Balancing Tensions To Keep Your Board in Tune
RALPH ENLOW
Carver to The Rescue
I was only a few years into my career as a non-profit ministry organization trustee when I first encountered John Carver’s Boards That Make a Difference: A New Design for Leadership in Nonprofit and Public Organizations (1990, Jossey-Bass). Like many others, I immediately resonated with Carver’s identification of five major dysfunctions common to most governing boards:
time on trivia
short term bias
reactive (vs proactive)
leaky accountability
ambiguous authority
It was easy to recognize the symptoms of Carver’s diagnosis in my non-profit board member experience. I was not alone. A generation of board members wholeheartedly embraced what quickly came to be known as “The Carver Model,” along with its proposed corrective measures revolving around board focus on ends, governing through policies and, among other things, a concomitant commitment to defining executive limitations in terms of proscription (boundaries within which executives may operate) rather than permission. I participated in and facilitated truly transformational board development processes in connection with my service to multiple organizations—processes that resulted in demonstrably sustained organizational progress.
Like all reforms, however, those articulated and advocated by Carver have proven susceptible over time to errors of misapplication and overcorrection. The pendulum of inefficient, trivia-distracted, myopic, reactive, porous, and capricious board governance swung, in too many cases, toward an opposite and equally dangerous pole: excessively passive, permissive, deferential, indulgent board engagement with non-profit CEOs. No doubt, some ministry executives have shrewdly, even cynically, leveraged Carver’s principles to abuse the powers of their office. Many others likely succumbed more innocently to abuses inherent in even the most beneficial re-balancing and reforms.
Side note: Although I reject on biblical grounds the concept of a pastor or non-profit ministry executive as “CEO,” I acknowledge that the way many ministry non-profits treat their chief leaders—and the manner in which many such leaders conduct themselves—has more in common with secular imagination than biblical imagery. I agree with the those who decry the tragic appropriation of secular terminology along with the worst of its trappings on the part of far too many pastors and ministry executives. I hope ministry nonprofits and their leaders will ever more fully embrace and espouse the biblical imagery of servant, steward, shepherd.
The past couple of decades has witnessed a litany of organizational scandals involving policies (or lack thereof) and practices of nonprofit executives and governing boards. Our religious nonprofit sector has been repeatedly rankled by faith-shattering revelations of fraudulent or abusive leader behavior only to be compounded—even in the face of mounting evidence—by initially oblivious and subsequently obfuscatory governing boards. To cite but a few examples:
The Acts 29 Network nearly disintegrated when revelations surfaced and persisted concerning celebrated movement co-founder and leader of its flagship Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll’s, abusively imperial and narcissistic leadership style. Observers have repeatedly cited, as a central contributing factor to Acts 29’s (and Driscoll’s) demise, the governing board’s toleration of Driscoll’s inexcusable excesses significantly enabled by deficient and dysfunctional governing board accountability.
Reports surfaced alleging serial sexual impropriety, sexual harassment, and other abuses by Bill Hybels, founder of Willow Creek Community Church, the Willow Creek Association, and the Global Leadership Summit. Despite the persistence and ultimate proliferation of such allegations, what some observed to be unwarranted defensiveness and deference toward Hybels on the part of Willow Creek’s elder board damaged the ministry’s reputation and diminished its influence. Subsequent analysis has suggested that a deeply flawed governance structure and culture may have been a major contributing factor to the debacle.
Investigative journalism by Julie Royes and World Magazine exposed a years-long pattern of financial abuses and a “personality cult” leadership culture rife with deception and intimidation on the part of megachurch Harvest Bible Chapel pastor, James MacDonald. Following MacDonald’s firing in 2019, governance failures and flaws were repeatedly cited by internal and external observers as major contributors to the enabling and perpetuation of abuse.
After allegations of an illicit and exploitive romantic liaison initially surfaced concerning lauded and lionized Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, the ministry’s governing board (on which several of Zacharias’ family members served) joined Zacharias in denying the accusations and discrediting the accuser. Despite repeated calls for an independent investigation, the board refused. Only after evidence of Zacharias’ sexual impropriety surged into a tidal wave did the board authorize an investigation which, tragically, confirmed the initial allegations and a long-term pattern of sexual impropriety. The governing board’s deep divergence from best practices in composition and culture ultimately led to the ministry’s essential dissolution.
Liberty University, self-proclaimed and largely conceded to be “The World’s Largest Christian University,” has been rocked by lurid revelations involving President Jerry Falwell, Jr. and wife, Becky. The allegations connect the couple to a lascivious lifestyle, luxurious extravagance, and fraudulence regarding personal and institutional finances, rendering them the subjects of political blackmail that may have swayed the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Liberty’s Board of Directors has been impugned for the lack of structural and procedural accountability that enabled the Falwells to flout so flagrantly the institutional mission and values and undermine its integrity.
Is Carver the Culprit?
The above examples comprise only a representative sample. Most other recent nonprofit scandals and shortcomings—and there have been many—have been less sensational. Nevertheless, their cumulative effect has become deeply consequential in terms of diminished public confidence and derailed organizational mission accomplishment. Many such failures might have been prevented, exposed, or more justly rectified had not there been accompanying governance flaws and failures.
Simply put, the policies and practices of many nonprofit boards have been found wanting. Regardless of whether a particular scandal involved rogue executive behavior, most observers have concluded that executives, whether tragically misguided or nefarious, may have been far too untethered from effective board controls. In some cases, boards had embraced “The Carver Model” with the best of intentions but with internally disastrous and externally injurious results. Could it be that some boards have been impeded by, among other things, their commitment to Carver-inspired governing principles? I believe that the problem is not with Carver’s principles, but with their application to an unbalanced, unhealthy extreme.
Tuning Requires Tension
In light of what seems to me to be the detrimentally skewed application of Carver governance principles on the part of some nonprofit boards, I wonder whether the metaphor of musical tuning might be worthy of consideration? When it comes to the music of, say, a violin, the instrument’s sound quality and appeal can be diminished, dissonant, or even deeply discordant when the tension of its strings is off in either direction: too much tension and the pitch is too high (sharp); too little tension and the pitch is too low (flat). Only when the tension is perfect does the note fully resonate, rendering the intended harmonies. Excessively high or low string tension can yield, at best, distasteful and, at worst, disastrous results for the player or the audience.
As for instruments, so for governing boards. Too little or too much emphasis on certain elements of governance can lead to dis-favorable—perhaps even destructive—outcomes.
As I have observed and reflected upon a number of recent nonprofit failures and consulted with nonprofit executives and governing boards, I have concluded that there are numerous areas of governing board responsibility in which healthy tensions must be maintained in order for nonprofit organizations to soar or, in terms of our metaphor, to sing. Three of those tensions-to-be-finely-tuned seem to me to be, in particular, most highly consequential:
Relating to the CEO: Supporting vs. Supervising
Keeping Informed: Trust vs. Triangulation
Measuring Success: Memetics vs. Mission
Let’s consider each in turn.
Relating to the CEO: Supporting vs. Supervising
John Carver rightly criticized the detrimental tendency of nonprofit boards to micromanage. I once served on the board of a $100 million global ministry with a $5 million North American annual operations total that was called upon at its every meeting to pre-authorize international executive travel that cost a few thousand dollars. In some cases, extensive board time was devoted to debates concerning the merits of a particular trip—merits board members were invariably far less informed and competent to judge than the ministry’s executives! Many matters of similarly comparative unimportance consistently occupied the lion’s share of board meeting time. Out of long habit and cultivated reactivity, board meeting time allocation was skewed in favor of relatively trivial matters while precious little governing board time and attention was available for the board’s engagement with the extent to which the organization was achieving its mission. The ministry’s executives were, by means of board micromanaging, simultaneously impeded in their efficiency, and enabled in their ineffectiveness.
Far too many boards resemble that description far too frequently.
Carver wisely insisted that the proper domain of governance involves ends rather than means. Rather than hamstring executives, wittingly or unwittingly encumbering their pursuit of the organization’s mission in terms of permission, Carver argued that effective boards would learn to exercise executive supervision by means of proscription. Accordingly, boards would proactively cast policies in terms of executive limitations rather than reactively responding to circumstances or requests by the specific authorization of activities or allocation of resources. To use the language of Ram Charan, boards would learn to, most of the time, “stay out of the way” (Boards That Lead: When to Take Charge, When to Partner, and When to Stay Out of the Way. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
The good news about the ministry organization I reference above is that its subsequent embrace of Carver governance principles was utterly transformational for the board and the organization. Two powerful questions came to pervade and shepherd every board meeting:
(1) Is this matter on our agenda truly board business [i.e., is this an ends issue rather than a means issue?]; and
(2) How can our engagement with this matter be limited to ends rather than means? [i.e., What proscriptive “executive limitations” parameters might we establish in policy rather than simply granting permission or precedent?]
The board created a Standing Policies Manual. All major organizational policies were crafted to distinguish between “board parameters” (proscription) and other provisions the administration could amend at its discretion. One key policy involved specifying the chief executive’s job and performance expectations and the frequency, process, and criteria for performance evaluation based upon the mutually acknowledged inextricable link between the performance of the organization (Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs) and the performance of its chief executive. Carver’s principles made a lasting and incalculable contribution to the organization’s effectiveness.
Many other organizations that embraced and implemented Carver’s principles experienced similar advancements in efficiency and, more importantly, missional effectiveness. That said, like all corrective principles, Carver’s are subject to detrimental levels of over-subscription. Proper board restraint from micromanaging can be skewed—wittingly or unwittingly—toward perilous levels of board deference. Carver’s “policy-only” approach can easily be construed by lazy boards or rogue executives—or both—to discourage or exclude board engagement with some matters into which boards should inquire and speak.
In short, the proper tension between supporting the chief executive and supervising the chief executive can be lost.
In time, to follow our musical metaphor, some mildly discordant notes may be sounded that, if not corrected, will inevitably devolve into fiduciary default. The problem is not with Carver but rather with an unbalanced emphasis on principles Carver proposed as correctives to commonly observed governance imbalances. Although there may be many ways in which a board’s proper supporting vs. supervision tension may deviate or degenerate, allow me to suggest a few areas that render boards particularly vulnerable to unhealthy levels of deference.
Conflict of Interest. Effective supervision is predicated upon rigorous board and executive conflict-of-interest protocols. To begin with, organizations should impose strong anti-nepotism policies applicable to both the governing board and the administration. Ministry organizations whose governing boards or senior administrations include executives’ family members—especially when their numbers or roles are potentially determinative—imperil not only the organization’s integrity but the long-term credibility that is vital to stakeholder support. Egregious nepotism and conflict-of-interest compromises involving Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and Liberty University, to name just two, amply illustrate the damage to ministry integrity and credibility that can result from such laxity. Governmental regulations and professional accounting, audit, and accreditation standards now call for increasing rigor upon the imposition and documentation of nonprofit governing boards’ conflict-of-interest measures. Boards should resist all attempts to minimize or circumvent such public accountability protections.
Board Composition. The proper balance between CEO support and supervision may well begin with how and on what basis board members are recruited, vetted, and retained. While it is entirely appropriate, practically necessary, and understandably desirable that chief executives play an active role in board member prospecting and recruitment, board policies and practices should preclude the possibility of a governing board largely comprised of persons who are so entirely relationally beholden to ministry executives that they are rendered incapable of supervisory objectivity. Board composition and performance are the responsibility of the board, not the administration. A board governance committee should, among other things, develop an ideal board compositional profile; craft policies, and implement procedures related to board member qualifications, prospecting, screening, and election; document written board member confessional (if applicable), mission-alignment, and fiduciary covenants; set term and tenure limits; establish board member performance expectations; and conduct periodic board member self- and peer-review. Where executives exert excessive influence upon these board prerogatives, dysfunction, if not downright mischief, is likely to ensue.
Executive Compensation. Although boards may wisely delegate to a subcommittee the tasks of researching and recommending executive compensation, every board member should be informed and involved in decisions that determine what comprises the full sum and structure of the chief executive’s annual compensation. As in the case of conflict-of-interest protections, here again, today’s governmental regulations and professional accounting, audit, and accreditation standards require the board’s full engagement and reinforce the board’s full accountability. The board is, at a minimum, responsible to ensure that the nature and level of executive compensation complies with all applicable tax laws and is demonstrably justifiable relative to institutional resources and relevant external benchmarks. Chief executive compensation levels and structure should also be fully justifiable and demonstrably congruent with the organization’s general employee compensation levels and structures. Under no circumstances should incentive bonuses be employed. Given both governmental reporting requirements (e.g., US-IRS Form 990) and pervasive digital and social media “surveillance” capabilities, the board should assume that the chief executive’s compensation cannot be shielded from public scrutiny. Thus, the board should administer executive compensation under the assumption that they may be called upon to justify that compensation to internal or external stakeholders. Of far greater consequence is the board’s call to serve as stewards of the living God—a calling that should compel it to embrace ethical standards far superior to minimums dictated by government regulations or the specter of public scrutiny.
Executive Committee. The Board Executive Committee’s composition and the scope of its prerogatives should be strictly limited and owned by the full board. On far too many occasions, I have observed dangerous levels of delegation or presumption on the part of organizational executives and executive committees. In one such case, a board member who addressed questions to the board concerning a chief executive’s decision was strongly rebuked and pressured to resign because of his perceived lack of deference to the executive committee who had presumed to ratify that controversial decision on the board’s behalf. In another case, the executive committee, in consultation with the incumbent, undertook sole responsibility for presidential succession with a mere modicum of full board ratification after a successor was presented on the presumption of immediate board affirmation and public acclamation. Best practices in governance discourage such levels of deference to executive committees, directing that board decisions and actions should be undertaken by the full board and that executive committee discretion be limited to that which is clearly enumerated in written organizational Bylaws or Board Standing Policies. Excessive empowerment of or default to executive committees leaves organizations perilously susceptible to loss of stakeholder credibility or, worse, to abuse.
Spiritual vitality. The spiritual vitality of its chief executive (or whatever the title designation) is inherent in a ministry board’s fiduciary responsibility. Yet few boards have developed constructive means by which to engage leaders in assessing and ensuring spiritual vitality and personal integrity. Most err on the side of passivity, presumption, and indulgence. Leaders are assumed to be spiritually mature and vital. Their gifting and skill in leading spiritual exercises lends credence to this impression. Boards assume that leaders consistently overcome temptations and maintain robust spiritual disciplines. To inquire or inspect seems tawdry, inquisitorial, hypocritical. Moreover, to borrow a phrase from author Jerry Bridges, boards tend to overlook “respectable sins” such as petulance, pettiness, outbursts of anger, patterns of power abuse, and so on, refusing to recognize and address them as possible manifestations of deeper dysfunction (Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate. NavPress: 2007).
The less boards engage leaders about their vitality, the more leaders are enabled to hide their struggles, nurture their failures, excuse their faults—even those incongruities that are evident to all and are impeding the leader’s credibility and that of the organization. Intervention need not be punitive or summative; it should be first and preferably formative and restorative. Galatians 6:1 pertains: even if a person is caught in some trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of humility (LEB, excerpted).
Boards should assign one or more members to engage in frank conversation, regular assessment (consider, for example, Peter Scazzaro’s Emotional Health Inventory), and proactive resourcing of the executive’s spiritual vitality. In this, as in the other issues mentioned above, proper tension between supporting and supervising should be maintained.
Keeping Informed: Trust vs Triangulation
I believe the common assertion that, “a board’s primary responsibility is to hire and manage the president,” constitutes an accurate and useful summary statement—so far as it goes. Adherence to that principle can help to avoid a great deal of governance dysfunction. Like all such maxims, however, properly nuanced application is required. We have already considered how managing the president can skew either in the direction of meddling or of over-indulgence. Boards must strike the proper balance between supporting and supervising. Among other things in that regard, boards must seek to manage judiciously the sources and means by which they are informed of actual organizational conditions and performance.
In other words, boards must discerningly manage the tension between trust and triangulation.
On one extreme, executives can be undermined, and boards can be manipulated, by dissenting subordinates or disaffected stakeholders. One organizational board on which I served was accustomed to receiving and responding quite routinely to direct communication from any ministry constituent about any matter of concern. Too much of the board’s attention was occupied with assessing (and, often assuming) the validity of constituent concerns. Consequently, excessive executive energy was diverted to responding to “end run” critical communication emanating from every level of the organization. The board’s—and the ministry’s—directional coherence and consistency was blurred by a cacophony of voices on matters ranging from personal and trivial to pervasive and highly consequential. It is easy to imagine how board members might under such circumstances come to view themselves as sympathetic champions of some of the organization’s individual members or factions rather than—as should have been the case—collective stewards of the organization’s mission.
On the other extreme, boards can become insulated from awareness of actual institutional conditions until egregious leader abuses belatedly surface or other threats to institutional stability finally break through strict seals imposed on information and communication. I once served in an organization in which the rigidity of the board’s insistence that any report of institutional conditions outside the exclusive channel of official president-board communication prevented it from realizing the president was on the verge of a personal breakdown and the institution’s sustained progress was imperiled. Though the board subsequently castigated itself about its lack of awareness and took measures to prevent such a recurrence, the underlying board culture and protocols continued until consequences of a different nature surfaced. Staff members who ventured to communicate to board members and board members who undertook or entertained unofficial communication with staff members and stakeholders—regardless of motive or import— were decisively censured. Proper prudence was in danger of giving way to poisonous paranoia.
So how might a board prevent itself from becoming, on the one hand, tragically insulated or, on the other, shrewdly manipulated? How does the board avoid wrongfully enabling the disaffected while at the same time exercising its obligation to exercise discernment? Consider the following protocols as but a few of the questions a board might employ in the interest of striking a proper balance between trust and triangulation:
Who attends? I have experienced board meetings where the number of board members was exceeded by the number of senior staff members present; where the agenda was largely set and navigated by staff members; and where discussion was dominated by staff members unrestrained in registering their opinions—even their “unofficial” votes—sometimes even in vociferous opposition to the president’s recommendations. An uninitiated observer would not be able to tell which persons in the room were actual board members and whether recommendations were those of the president personally or the staff collectively. There is little need to demonstrate how such patterns clearly deviate from any meaningful concept of governance and how they can easily issue in all manner of organizational division and missional devolution.
On the other extreme, I have encountered presidents—and boards—who would insist that all members of the staff except the president be excluded from board meetings. The dangers associated with that practice are likely as severe as those associated with excessive staff presence at board meetings and staff presumption of board prerogatives. When the president becomes the exclusive channel of information to and from the board and reciprocal interpretation of institutional conditions and board decisions, possibilities abound for, at best, misunderstanding and, at worst, manipulation.
There is a time and place for executive sessions. In fact, I agree with the many governance experts who assert that best practice dictates that every board meeting agenda should include an executive session. Why? Because while rare and ad hoc executive sessions may understandably cause undue consternation, executive sessions as a routine board agendum can help to remove potential impediments to the board’s collective candor and objectivity. Moreover, executive sessions provide opportunity for the board to exercise proper care not only for the presidential performance but also for personal well-being. In such routine executive sessions, time may be allocated both for exclusive board-president engagement (i.e., no other staff present), and for board-only engagement (i.e., without the president even if s/he is a board member—provided such is stipulated in board bylaws or standing policy).
What Information? The board—not the president—has the prerogative to determine what information the board requires. That doesn’t mean the president should not propose what to report to the board and ensure preparation of thorough and highly intelligible information for the board. Ultimately, however, the board should take ownership and initiative to require the administration to supply board-designated critical information in the format and frequency it believes will best enable it to fulfill its fiduciary and strategic leadership obligations. If the board has developed the habit of passively receiving whatever information the administration offers, it may be defaulting on its duties. In extreme cases, presidents can deliberately shield or skew the information boards need for ensuring the organization’s missional fidelity and public integrity.
When to Corroborate. Although it is wise and proper that “the president must be the sole channel of official communication with the board,” there are matters concerning which a prudent board would be wise not solely to rely on what the president is reporting. One of my former trustees, an informed and experienced governance and stewardship best-practices proponent, asserts that prudent boards should—with respect to a limited range of critical performance measures—seek confirmation from a variety of internal and external sources. Such mission-critical organization performance measures include: (a) “sales” [i.e., for those in the nonprofit sector, enrollment/member/subscriber] data; (b) “customer” [or, in nonprofit lingo, stakeholder/beneficiary] experience and satisfaction; and (c) organizational climate.
Boards cannot afford to be misled or misinformed regarding these matters. Proper stewardship calls for independent verification. There is too much at stake to do otherwise. Even the most sincere and straightforward presidents can be vulnerable to spin and self-deception. When key data or mission-critical performance assertions cannot be substantiated, boards should seek corroboration from other internal and external sources. Presidents who have “nothing to prove, nothing to hide, nothing to lose” will welcome independent verification that is born, not of fickle suspicion, but of fiduciary prudence.
Is substantial internal dissent acknowledged? Patrick Lencioni (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass, 2002), among others, makes it clear that healthy administrative teams are not those pervaded by benign concurrence. Rather, high-performing teams are characterized by honest disagreement and robust debate. Consensus cannot be forced but, in the end, still must be forged. Accordingly, it is often said that staff debate ends when a recommendation is presented to the board. Once a decision is made, it is a team decision. Every member of the team is expected to support it and subsequent efforts to undermine it constitute expressions of insubordination and disunity.
When major administrative recommendations are offered to the board, however, I believe it can be disingenuous and damaging to represent team recommendations as unanimous recommendations in cases where significant internal dissent remains. Where key internal stakeholders (especially high-level team members) disagree with a recommendation—no matter how arduously a president may believe in it—representing that recommendation as if there is no doubt or dissent constitutes a disservice to the board and undermines institutional unity and leadership confidence. It is weak leaders, not strong leaders, who cannot acknowledge or abide dissent. Sadly, I have too often observed that highly contested decisions were mischaracterized as “unanimous” to the detriment of all concerned.
Are deliberation protocols appropriate? Although I do not know where this maxim originated, I often quote it: Never discover, discuss, and decide an issue in a single meeting. To soften it a bit, we might remove the word never and add the word major. So, unless urgency clearly dictates otherwise, boards should avoid situations where a major issue is brought to its attention (discovered), explained and explored (discussed) and acted upon conclusively (decided) on a single occasion. Bad decisions, distrust, and disunity often constitute the fruit of such poor protocols. Presidents who pressure boards to make inadequately understood or insufficiently grounded decisions are inviting boards to err on the side of blind trust. Better habits of deliberation, dialogue, and documentation (triangulation) build deeper and more abiding trust.
What about employee turnover? Although there are many reasons for employee turnover—including the mission-critical need, in the words of Jim Collins, to “get the wrong people off the bus” (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, Harper Business, 2001)—prudent boards will not be inattentive to pervasive or persistent patterns of employee departure. Boards should be informed about employee attrition and should be briefed on senior management team member departures. Where attrition patterns accelerate or persist, boards should triangulate. There is wisdom in the familiar adage: people join the mission; they leave bosses. When people in significant numbers or stature are leaving an organization, boards should know about it and they should ask why.
Measuring Success: Missional vs. Memetic
Ineffective boards are content merely to mark time. Effective boards learn how to keep score. They work with presidents and their executive teams to establish and monitor metrics (aka, Key Performance Indicators, KPIs) mutually deemed to represent genuine progress in stabilizing and strengthening the institution and yielding organizational mission accomplishment results. In my experience, however, there are two opposing directions toward which boards tend to err in terms of measuring success.
Criteria by which to measure success can be primarily memetic or missional.
Do we measure ourselves by ourselves? The first tendency is to make all measurement entirely self-referencing. In such cases, KPI’s exclusively chart progress relative to previous institutional performance. The old, good news-bad news airline pilot joke comes to mind. The pilot announces to the passengers: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we are making excellent progress. The bad news is that I have no idea where we are!”
Do we measure ourselves by our peers? The better way to assess institutional progress is to establish external best-practice benchmarks in key performance areas. What levels of performance represent acceptable or superior achievement relative to similar organizations—especially those of similar size and characteristics to our own, or of the organizational size and characteristics to which we aspire? Although benchmarking serves as a good and proper antidote to exclusively self-referencing metrics, there is an error to avoid on the other extreme. Here it is in the form of a maxim:
You will increasingly conform to what you count.
Therein lies a serious potential mission-drift temptation: measures of progress and success that are superficially or exclusively benchmarked to other organizations may very well draw you toward resembling your peers and at the same time inexorably away from realizing your mission. I call this the tension between missional vs. memetic (i.e., mimicking, conforming to peers) measurement of success.
One day during my tenure as a university Provost, the faculty chair of our Psychology program came prancing into my office, beaming. “Ralph, I just saw the statewide scores from the Psychology Graduate Record Exam (Psych-GRE) and, guess what, our seniors achieved the highest average test scores of any postsecondary institution in the entire state!”
“Congratulations, Chip” [not his real name], I said, “but that doesn’t tell me very much about the effectiveness of our Psychology degree program.” Chip was crestfallen. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Let’s think about why we established a Psychology program at our college,” I explained. “Our college’s mission is to develop ministry and marketplace leaders who will embody and propagate the Good News in word and deed to the ends of the earth. We chose to establish a Psychology degree program so that students gifted and called by God to apply biblical insight, embody redemptive compassion, and offer restorative counsel to wayward and wounded people would have the foundational knowledge and skills needed to carry out that calling in church ministry, clinical counseling, or social service professions. These test scores attest to the commendable academic quality of our program. I’m delighted and not surprised, given your dedication to excellence and the characteristic diligence of our students. But the test scores do not represent direct or primary evidence as to whether our Psychology program is achieving its purpose in line with the institution’s mission. These scores tell us that our graduates who wish to pursue advanced degrees and certifications in the discipline will have a very competitive chance at elite program admission and professional success, but they tell us almost nothing relative to whether the program’s graduates have the biblically-integrated knowledge, skills, and dispositions that correspond to the program’s and the institution’s purposes.”
The fact is, if we had embraced Psych-GRE student test scores as an exclusive or even prominent index of program effectiveness, I am convinced the program would eventually veer from its central purpose. We would increasingly select, retain, and reward faculty and students who could elevate our chances of achieving and maintaining high Psych-GRE test scores. In the meantime, we would likely have taken our eye off the ball in terms of institutional and program mission fulfillment. The program’s features, emphases, and resources would gradually and inevitably skew in the direction of the indices by which we preferred to measure its success. In other words, we would be committing the error of privileging memetic over missional success measures. Psych-GRE exam scores represent one measure of program excellence, but they dare not become the sole measure, or the most frequently and conveniently cited measure. And frequently cited measures will inexorably become your most conformed-to measures.
By the way, that is one problem with many “standard” metrics: they are convenient and conventional. But deference toward or dependence upon “standard” metrics often constitutes a missional minefield. Hear this: All measures have bias. Be sure the bias inherent in your measures hews toward what you—not the mainstream majority—deem most important. True, this approach may or may not diminish your marketplace rankings, but it will elevate your missional results.
Assessment should always begin with a simple question I learned from Robert Mager: What would it take to convince me …? Mager applied it to instructional design. But the question is just as relevant and revealing with respect to organizational performance Board members and executives should ask, “What would it take to convince us that this organization is achieving its mission?” Or, to elaborate, “what data represents the most valid and reliable evidence that we are effective in accomplishing our mission?”
Defining success requires proper tension. Boards that rely exclusively on internal measures of progress and those that rely excessively on external rankings or quality benchmarks are misgauging the tension between missional and memetic measures of success.
Is your board out of tune?
Effective board governance requires balancing tensions. Although there may be many such areas of tension in which to seek proper balance, I have suggested three that bear special consideration:
Relating to the CEO: Supporting vs. Supervising
Keeping Informed: Trust vs. Triangulation
Measuring Success: Memetics vs. Mission
Those of us called to the special stewardship of nonprofit governance would do well to ponder together and make wise provision for balancing these tensions. The long-term integrity, credibility, and fruitfulness of our work is at stake.
Ralph Enlow is an IACE Board member and Past President of the Association for Biblical Higher Education