No longer on the board

Over the years I have served as a member of the board of directors of several different nonprofit corporations. Serving on a board requires a particular set of skills. One has to develop an ability to read budgets and to judge the financial performance of an enterprise. In nonprofits, board members often have to step in and participate in direct fundraising efforts including looking seriously at their own capacity to give to the cause. They have to develop skills at personnel management, including the search for executive leadership for the corporation. They need to be aware of corporate law and their fiduciary responsibilities. They have to have an ability to endure meetings that are occasionally boring and fellow directors who often more interested in grandstanding and resume building than in the overall health of the corporation.

It makes sense that I would serve on boards of church-related corporations. I served on the board of directors of the Pilgrim Congregational Charitable trust for 25 years - longer than any other director in the history of the corporation. My service was ex-officio. That is, I served because another position I occupied. As pastor, I was automatically a member of the board of the corporation. I also served as a director of the South Dakota United Church of Christ Foundation, a position to which I was elected by the United Church of Christ Conference. Some corporate boards are self-electing, meaning the existing board votes on who will be members of the board. Others employ different methods of selecting board members. When I served on the Board of Local Church Ministries, a corporation in the national setting of the United Church of Christ, I was nominated by a state conference, and elected by the General Synod of the United Church of Christ.

Looking back, however, I served on more corporate boards of institutions that are not directly church-related than those that are officially connected to the church. Some were social service agencies whose causes I deeply endorsed such as Black Hills Area Habitat for Humanity and The Front Porch Coalition. Providing housing for those in need and working to prevent suicides and respond with compassion to those who are grieving the loss of a loved one to suicide are causes that are close to my heart. I served with passion.

There were other corporations that had different purposes as well. I think that I served on more boards of directors of arts agencies than any other type of corporation. At one time I was on the boards of The Black Hills Chamber Music Society, Bells of the Hills, and Allied Arts all at the same time. That’s a lot of hours of meetings for someone whose job already involved a lot of meetings.

Over the span of my career, I served multiple search committees seeking employees for nonprofit corporations. I helped select executive leadership for a half dozen corporations. For the most part, I think that the committees on which I served made good recommendations and I can look back on some very strong and successful leadership. There were also a few mistakes, a few employees whose skills weren’t a perfect match for the needs of the corporation, and a couple of notable struggles that involved pushing for resignations of leaders and in a couple of cases directly firing employees. It isn’t at all like one might imagine from television shows.

There were several boards on which I served where I was the youngest member of the board at my time of service. That interests me now that I have become a senior and reached retirement age. Many boards on which I served had members who were retired from their active careers. So far, however, I have retired from board service along with my retirement from my career. I did go back to work after retirement, but I am no longer serving on any corporate boards. I have no desire to return to that kind of service. I hope that my decision about board service creates opportunities for younger people to assume the mantle of leadership.

Nonprofits depend on volunteer leadership and often benefit from volunteers with years of experience that add up to great leadership for the institution. However, their dependence upon older and often retired board members can result in boards that are unwilling to take even reasonable risks and often are overly invested in the status quo. More than a few nonprofits would benefit from younger and more visionary leadership. Young people, however, are very busy with family and career and have less time to dedicate to volunteer service. It is a dilemma for many nonprofit corporations.

In this phase of my life, I am most interested in finding other ways to serve the causes in which I believe. I would rather be a worker than a leader in many of the organizations in which I serve. I don’t need to be the one in charge or at the center of policy decisions. I’m happy serving as a volunteer just doing the work that needs to be done. And one of the things I have discovered is that I don’t miss all of those meetings. I’m perfectly happy allowing others to sit around the big tables and wrestle with the numbers on a spreadsheet. I try to be a generous donor, but I am not so eager to get involved in direct fund-raising.

One of the advantages of being semi-retired and working in interim positions is that I no longer have to worry about my resume. I don’t need more board positions to list as experience that might gain me another board position. I don’t need to sell myself in the same way that was the case when I was actively working. The jobs I do these days don’t ask about executive experience or board skills.I still have my curricula vitae on my web site, but I am thinking of removing that from the site. I haven’t updated it in a couple of years except to change my address. I’m pretty sure that no one is looking at it these days. That is fine with me.

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