What Albert Ellis Might Say about Governance

To be sure, we have seen our share of over-reaching and micromanaging governing boards. Some were drug into micromanagement by one or two rogue members who use their trusteeship to prosecute pet issues (the guy who wanted to fire the wrestling coach comes to mind). Other boards seem to have over-reach in their historical memory, having repeatedly crossed the line with many heads of school over many years. In fact, the ubiquity of board meltdowns in independent and international schools is what our colleague Pat Bassett calls "the bane of our industry."The late American psychologist Albert Ellis held that irrational thinking, and thereby much self-inflicted human misery, is in our very nature, perhaps even encoded in our DNA. Ellis held that it is only through dint of deliberate effort that we think rationally and can untwist the distorted thinking that drives us nuts. In a similar vein, perhaps micromanagement is in the nature of boards made up predominantly of parents, to say nothing of those international schools with parent elected board members. If so, the detached observer sort of board member that we treasure is as unnatural as rational thinking is to humans. But, as with human thought, governors can learn to take a detached perspective, or at least understand how their close connection to school events creates a propensity for over-reach.Maybe that is as good as it gets in our field; that governance is inherently Sisyphean, with the rock rolling back down the hill according to its nature (and gravity). Smart governance, then, would contain built-in ways to ensure correction once the conversation in the boardroom shifts to being about the wrestling coach. We can't stop humans from being human, but we can work on the parts of human-ness that get in our way.