What Trustees Talk About

I overheard two independent school trustees discussing the relative merits of the students being asked to tour prospective families on their visits to the admission office. One trustee, we'll call him Jim, initiated the conversation based on something he had observed as a member of the newly formed marketing committee. Both Jim and the other trustee, Alice, are on the marketing committee.

Jim: "Sadie (an 11th grade student) is excellent, she really shows the school in its best light. I love her enthusiasm and positive attitude."

Alice: "But, Ted (a 12 grader) is simply awful. If I met him on a tour, I would run far away to avoid having my child end up like that."

Jim: "I know. Sophie (the director of admission) always picks Joe. I think we should call her and tell her how lousy he is."

Alice: "Good idea, before he does any more damage. By the way, do you think Sophie is very good in this role? Larry (the head of school) made a bad hire. Ann (the assistant director of admission) is much more enthusiastic and picks better students to tour. Maybe she should take over."

Such conversations drive me crazy. On the one hand they are flagrant violations of the boundary between governance and operations. Trustees should not be evaluating, especially in an anecdotal or informal format, the employees of the head of school. Yet, on the other hand, boards and heads collude in such violations when they agree to create committees like marketing, admissions, etc., and add board members to the roster. On still another hand, maybe such conversations are inevitable when parent trustees dominate boards; it may be unrealistic to expect them not to talk about such things.

The question this begs an answer to is about how independent and international school trustees should handle their experiences as parents in the school when it comes to governing. The field abounds in unhelpful, but nice-sounding, aphorisms such as, "govern above the fray," "anecdote is the singular form of data," or "be able to see beyond your own child's experience." The problem is that once a trustee hears or sees something, anecdotal though it may be, it becomes a bell that cannot be un-rung, especially when the information is corroborated by one's own experience or anecdotes from others. 

I used to think that the answer lay in better trustee cultivation, selection and training. After all, if we just got people with the right mindset--focused on strategic issues rather than the day-to-day--and relentlessly trained them on the basics of trusteeship, then our governance problems would be solved. I no longer think this is sufficient. Both of the two trustees in the vignette above are known to me as stellar governors; exactly the sort of people and minds that any board would love to embrace. If they are vulnerable to this type of ad hoc derailment, then how much more so are the thousands of other trustees.

Because enrollment and fundraising are of paramount concerns to many, perhaps most, schools these days, trustees might sensibly argue that customer satisfaction should be a strategic board concern. To think otherwise seems to risk becoming like Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese) in the Fawlty Towers comedy series, who in one episode said of the hotel that he and his wife owned that "this would be a perfectly wonderful hotel if it weren't for the guests." 

My thinking these days is that heads and administrators seldom take customer satisfaction seriously enough (or at least they often give that appearance by explaining every potential issue away in terms of extreme parents or idiosyncratic observations), while board members tend to take it way too seriously, elevating any supposed issue to the level of board debate. This sets up a classic polarization paradigm where each then seems to propel the other even further away, not unlike couples in a dysfunctional relationship where each justifies crazier and crazier behavior as reasonable given the response of the other.

The solution may lie in finding a way for heads and board members to have a constructive, helpful and appropriate conversation about customer satisfaction, rather than letting governance get hijacked by the tyranny of the anecdote.

1. Heads should make it clear to their boards that they take customer satisfaction very seriously.
2. Boards should make it clear that no matter how seriously they themselves take customer satisfaction, the job of fixing any problems lies with the head and administration; e.g., trustees will eschew "working the problem." In fact, a board that feels compelled to intervene directly is either over-reaching or dealing with a dysfunctional administration.
3. Boards and heads should agree on a framework for systematically gauging customer satisfaction other than via anecdote or informal commentary; e.g., surveys, focus groups, etc. Customer satisfaction problems and remediation plans should be reported to the board as part of the head's regular information process.

Should trustees ever pass along anecdotal material to the head? Is it ever appropriate for trustees to make operational suggestions?

The answers, as with so many things, depends. In this case, the answers depend on the context and the seriousness of the news. Has the trustee learned directly or anecdotally about illegal, immoral and unethical misconduct on the part of a school employee; conduct that places the school at risk? If yes, then certainly the trustee should notify the head of school or board chair, who will in turn notify the head. Has the trustee overheard chatter among parents at a basketball game that the middle school math teacher isn't quite up to parental expectations? If yes, then the trustee should ny no means mine further for details, nor should she pass along the information. What if the trustee, also a middle school parent, agrees with the anecdotal assessment of the teacher? Then the trustee can deal with the teacher directly about issues involving his or her own child, but should still refrain from acting on the observation in an official board capacity. To do otherwise would put a governor in the role of working what is a management problem.

The proverbial flies in the ointment here are who gets to define "seriousness," and whether or not trustees are willing to delegate to management no matter what.   Different people define seriousness differently, and what, in the great sweep of one school year rolling into the next seems ordinary to a head might seem very urgent to the parent watching his or her child get older every day. This is perhaps the central challenge for the parent trustee: separating the essential from the extraneous (or at least the non-emergent) when hearing the daily news reports about the school from friend, spouse/partner or child.

Likewise, resisting the urge to intervene on one's own can seem irresistible, especially if one believes oneself to know better than management how to address a particular problem. Regardless of the rationale, trustees should never plunge across the line into personal intervention. Even the urgent and serious should be the responsibility of management.

There is, of course, more to say on this subject, and so consider this to be the first of a number of related posts. Please comment so we can kick this around.