Two Things You Should Never Joke About!
Looking for a Christmas gift for your organization’s board members, CEO, or senior team members? We’re a tad biased, but co-author
Dan Busby and I recommend our latest book,
More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants!More Lessons features 40 short insights for enriching effectiveness and excellence in the boardroom—and practical wisdom for addressing those elephants in the boardroom that no one wants to talk about!
While all 40 lessons, we believe, are worthy of your time and reflection, we do have some favorite chapters.
My top-two picks would be the wisdom we passed along from Olan Hendrix:• Lesson 32: There Are Two Things You Should Never Joke About—#1: Prayer
• Lesson 33: There Are Two Things You Should Never Joke About—#2: Fundraising
On fundraising, Olan Hendrix recounts a time he accompanied a client on a donor call. “This Christian leader had a worthwhile cause and many friends, but wasn’t raising any money. I wanted to find out why.
“After exchanging pleasantries with the donor, he began making jokes about the fact that he was there to ask for money. I had discovered his problem! Perhaps he was covering up his nervousness about asking for money, but flippancy is never a good substitute for sincerity.”Hendrix, who served as the first president of
ECFA, concluded, “I want a part of my legacy to be that I helped God’s servants to see fundraising not as something to joke about or apologize for, but as a noble and vital part of ministry.”
No Joke! You’ve likely been at a meal when someone announces, “the last one with your thumb up says grace.” Hendrix shares another lesson learned when a search committee rejected a candidate who “made light of prayer.” When I first heard Olan share this with a group of young leaders—it immediately changed
my thinking and
my behavior.
Yikes.You’ll find that More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom will challenge and change board member thinking about dozens of boardroom behaviors and elephants:• Lesson 1: Two Stories—The Board and the Bachelor Farmer and $1.5 Billion Worth of Burger Blessings
• Lesson 4: Guarding Your CEO’s Soul
• Lesson 5: Dashboards Are Not a Secret Sauce for Sound Governance
•
Lesson 8: What If Your CEO Is Hit by a Bus?You’ll appreciate the short lessons in 10 major categories, including: Nominees for the Board Member Hall of Fame, Boardroom Bloopers, Boardroom Time-Wasters, Trouble-Makers and Truth-Tellers, and Boardroom Worst Practices.
Examples:• Lesson 9: Just Do One Thing a Month
•
Lesson 13: Caution! Understand the Governance Pendulum Principle• Lesson 16: Looking for Consensus But Finding Division
• Lesson 17: Botched Executive Sessions Are Not Pretty
• Lesson 18: Warning! Résumé-Builders Make Lousy Board Members
In our first book in this series,
Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: 40 Insights for Better Board Meetings, we encouraged boards to allocate a “10 Minutes for Governance” slot at every board meeting—to fan the flame of lifelong learning. Many boards are now doing that—and these short lessons are perfect for
10-minute segments (five minutes of content and five minutes of discussion):
•
Lesson 24: Should Most Standing Committees Stand Down?• Lesson 27: Address Absentee Board Member Syndrome
• Lesson 35: Leverage the 80/20 Rule in the Boardroom
• Lesson 39: Identify Your Key Assumptions
In Lesson 39, we quote Donald Rumsfeld,
“Meetings are a good place to discover whether an organization might be suffering from groupthink. If everyone in the room seems convinced of the brilliance of an idea, it may be a sign that the organization would benefit from more dissent and debate.”The Boardroom Lesson: “Identify your key assumptions so your inaccurate premises don’t lead to inaccurate conclusions and colossal flops! Invest time in assessing the validity of your assumptions—and asking for advice and counsel from others.
Expect God to lead you to colleagues, acquaintances, and even experts who will give you feedback on your ministry’s important plans and your assumptions about those plans.”We encourage you to order copies for your board members, CEO, and senior team members and consider how to leverage one lesson at every board meeting and/or 10 or more lessons at your next board retreat.
Watch for the “40 Blogs. 40 Wednesdays.” posts by 40 guest bloggers beginning on January 8, 2020. Visit the “
More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom Blog” here to subscribe.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for
More Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom: Effectiveness, Excellence, Elephants! by Dan Busby and John Pearson.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:1) “Defending Risks Everywhere Is Not a Strategic Plan,” Lesson 28 in More Lessons, warns that you must discuss the “risk elephant in the boardroom.” How effectively do our board, CEO, and senior team encourage “elephant discussions?” Is dissent and debate a value—or is conformity a boardroom value?
2) Lesson 26 cautions that “Ministry boards have a natural gravitational pull towards issues that should be reserved for the staff.” Does our board understand the “Big Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand” metaphor for keeping discussion at high levels? Should we invest 10 minutes for governance on Lesson 26 at our next board meeting?
Invest “10 Minutes for Governance” at Every Board Meeting
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
One of the big ideas in the Board Bucket, Chapter 14, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to continue “dating” board members after you’ve recruited them to the board. Inspire board members to be lifelong learners. After all, we do appreciate airline pilots and surgeons who are also lifelong learners!
“Tool #19: Ten Minutes for Governance” in the new resource, ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board (also by Busby and Pearson), provides a template and ideas for reminding board members that “good governance does not happen by osmosis. It happens only with intentionality, training, and keeping critical governance topics (like focusing on policy, not operations) on everyone’s radar.”
The book provides access to 22 Word documents you can customize for your board’s unique needs. (Follow the blog on the 22 tools here.) For more resources in the Board Bucket, and links to the four governance books by Dan Busby and John Pearson, click here.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). And watch for John’s review of the new book by Doug Fields and Jason Pearson, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love.
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