Ask Alban: Thinking About Board Size

Q. Everyone knows that our governing board is too large for effective decision making, and yet every time we talk about reducing the size of our board people grow anxious. The conversation gets stuck when leaders assert that we must have a large board to insure good representation.  How can we engage a productive conversation about board size that explores new ground and doesn’t provoke anxiety?

A. A good place to begin the dialogue is by asking board members, “What is the fundamental work of the board?” You may want to begin with the assertion that the primary work of the board is governance, and then go on to ask board members how they understand that term.

Once board members build a shared definition of their work, you can introduce the next important question, “Why is having a large board important to you?” A first round response is likely to include vague assertions about the importance of representation and good democratic process. If you stick with this question long enough (by repeatedly asking, “And why is that important?”) you will eventually surface the heart of resistance. Congregations with large boards are often protecting or promoting some core value that is widely shared but not fully articulated. Let me offer a few examples from my consulting practice.

The board of a Baptist church recently spoke to me about their belief in soul liberty and soul freedom, and the need to protect individual voice from the unchecked authority of a pastor. In their thinking, a large board is the best way to insure the individual right of self-expression.

The board of a Unitarian Universalist congregation spoke to me about the importance of hearing the underrepresented, or the voice on the margins. For this particular group, a large board is important to insure that a mainstream voice doesn’t silence the margin.

A group of Mennonite pastors recently spoke to me of their congregations’ deeply held values of humility and being a “plain people”. A large board signifies that no individual voice is more important than another.

A Jewish rabbi explained that for a people who have suffered near extinction, the notion that every person matters finds its way into board life, where the presence of many voices around the table is an end unto itself.

If we listen carefully to these examples we see that “representation” is the expressed principle, but the underlying values that drive people to pursue representation are subtly unique. If you want to advance the dialogue around reducing board size, you need to articulate the underlying values that support representation. Then you are ready for the next question.

“Are we really promoting or protecting what is most important to us by operating with a large board?” In the above examples board members recognized that what they cared most deeply about was not actually preserved or promoted by a large body. A large board often results in a few active board members engaging in dialogue and decision making, while the rest of the board looks on, or rubberstamps decisions made outside of the room. Sub-groups within the board often form, creating marginalized clusters whose voices are never fully heard or honored. Board members don’t experience their presence as critical and find it easy to skip meetings or to ignore their responsibilities. The most assertive and frequently heard voices on the board are often not the healthiest leadership voices. In short, large boards don’t actually promote good representation, they often undermine it.

Once the board has identified the fundamental nature of their work, and they have recognized that being large doesn’t necessarily promote effective representation, you are ready to move the dialogue forward. “Where does our understanding of “right” board size come from?”  Somewhere in the history of the congregation a group of leaders decided that this structure was the right structure. Why was that decision made? Was it a good decision for that time? Are the conditions which informed that decision still relevant today? Does denominational polity really require the specific practices that we have adopted?

Finally you are ready to pose the ultimate question, “What is the right board size for who we are and what we seek to accomplish?”

Boards that engage in this type of dialogue rarely come to a decision about reduced board size in a single conversation. It takes a long time to unfreeze the long held assumptions that members cling to, even when they can no longer defend the logic behind their position. Lots of patience and good humor is required. And once the board has changed their thinking, well then there is the rest of the congregation.

The Village Elders

All congregations are faced with decisions that can be made by a small leadership body (the governing board, the staff team, a committee) and decisions that must be taken on by the collective body. In the small to medium sized congregation, when full congregational decision making is required, a church-wide meeting is scheduled and a significant percentage of total membership shows up.  In the large congregation, leaders are continually frustrated by the small percentage of members that turn out for a “y’all come” meeting. It’s not unusual for a congregation with membership exceeding 2000 to have only 120 people show up for a congregational meeting where important decisions are being made.  Why is this? I believe that the answer has something to do with group threshold limits, and the number of people who identify themselves as the “village elders” at any point in time. Let me explain.

The full leadership body of the church is a self identified group of leaders who feel “responsible” for the overall well being of the congregation.  This typically includes members of the staff team and board members. It also includes an inner ring of leaders who are not currently serving in either of those capacities, but still feel a strong sense of leadership responsibility for the church. This group informally functions as the “village elder” body, keeping a watchful eye on the direction of the congregation.  It’s not an officially appointed body, and membership seems to self adjust over time. However, the size of the group always remains rather constant; somewhere between 75-150 people.  This seems to hold true regardless of the size of the total membership body.

Why doesn’t the informal leadership group ever grow larger than this number, even in the very large congregation?  Humans are known to have a cognitive upper limit to the average number of individuals with whom they can form cohesive personal relationships. That limit, known as Dunbar’s Number, is around 150 people.  Having enough memory space to remember people’s names and faces is not enough to manage 150 relationships. It is about integrating and managing information about the constantly changing relationships between individuals within a group.  When a group grows larger than 150 people, members of the group lose their ability to track relationships, and the group loses its capacity to function well as a community.

I would argue that in the large congregation the leadership body is always subconsciously reforming itself around the Dunbar limit. The leadership body must be able to think of itself in some cogent way as members of a single community. This requires that people know one another well enough to communicate around important congregational issues.  In response to this natural group dynamic, leaders are continually stepping into the informal village elder group and removing themselves from the village elder group, based on life circumstances.

In a medium sized congregation, if 150 people show up for a congregational gathering it represents a significant percentage of the membership body. In the large church it may represent less than 10% of membership.  The small percentage may be interpreted as a sign of apathy, but it’s really just the village elder system organizing itself to fulfill an important leadership role on behalf of the congregation.

How does this compare to your lived experience?

Photo Credit:  The Earth Tribe

Role of the Executive Team

An ideal sized governing board in the large congregation is 5-7 individuals. A group of this size can effectively engage strategic decision making. Many congregations simply cannot imagine reducing the size of their governing board to 5-7 individuals. Either the operating culture or the congregation’s polity system do not support a streamlined decision making group. Congregation members may be too distrustful of the small board, believing that it couldn’t possibly represent the best interest of an entire congregation. In these congregations an executive team is often formed within the board structure, to facilitate more effective decision making and to help the board maintain a focus that is more strategic and generative in scope.

The executive team may consist of the senior clergy leader, the executive clergy (if such a role exists), the board chair, the treasurer (or other financial office) and one or two other central board figures. Executive teams may meet weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, depending upon the work that they do on behalf of the congregation. Executive teams can promote good governance when they focus their time in the following ways:

• Triage: One of the primary ways that an executive team can promote good governance is by triaging the various topics that are slated to come before a board. The team looks over all of the slated board issues and determines which topics can be effectively delegated to other decision making bodies in the congregation. By keeping an overabundance of fiduciary items off of the agenda the executive team can help the board stay more strategically and generatively focused.

• Framing: Once the ET has determined that an issue does belong on the board’s agenda they can work to frame the issue in a way that will encourage strategic and generative conversations about the topic. They can determine which part of a conversation belongs to the board, and then they can frame the topic in such a way that the board’s time is well used in service to the decisions which must be made. Similarly, the ET may entertain some dialogue around important topics before bringing the issue to the board so that only those elements of the topic that are relevant to the board’s decision making are brought to the board. In other words, the ET strains out irrelevant or misleading data so that the board conversation stays more focused on the truly critical issues at hand.

•Decision-Making: Some congregation’s delegate specific types of decision making to the ET. The most common decision making that occurs within an Executive Team is the time-sensitive issue that must be acted upon in between regularly scheduled board meetings. When the ET makes a decision on behalf of the board it is critical that full disclosure of those decisions be communicated back to board members in a timely manner.

• Deciding what to place in the “consent” agenda: A consent agenda, sometimes called a consent “calendar,” is a component of a meeting agenda that enables the board to group routine items and resolutions under one umbrella. As the name implies, there is a general agreement ahead of time by a board on the use of the procedure. Issues that are packaged together in a consent agenda are distributed to board members ahead of their regularly scheduled meeting for preview purposes. At the meeting, items in the consent agenda do not warrant any discussion before a vote. Unless a board member feels that an item should be discussed and requests the removal of that item ahead of time, the entire package is voted on at once without any additional explanations or comments. Because no questions or comments on these items are allowed during the meeting, this procedure saves time. Those items removed from the consent agenda by a member of the board can be discussed more fully before being acted upon. The Executive team can pre-sort the issues up for inclusion in a board meeting and determine which items can effectively be included within the consent agenda.

Large congregations that make effective use of an Executive Team often find that over time the board needs to meet less frequently. As the ET becomes more effective at triaging, framing and decision making on behalf of the board, board members come to accept and expect strong leadership from the ET. Board members appreciate the need to meet less frequently and appreciate that when they do meet they are engaged in more productive conversations that truly benefit the life of the congregation. Some congregations, after working effectively with an Executive Team over time, come to realize that the ET has become the governing board and that the larger governing body is actually an advisory group to the ET. Once this awareness takes hold, the congregation may be ready to reduce the size of their board to 5-7 individuals and eliminate the Executive Team.

Photo Credit: Zebra Huddle

Failed Strategy Execution

I’m frequently asked to consult with strategic planning teams as they formulate their process for self study and strategy formation.  In my first meeting with church planners some version of this question inevitably surfaces. “What assurances can you give us that we will actually execute the strategy that we claim during this self study period?”  Following the question is typically a long recital of the congregation’s past failures in executing strategy. Congregations are pretty good at having conversations about planning. They are not as good at executing the strategies that they plan. Why is that?

Strategy formation is one thing. Strategy execution is another. Here’s my “top seven” list explaining why large congregations fail at strategy execution.

1. Claiming too many strategic priorities.  Look over your congregation’s latest strategic plan. How many initiatives does the plan include? If it’s more than 2-3, it’s too many! Many large congregations create plans that cover the full distance between their present reality and the church that they hope to be when the full reign of God arrives on earth. In five short years they aim to close the gap between their present reality and a vision of their best selves. When leadership claims too many strategic priorities they may as well decide not to do any of them. Too many claimed priorities allow every leader (staff and lay) to pursue whatever they feel most passionate about in the moment, all under the guise of having fulfilled the strategic plan. The congregation loses focus when this happens. 
2. Not learning to say NO. This reason for failure is closely linked to the first. Once a leadership team has identified their priorities they need to learn to say NO to good ideas that just aren’t in alignment with the claimed direction. This is really hard for large congregations to do. Good ideas and the capacity to bring them to fruition abound.  We want to honor the spontaneity of what may be a Holy Spirit moment. We want to embrace a vision of empowered lay leadership. The challenge is to create a planning process that honors the movement of the Holy Spirit in the plan itself, and honors the passions of the laity in the formation of the plan. If we engage an effective planning process we can feel more comfortable with our “No” because there is a more urgent “Yes” within the plan.
3. Housing the ownership of the plan someplace other than the governing board.  The governing body of the church is the only body that can effectively own and oversee the plan. A committee of the board can’t really do it on the board’s behalf, because the committee doesn’t have the decision making authority of the full board. The board engages in decision making that takes the congregation away from its strategic focus because they are not as fully immersed in the plan as the committee is. The staff team can’t do it. It’s the job of the staff team to operationalize/manage the plan, but not to provide oversight. The senior clergy leader must have firm ownership of the plan but her role doesn’t have the scope of leadership authority to keep the entire congregation focused. This task belongs to the board. 
4. Absence of articulated goals, strategies and metrics. Many congregations, as they formulate their strategic plans, pay a great deal of attention to defining the identity of the congregation in the form of a mission statement, vision statement, core values and strategic priorities. They pay lesser attention to translating that strategy into operational goals that can be observed, evaluated and measured in some meaningful way. If the plan hasn’t been “operationalized” it’s likely to fail. The plan needs to be detailed enough so that all of leadership has a shared understanding of “what we will look like if we have executed our strategy effectively.” 
5. Failing to incorporate the strategic priorities into the performance goals of staff members.  Each member of the staff team should have perfect clarity about what their role is in the execution of the strategic plan in any given year. The collective performance goals of the staff team, if accomplished, should significantly advance the plan.  Staff members should not be allowed to set their own performance goals without consideration of the strategic priorities of the congregation. 
6. Failure to sunset programs that no longer fulfill the congregation’s mission.  I’ve never engaged a planning process in a large congregation that didn’t surface a need/desire for more programming.  Large congregations love programming and they are always convinced that the way to be more effective in engaging their mission is to offer more/better programs.  Staff teams in large congregations are dying for want of some good program pruning. There is an outer limit to how many programs any given congregation can support with resources and/or participants.  Leaders need to develop a discipline for deciding which programs will end in service to emergent programs that better serve the missional identity of the congregation. 
7. Failure to allocate resources in accordance with the plan.  In addition to carefully focusing the resource capacity of the staff team, leaders also need to focus the capacity of operating budgets, building usage and administrative support. The day to day decision making that is driven by an operating budget, the allocation of admin staff, and the scheduled use of the building should reflect the strategic priorities identified in the plan. If there isn’t alignment at this level, the plan is likely to fail.

Photo Credit: Greg See at flickr.com

Board Oversight

 Under the best of circumstances, lay leadership and staff leadership in the large church seem to have a difficult time finding a workable approach to board oversight of the staff team. Board leaders often fluctuate between being too hands off (not paying any attention to the activity of the staff team) or being overly involved (stepping into the micro-management of the staff team.)

 Here are some helpful oversight practices that I’ve seen boards employ:  

• The creation of a personnel committee that generates good employment policies and documents those policies in an employee handbook.
• The articulation of clear expectations about what board leadership expects in a performance management system for its staff team (i.e. job descriptions, annual performance reviews, etc.)
• The articulation of clear expectations about what principles need to be honored in salary administration
• Annual or semi-annual reports from the personnel committee, satisfying board members that the annual cycle of performance review has taken place, and that required salary administration guidelines have been satisfied.
• An annual cycle of review, systematically inviting key staff members to meet with the board for mutual ministry review of functional areas. These ministry reviews are not performance evaluations of staff. They are dialogues between clergy and lay leadership about how various ministry areas are developing or performing.
• An annual process of goal setting with the Senior Minister, and an annual performance review of the Senior Minister by some meaningful sub-body of the board.
• Setting policy and clarifying expectations with regard to pastoral succession planning.

 Following are practices that I’ve seen that are not helpful  for board members in the large congregation:

• The hiring/firing of any staff member other than the senior minister, unless specifically invited into a particular situation by the senior minister.
• Preparing, reviewing or administering performance reviews for anyone other than the Senior Minister.
• Setting individual goals for staff team members, other than the Senior Minister.
• Meeting one on one with staff members without the Senior Minister present, in an effort to make certain that staff members are being treated well.
• Serving as a complaint board for members of the congregation who have gripes about the staff team.

For a great resource on the coordination of staff and board leadership check out, Governance and Ministry, by Dan Hotchkiss.

Photo Credit: Lynn Pernille