When Boards Go Bad

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the famous words, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The same can be said for the boards that govern private, independent schools, but the surest and most frequent road to ruin for boards involves getting sideways with one or more of six essential principles of governing well.

• Power – vested in the board as a whole, not in any individual trustees.
• Place – board work happens during duly constituted board or committee meetings, not in sidebar or ad hoc conversations between subsets of governors.
• Process – smart boards take a “divide and conquer” approach, using committees to do the heavy lifting, rather than doing everything in plenary session (and they don't redo committee work in plenary, either).
• Perspective – that of a detached observer, rather than someone “in the fray.”
• Position – holds the school in trust for future generations of students; does not own the school for personal gain.
• Privacy - keeping board discussions private and confidential, while maintaining unconditional support for collective board decisions in public.

We call these the six P's of board health. How are your board members doing?