The single most important element to a productive board is the clarity of its leaders. Committee chairs armed with spelled-out charters and annual workplans, who each agree, personally, to take responsibility for their group's performance, can take a lot of weight off of the board chair. Implementing a shared agenda is more manageable for everyone.

Do you have the right people in the right spots? Are the board's committee chairs proactive, able to motivate others, and accountable for their charge? If not, it may be time to move a new generation of committee chairs into place. If the politics of moving out a long-time committee chair proves too difficult, sometimes creating co-chairs works: it allows long-time chairs to save face, while providing them with partners who are less fixed in their ways and more willing to drive change.

Missing annual committee workplans? Ask each committee chair to submit annual goals for their committee to the Executive Committee. Model good follow-up behavior by calling them to encourage them to fulfill their assignments. They'll get the message, and start, in turn, to actively engage more personally with members of their committees.

What's the board's plan of action, month-by-month? Now is the time to analyze how the board's various fundraising, program, finance, and planning obligations will unfold in relation to the program and fundraising year. Create a board calendar of every activity you expect board members to be involved in over the course of the upcoming year.

Make sure the assignments are reasonable for busy people. Shorten or spread out your list of goals if it looks intimidating - otherwise people will vote with their feet; agreeing in principle yet bailing out upon execution. Better to plan fewer activities with higher engagement than more activities to which very few board members show up.

Brooklyn Boatworks helps young people develop life skills through the unique craft of wooden boatbuilding and on-the-water experiences. The organization's programming promotes the values of learning by doing, cooperation, perseverance and craftsmanship as it imparts science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills to New York City students, ages 10 through 16.

As Brooklyn Boatworks makes decisions about how to grow the organization, board members have had a wide variety of ideas on how the organization should proceed. With Cause Effective's help, the board chair convened a board retreat at which the focus was on connecting strategic decisions to the board's agenda for its work in the coming year, and thinking through how the structure of the board and its processes could help the organization move ahead with making key decisions on its future. For example, a discussion exploring how many schools and students would be necessary "to feel we are making a difference" helped the group clarify goals for the board's fundraising.

The board chair, Erin Shakespeare, is following this up with a good deal of behind-the-scenes discussions with each board member. Those discussions foster shared leadership - committee work - as well as cementing individual commitments. "Erin is not afraid," remarked Brooklyn Boatworks executive director Marjorie Schulman, "to have difficult conversations with other board members - and with me!" This has led to board coherence and meetings that focus on the emergent matters that need to be addressed, noted Marjorie: "When we come together as a group we're ready to delve into the larger conversations about what our future should look like, because everyone is up to speed with the background they need."