It is fantastic that we have just released the updated ‘A Question of Balance’. It has always been one of our flagship publications, read and digested by countless staff and trustees.
That balance remains as important as ever. A chair and CEO shouldn’t be great mates, knowing each other since they were at school together or going on holiday together. Equally, they need to be able to talk to each other regularly, politely, with respect and courtesy. People have given me examples of both those extremes in the last few months, and in one case, the CEO decided to leave when communications broke down.
CEO and chairs shouldn’t be clones; if they both think the same way, see the world in the same way and have the same ideas, then there is no synergy and no diversity. The best relationships are more than the sum of their parts, and nowhere is that more true than in a chair – CEO relationship.
Two challenges to board balance
There are two ways that the issue of balance for boards is currently being tested and stretched.
The first is in the external environment. In the turbulent world we live in for charities and non-profits, how does this balance survive or work best when trouble hits? That trouble may be in the case of a funding crisis, key people leaving or media storms. In this case, what is called for is not balance, but a clear division of roles. What can the CEO best do? What can the chair best do? How can others help? As new pressures hit, there will be reasons that the ‘balance’ between chair and CEO needs to evolve.
The second stretch is as boards evolve and improve. As boards put more time into recruiting new trustees and may get individuals who have more extensive specialist or lived experience, what is the balance between the board and staff team? We have tended to see the key dynamic as between the CEO and chair, and that remains critical. But there is also a crucial balance between the skills and role of the board, and the skills and role of the senior staff, and that needs careful reflection and management too.
How should this ‘new balance’ develop? It is pointless to recruit a brilliant board with amazing skills, and then only use them for the occasional comment at board meetings. It’s like having a Rolls-Royce simply to do the supermarket shop.
A balance that needs to evolve
Each board will need to decide how its own balance evolves: between CEO and chair, between trustees and staff, and between the roles when times are stable, and when times are turbulent. The question of balance remains the stepping stone for those discussions. One thing is for certain. That balance can’t be carved in stone or kept unchanging. The pressures from the world mean that everything should be evolving to match the needs of the world and the pressures that today’s charities live in.
