to drop, and not because anybody means it to.
Successions rarely come apart over contract terms. Those are solvable, and most people roughly know how. They come apart over grief, which arrives late, disguised as a procedural objection, from someone nobody expected it from. A search firm hands you a hire. This is the part that comes after, and it is the part that decides how it goes.
The Chair
One more thing about the seat you are in
Board chairs get very little. You took a job nobody trained you for, you inherited arrangements no one explained, and the thanks arrives at the annual meeting in the form of a plaque. In most organizations the chair is carrying more than anyone has noticed, and often something that was never theirs to carry. Part of this work is helping you put that down.
Discretion isn’t my policy. It was my profession.
The Board Mirror
Before we talk
The Board Mirror is twenty statements about your own leadership, not your leader’s. It takes about fifteen minutes. Nobody sees it and there is nowhere to send it. It is the same instrument I use with chief executives, turned toward your chair.
Download The Board Mirror · no email required
The first conversation
Your leader can arrange it, or you can write to me directly. You do not need their permission to ask a question. Thirty minutes, confidential, nothing to prepare. If I think this is not the right work for your organization, I will tell you so and try to point you toward what is.