The Board's Role in Making Strategy

One of the most frequent questions we receive from independent school trustees is about the board's role in strategic planning. Traditionally, making strategy was a key board activity, done in concert with administration and informed by plenty of stakeholder input. Recently, we are seeing many boards following the corporate model of pushing strategy formulation to the executive (head of school), and simply voting to adopt and then monitor the plan.This piece by Ken Favaro in Strategy+Business online contains a clear and concise restatement of the board's role in strategy--one that integrates both traditional and corporate perspectives into a coherent whole for schools:

"...for [the] board directors to be meaningfully engaged in a company’s strategy and able to add value to it, they must be part of deciding what strategic issues and opportunities need to be addressed now (versus those that can wait until later), how they are framed, what alternative responses should be considered, how alternatives should be evaluated, how well they have been evaluated, and ultimately what alternative (or combination of alternatives) should be chosen."

Regardless of who frames the strategic alternatives, Favaro's point above makes it clear that the board should play an active and engaged role throughout. We wholeheartedly agree.