Does your board "raise the bar?” Our experience is that many boards do good technical fiduciary work—and are well versed in their duties of care, loyalty, and obedience. But we argue this is no longer enough to effectively govern a thriving organization into the future. Great boards "raise the bar" to elevate the capabilities and impact of their organizations. 

Here’s another way to say it: If your board is not modeling the way for disciplined strategic work, excellent teamwork, and rigorous development and assessment of people and performance, then it’s not working to its highest potential. It’s time for a new conversation about the role of the board in creating a resilient, adaptive, and valuable organization. 

This article from Harvard Law School Forum recommends 6 ways that boards (corporate and NFP) and their members can elevate performance. We highlight 3 of them here:

Let’s go a little further and invite you to consider your own board. As we highlighted in our August Blueprint, the magnitude and variety of risks that boards face continues to increase—but often board structures and practices have not kept pace. 

High-performing boards are what we call Adaptive Boards—in addition to fulfilling core responsibilities and responding to current circumstances, they also engage in future-focused learning, innovation, and vision building. Since 2019, when we coined the term in our white paper on Adaptive Boards, new understandings of good governance continue to become increasingly vital—and we see similar thought leadership to GLP’s from other research in higher education and corporate sectors.

One place to start is with a quick assessment.

Check the box if your board does this activity with frequency, consistency and supporting systems and capabilities. Where are you today?

Adaptive leadership leverages the board’s collective talent to look outward, identifying intersections, trends, and questions about what is or will be relevant for stewarding the institution. This mindset also immediately reframes how your board approaches:

Time allocation in meetings. When you are committed to engaging the talent in the board room—and throughout the organization—the agenda is shaped by key questions such as: How can we spend meeting time focusing on what matters most? How can we protect time for dialogue on questions of strategy and the support of leadership? 

Succession planning. If you are looking ahead to the future, succession planning for the CEO/head or board chair becomes a purposeful aspect of the ongoing work of the board—rather than a reactive step implemented in response to immediate circumstances.

Board composition, recruitment, and education. When board members embrace the understanding that they are unpaid governance professionals, it becomes clear that the specific skills, experience, and talents of each board member—as well as their ongoing commitment to learning—are essential factors in shaping the long-term success of the organization.

Strategy. When board members approach their work as stewards of the organization and its long-term value, strategy becomes a core focus of the board’s time, talent, and energy.

Reflecting the importance of long-term thinking, this study described in Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance indicates one of the key high-impact behaviors of effective board members is that they are more likely to use a longer timeframe for decision making, helping the board avoid a short-term orientation. 

Looking to the future can also encourage the use of imagination—which is essential to navigating the unknown and essential to strategy development. The tips identified in this article on how to work with “unknown futures” can help leaders to think expansively about vision and break free from the limitations of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis followed by ordinary technical planning.

Using the example of how Jules Verne’s sci-fi story “Robur the Conqueror” led to the development of the modern helicopter, the article describes how you can use “wild cards”—low-probability, high-impact changes that could reshape the future—to broaden your perspective:

The exercise of exploring multiple future possibilities will also improve your board’s strategic foresight. As noted in this Forbes article, Octavio Egea and Arjun Shukla, consultants at frog, part of Capgemini, argue that “the path ahead is neither linear nor predictable—demanding a culture of adaptability that is prepared for the onset of multiple possible futures.” They suggest it is helpful to see the future through one or more of the following lenses:

• Analytical lens—Uses historical data to inform and guide decisions about the future.
• Speculative lens—Explores a wide range of future possibilities through creative and divergent thinking.
• Systems lens—Connects thinking across different systems to build flexible strategies and help create desired outcomes.

As you explore the future and assess current risks, you may encounter limitations of your current committees and board structure. In order to elevate your board’s performance, it may be necessary to evolve your board, your composition, practices, and committee structures. GLP has developed a successful approach we call Board Evolution© to help you lead a bespoke process of assessment and redesign of board systems and structures. If you’d like to learn more, let us know—we are happy to provide a complimentary consultation.

When boards raise the bar they create space for their leaders to do the same: adaptive leadership is not just for the board. CEOs and heads of school also benefit from a focus on learning, innovation, and long-term thinking as they navigate geopolitical risks, rapid changes in technology, generational differences, and unexpected challenges.

This article from McKinsey highlights how versatile leaders are more successful—and that versatility results from:

1. Taking on different operating roles, environments, and challenges to grow a varied set of skills.
2. Deep curiosity and creative thinking—a willingness to ask questions, rethink assumptions, and learn on the fly.

In the corporate sphere, as the article notes, aspiring CEOs can pursue widely divergent experiences, such as helping with a big restructuring, and, at another point, growing a midsize company from $500 million to $5 billion in revenue. Those experiences will cultivate a variety of skills and knowledge, making the leader more versatile as a CEO.

As NFPs and schools solve for the talent needs ahead, how do we think about attracting and cultivating educational and NFP leadership when viewed through these insights?

The leadership ladder for educational and NFP organizations does not often provide exposure to the problems, contexts, and operating environs that chief executives navigate most of the time. This is why many new leaders are caught off guard, especially if they or their boards have not been attentive to creating a supportive on-ramp with clearly negotiated expectations. 

How can the board and leadership work together to actively transform the opportunities for talent development in their organization? How can you help rising leaders gain a wider range of skill sets and gain experience interacting with a variety of stakeholders?

Building a distributed leadership culture that extends beyond the board chair and CEO/head will not only help mitigate risks and build resilience for the organization—it will also help the development of homegrown talent.

GLP recommends that boards interested in the challenges associated with finding, developing, and retaining talent need a committee or task force focused on people strategy. Part of that committee’s responsibility is identifying ways to better cultivate talent, build strong teams, and prepare leaders within the organization. In this blog post, we offer the idea of having a "Chief People Officer" whose responsibility is to facilitate a cohesive approach to recruiting and developing leaders in alignment with your organization's priorities, vision, and culture.

This NPR conversation highlights the pressures that college presidents face—and how vital it is that they are able to lead change and communicate well with numerous constituencies. We appreciate Brian Rosenberg’s clarity—and humor. His comments on new presidents align with what we see with new k12 school leaders, too, and his insights are relevant for leaders in all kinds of mission-driven organizations. A few highlights:

There is so much in this one paragraph! Boards and leaders will make better future decisions by taking time to understand “how we got here” in order to break free from the structures that put leaders in an unwinnable set of crosshairs. 

Many k12 schools and not for profits face the same challenges. Leaders can model the way, but boards will have to take ownership for this work in equal measure—learning the business, interrogating future possibilities, building shared agreements about purpose and strategy, and supporting leadership through the pain and loss associated with change. 

Rosenberg continues:

There is a lot of hope in Rosenberg’s comments for scrappy, entrepreneurial, and ready-to-get-to-work schools and organizations who may be feeling real pressure. And the adaptation conversation is likely to include an exploration of AI. Let’s go there…

In “AI in Education: Leading a Paradigm Shift,” Tyler Thigpen, with whom I’ve taught at UPenn’s Graduate School of Education, offers a thoughtful and practical approach for asking and answering the question: How should AI shift the current paradigm for teaching and learning—and how shouldn’t it? 

Thigpen walks through 13 components of education—from curriculum, to school culture, to buildings—and explores the role of AI for each. The format is useful for framing faculty discussions and making decisions in your own institution. We highlight two examples here:

Vision

We asked—How can AI help us achieve our school’s vision more effectively?

How we answered—Our school mission is each person who enters our doors will find a calling that will change the world. For us, AI is like any other new tech. It can be used for good or ill. Thus, we’ve sought and embraced AI to the extent it helps us guide stakeholders to reify their life’s purpose. Anything short of that bar doesn’t get our attention for long.

Assessment

We asked—How can AI-driven analytics provide deeper insights into learner performance?

How we answered—Three methods arose for us here as well. First, we leveraged the learning analytics embedded in the responsive and adaptive learning programs mentioned above. They analyze student performance data to identify strengths, weaknesses, and interests, helping guide learners toward discovering their passions and potential callings. Second, we had our middle and high schoolers take the College and Career Readiness Assessment Plus. This world-class test uses AI to assess learners’ quantitative reasoning, analytical thinking, writing effectiveness, and writing persuasiveness. Third, we brought back a form of oral exams (which we call Practicals) to ensure authenticity in assessments. Essentially, learners can use AI at various points throughout their learning journey, but ultimately, they must prove mastery of foundational learning objectives in foolproof ways—i.e., both with and without AI tools.

This HBR article by Chip Conley also has useful insights for designing learning in the age of AI. “Wisdom Work,” says Conley, is the new “Knowledge Work”—referencing a concept from management theorist Peter Drucker, which has been influential for more than half a century. 

Wisdom—“metabolized experience shared with others”—is becoming more important because: “AI is increasingly able to handle knowledge-based tasks that until just a few years ago only people could perform. With this shift, and in a world where more and more young people will be running organizations, there will be less demand for human knowledge—and more for human wisdom.”

Asking the question, “Beyond your boss, who in the organization offers you helpful advice or wisdom?” enabled the author to create a Wisdom Heat Map of the organization, identifying where wisdom was stored in the organization and identify the qualities of informal mentors: “less ego and more collaboration skills, a knack at asking generative questions, and an ability to offer unvarnished insight that feels like a gift as opposed to judgment.”

This approach inspired the creation of a mentern program: “The word mentern is a combination of mentor and intern….We based our mentern program on the idea that the two people who are paired in the program have both a lot to share (as mentors) but also a lot to learn (as interns), no matter what their position, age, or experience. Often, these menterns were from different generations….Fostering this kind of reciprocal mentorship was a great way to transfer knowledge in the organization and deepened the connection of these two managers and their commitment to the company.”

How could you use this mentern approach at your organization? 

Raising the bar means you are always talking about and assessing strategy. And that means you are working in the domain of uncertainty. You are:

• Making future-focused choices—when the future is never certain
• Specifying an outcome you want to achieve—when you don’t control all the variables 
• Hypothesizing and testing your ideas

Strategy is essential to putting your organization in a position to win. Yet, it’s not possible to prove in advance that your strategy will work. This inability to “prove in advance” runs counter to the way many leaders and board members have been trained to make decisions—and as a result can often lead to the trap of avoiding long-term strategy and focusing only on lists of initiatives (plans) that operate in short-term timeframes and involve factors that can be controlled. 

In highlighting the importance of keeping strategy simple, this HBR article underscores that:

“Articulating a simple strategy is a challenging task. As Steve Jobs once put it: ‘Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.’”

At GLP, we start every strategy process with creating a one-page strategy document for this reason. Strategy requires clarity about a few key decisions. 

If you find yourself identifying lengthy lists of actions and tactics, save those for the planning phase and return to the process of establishing a clear, simple strategy.

The author also encourages avoiding the term “strategic plan”: “A plan is not a strategy….If you start calling plans strategic, you’ll be tempted to short-change the effort you need to make to create a good strategy.”

We agree that unless you are reframing “strategic plan” to be an umbrella term that describes the creation of strategy and the act of planning to execute, it will only cause confusion. Understanding that strategy and plans are distinct will enable you to utilize them both effectively—as we highlight in our blog post Plan or Strategy? Hint: You Need Both!

The work ahead for leaders and boards is getting more complex. Raising the bar makes us ready, but it also makes governance and leadership more challenging, engaging, and rewarding. We’ll continue to share ideas, resources, and provocations to support your efforts, and hope you’ll let us know what you’d like to learn more about as we publish future Blueprints.

Email me directly at stephanierogen@greenwichleadershippartners.com.