Four Practices and Four Areas of Focus for a Successful Head/Board Partnership
The school's success is the head's success is the board's success
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Whereas the customary work of a nonprofit board is limited to scrutinizing management, the new work requires new rules of engagement and unorthodox ways of fulfilling a board’s responsibilities. The pressures on most nonprofits today are too great for the old model to suffice.
The New Work of the Nonprofit Board, Harvard Business Review by Barbara E Taylor, Richard Chait and Thomas P. Holland, 1996
I’ve used the above quote before and I think it bears repeating. So often, by default, baords and heads end up trapped in the “scrutinizing management” cul de sac. Let’s find our way out!
Whenever I write about governance, I end up writing something twice as long as I intended because it’s unavoidable that governance is a lot. Here is my usual process when I write about this topic:
Step One - I feel a sense of urgency and a few ideas crystalize that I think might be helpful to put out into the governance conversation.
Step Two - Initial drafting and I feel pleased with my progress!
Step Three - This is so inadequate and governance is vast and overwhelming and hard to articulate well and who was I to even think I was equal to this topic?
Step Four - I let the draft sit, focus on how to focus what I want to say, finish it and hit send on something that I feel confident -enough- about and feel it has some decent points.
By Step Four, my inner recovering perfectionist has surfaced to remind me that I am both still in the midst of processing my own theories and thoughts around what good governance looks like in practice AND that I’m just humbly offering these thoughts to the world with the hope parts of it will connect and maybe make some of this complicated topic a little easier to navigate.
Governance is about power and authority and influence. The volunteer nature makes the internal motivational aspect very important and most trustees are trustees because they have a passion and emotional connection (one that is sometimes irrational and difficult to articulate) to the existing mission and institution, even if a part of them does it because it does have a status-driven external motivation. (I suspect anyone who is driven to be a trustee primarily for the status has concluded it wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it is for a ticket to the Met Ball?)
The board has a complicated relationship with the head/ED/CEO - sort of supervisory, sort of power sharing, in many ways dependent on the vagaries of each individual’s sense of self and the sophistication of their relationship skills, always fluctuating and always in need of attention. It is rife with human politics and ripe for drama.
It’s very life, isn’t it? And maybe that’s why it’s so darned complicated to try and move it forward with a handful of insights or tips.
And it also makes it completely understandable how boards and institutions end up in the “every few years, two hour board training session about how governance is not operations” routine because it’s simpler to do a few hours of training about areas of responsibility and go about your business. Everyone is busy. And this used to be pretty much fine for many organizations.
But schools are way more complicated than they used to be. The stakes are high and my goal is to try and put forward material that might make this complex and nuanced business just a bit more accessible and doable. I believe the head and board should and can be a collaborative force for good, indispensable to a school’s success. And I also believe that the board/head partnership has the potential to provide much professional and personal satisfaction for all members, serving a school well in complicated times.
It’s clear from the very positive response “Powerful Partnership”, the presentation I did with Moira Kelly of EXPLO Elevate at NAIS, received, that governance is top-of-mind for heads of school right now, to an urgent degree. Everyone seems to agree it’s messy and complicated and the “tried and true” set of rules of the road don’t meet the moment. Governance and school operations are different areas of purview AND they are intertwined and interdependent in 2025.
And unlike many other nonprofit boards, independent school boards are full of members who are part of other current community stakeholder groups. The boundaries are nuanced and while a parent trustee can be conscious of taking off their parent advocate hat in the board room, it’s not easy and it is still legitimate to have feelings and opinions about your child’s experience at the school.
And it’s easy to demonize a faceless collective authority, but independent schools as a sector are struggling to set up trustees for success.
But ignoring the complexities and nuances of governance leads to frustration, conflict and fuzzy school leadership - the last things a school needs to operate well in the current dynamic environment. It leads to unplanned head turnover, premature head turnover and a quickly shrinking pool of trustees willing to take on the board chair’s job.
I’ve outlined the problems with the current approaches here in much greater detail so I won’t repeat myself.
In this article, I’m putting forward ideas for four regular practices (or habits or mindsets - pick the word that makes the most sense to you) that I believe are essential to building and maintaining a strong board/head partnership. Then I outline four general areas of board responsibility where these practices should be applied. And I also consider the uneven nature of the relationship - there are places that the board has more power (and responsibility) and places where the head has more power (and responsibility). Because - it’s complicated. And let’s be open about that.
Four Practices for Board/Head Collaborative Success
The overall job of a nonprofit board is to steward the institution. The collective is responsible, above any one individual, to provide care and oversight so the institution can fulfill its mission into the future.
The collective nature is a very specific and nuanced form of authority - looming larger in some ways because of its vague and faceless nature and also sometimes easy to push to the side of the day to day institutional consciousness, to forget it’s a group of people. Just like when faculty refer to “the administration.” It used to crack me up when I was a senior admin at Walnut Hill and faculty would complain to me about “the administration” and I would remind them that part of “the administration” was this person you’re talking to!
I suspect that the board’s authority looms larger in times of stress - “the board” will save us! And in times of smooth sailing, it’s easier for the institution to consider it distant yet benign.
The head’s job is to lead the school.
And while the board does hire and evaluate the head, the board and the head are dependent on each other’s success for the institution’s success.
The four practices to create, support and maintain this partnership are:
Demonstrating respect on both sides for a shared dedication to the mission
Strong, trusting relationships driven by an assumption of good will
Fostering a board culture promoting proactive trustee engagement in well established governance norms
Accurate, strategic and timely information sharing
When a head is new, it is incumbent upon the board to set the tone and be proactive in demonstrating respect and good will and put effort into creating the trusting relationships. As the head settles in, it becomes equally incumbent upon the head to put the effort into maintaining relationships and building them with new trustees as they cycle on to the board.
Board members need to put the work into to get to know each other, to create opportunities for all members to have influence and input into committee work and to be thoughtful and intentional about who they will invite on to the board.
And the head and the staff share the lion’s share of the responsibility for information sharing. The board can only be responsible fiduciaries if they have accurate information. The head needs to set them up for success but this expectation also shouldn’t be abused - the head and staff need to produce good and relevant reports, but they shouldn’t walk away from every board meeting with a stack of requests for more. There are also many ways trustees can keep up to date with school happenings outside of a head’s report - schools are veritable content machines in 2025 and trustees should be tuning into social media channels and reading school publications.
And if the head and board end up in a situation where there is a lack of respect for either side, it’s the beginning of the end and it’s hard to repair.
Four Areas of Focus for Board Responsibility
In order to responsibly steward the school, the board needs to be engaged in the following areas, and of course, these areas are interconnected.
Mission:
Appreciation and deep understanding that the school is implementing on its mission through its day to day operations
One note - board members really need to read materials sent before board meetings! (One of my standing jokes is that the third rule of administration is: no one reads anything. But still!)
Money:
This is a central time-consuming duty of any nonprofit board member. If the business fundamentals aren’t working, an organization can’t deliver on its mission.
Every board member has to be engaged enough to have full confidence that the school is competently managing business fundamentals, including having a grasp on revenue streams and costs. Information flow from finance, admissions and development is crucial for the board to do their jobs - this is a main area where school leadership has both responsibility and agency to set up the board for success to the best of their ability, in a spirit of candor and trust.
This is an area where in some functions, the board is the leader and has an appropriately robust role in financial controls including the annual audit, closely partnering with the CFO and head. The board also typically takes the lead on appropriate management of the school’s endowment.
The board also needs a robust understanding that any other school resources are being responsibly stewarded - including maintenance and enhancement of a safe campus that supports the activities of mission delivery.
Active institutional risk management is also a key aspect of fiduciary responsibility.
And of course, philanthropy - ensuring the school has enough resources to deliver on its mission - comes under money as well.
Momentum:
No school or organization should stand still and to have momentum is to have a defined direction to move forward. The “strategic” aspect of trusteeship is all about understanding the school’s current trajectory - to know (and hopefully feel excited!) about where the school is heading, now - and for board members to collaborate in strategy development as to how the school navigates into the future.
Management (of the Board):
Board management is the administrative aspect of board work - recruiting and onboarding new trustees, managing governance education, managing an evaluation process for the board chair and board, understanding the bylaws and implementing relevant bylaw policies, etc.
As you can see, this is a full plate and this is just “business as usual” governance - it doesn’t factor in all the usual stresses that hit schools - crises on or off campus, potential enrollment crises, head transitions, board chair transitions, etc. or even “good stresses” such as the giant institutional effort of a major capital campaign.
However, most schools and boards don’t have the capacity to handle everything full throttle at the same time! For just one example, maybe the buildings and grounds committee is very active in a year where the school does a major addition and in other years, it gets less attention.
Respect and good communication is the foundational building block and the head and the board should be intentional and consistent in tending.
And this bears repeating - the board needs to support the head in leading the school and the head needs to support the board in stewarding the institution - it’s a mutually dependent and mutually beneficial relationship.
If the basis of the partnership is trusting communication, you can figure the rest of it out. And by “trusting communication,” I would strongly recommend an approach that is up front about how you approach stressful topics - demystifying conflict management and providing avenues for trustees’ concerns to be expressed whether it’s individually or in a committee or at the full board level - just acknowledges and de-escalates the inevitable.
And trusting communication needs to go beyond the board chair and the head. It is also imperative that the board’s collective authority be experienced as being the board’s collective authority. Once the board as a group begins to suspect that the board chair is acting as “the board’ - and this can be a slow boil over years or it can be an eruption - nothing good comes from it.
And it is a main reason why it is so hard to find board chairs that want the job! One person can’t carry the weight of responsibility designed for an entire group of shoulders. There are sound reasons that the long-term wellbeing of an organization is stewarded by a group and not an individual, but often governance functioning defaults to a very small group within the group - and more often than we would like, a group of one. Executive committees can be a very positive force but if the communication between an EC and the rest of the board is fuzzy, it just amplifies the “who’s in - who’s out” dynamic.
When a head “fails” it is an institutional failure. Disrespect and suspicion of motives, strained relationships, rickety informal governance structures that cave under pressure and inadequate information flow between head and board over an extended period of time typically all feed into an unhappy outcome.
Yes, it’s complicated. But every head/board partnership can move the needle in a positive direction, starting with getting real about communication. Shaky partnerships can become solid and solid partnerships can become strong.
I left many, many words on the cutting room floor for this one, so stay tuned for more, particularly about what it looks like for a board and head to make forward progress.
I also want to acknowledge the work and the insights of all the people I’ve been talking to about governance over the past month: Moira Kelly at EXPLO Elevate, Stephanie Rogen at Greenwich Leadership Partners, Bethany Di Napoli at ISCA, Bonnie Ricci at ICAISA, Mark Crotty at NWAIS and soon to be at Educators Collaborative, Susan Baldridge at TABS. And I recently read Brooke Carroll’s book on small school governance. I’m so glad there are people out there who also find this topic fascinating!
I’ll leave governance here for now and I’ll be back Tuesday with the April Happenings newsletter (including announcing a fall program I’m pretty excited about) and then next Friday an article for new heads working with the “money people” - finance, admissions and development.
Julie
If you want to increase the capacity of your board, I’m happy to talk about board trainings, workshops and governance advising! You can check out Stony Creek Strategy’s Governance in Action workshops here and find my contact info here. We can also design a customized workshop or retreat day for your board. And always happy just to chat!