Kindling Board Trust

How well do you know your fellow directors apart from what you see and hear from them in your work together as a board? Possibly not well. This post is about increasing our familiarity with one another with the goal of building trust around the board table.

One often thinks about trust in the non-profit governance context as being about the relationship between the board and the CEO. Trust amongst board members is important too. Indeed, trust is increasingly important as boards strive to be demographically and culturally more diverse.

Boards, especially in urban nonprofits, often operate without needing a lot of trust among directors. Frequently they get away with operating as a group of individual advisors, not a team. Most matters get short shrift in the context of multi-item agendas, and reliance on decisions made by voting exacerbates this kind of group culture.

But if trust among directors is not present when the board really needs it, the organization may be in trouble. Building trust on boards should not be left to happenstance. Directors are usually not together frequently or for a long enough periods to allow the group to quickly warm to each other.

So, some purposeful or intentional work kindling board trust should be considered.

Why trust is important

Trust is important so that governance team members feel safe in asking “stupid” or possibly uncomfortable questions, questions that need to be asked. It is also important so that people can offer and receive feedback from one another. Trust makes it possible for listening that enables directors to have their minds changed or to change others.

In the context of community diversity, a 2014 U.K study by Katharina Schmid, Ananthi Al Ramiah and Miles Hewstone of the University of Oxford, suggests there are three kinds of trust: in-group trust, out-group trust, and overall trust. ^[1]Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity and Trust: The Role of Intergroup Contact and Perceived Threat, Psychological Science March 25, 2014 (3), pp 665-74. This British study is a response to Robert … Continue reading One would love to think that diversity, the opportunity for casual contact among people who are different, would boost trust. According to this research It does not, at least not directly.

However, the study found that when one factored in actual day-to-day personal contact, trust could be enhanced. That is, when majority and minority members had the opportunity for conversations about their families, their hobbies or other non-professional topics. This deflated their sense that they were threatened, which boosted feelings of trust—trust of all kinds. The study’s conclusion: diversity can lead to more trust, just indirectly.

There have been lots written too on the kinds of trust and its importance on teams. Patrick Lencioni, in his best selling business book The Five Dysfunctions of Teams: A Leadership Fable^[2]The Five Dysfunctions of Teams was published in 2002 by Jossey Bass. Lencioni has two other related books, Death By Meeting, 2004 and The Ideal Team Player, 2016, talks about predictability-based trust and vulnerability- based trust. Predictability-based trust comes from observation, vulnerability-based trust from getting to know one another. He says that the latter is most important. Without trust board members are likely to see meetings as a necessary but unwelcome commitment, jump to conclusions about other directors and not take any communication risks.

When is trust needed?

Trust around the board table is important of course when a governance team is facing a tough choice where the consequences of an action, no action or the wrong action are significant for the organization. These are situations where “the data” is of little help and individual “gut instinct” could be dangerous.

Trust is also important to have when any of the normal things that challenge boards are to be dealt with:

• The evaluation of the executive director
• Conducting and acting on a board self evaluation
• The removal or disciplining of a board member
• An allegation of illegal or inappropriate behaviour within the organization
• The discovery of a failure by the executive director to follow direction (e.g. an established policy)

Trust around the board table is then not just important for the big, most obvious situations.

So, what tools can boards use to kindle greater trust?

 Take some time out

Intentional work by the board in building trust requires some time outs from the normal business agenda. Some boards employ meeting icebreakers or check-ins. They are useful in helping people park whatever else is on their minds and mentally enter the meeting. They can also help in getting to know one another.

• What is the best thing that has happened to you this week
• What is your most guilty pleasure?
• If you had three famous people, dead or alive, to have dinner with, who would they be and why

The issue with check-ins is that they take a lot of agenda time and do not necessarily prepare people to listen. If you are going to use a check-in question of any kind put it on the agenda so that there time for directors to think about what they are going to say in advance of the meeting.

Instead of making check-ins lengthen your board meeting, try putting less on the agenda. For example you probably do not need a financial report and executive director’s report every month. A board calendar is a great tool for agenda planning.^[3]A number of GoverningGood posts address meeting planning issues. One is Easy Board Home Improvements. In the Governance Guides section on this site several publications might also be of … Continue reading

Organizational Retreats

Organizational or board retreats are a great mechanism for trust building amongst board members and between board members and staff. They are especially effective when social time, such as meals are built into the time together.

I was on the board of an environmental organization that had an annual full-day board, staff and volunteer retreat. Participation was, and is, on the board’s calendar as an expectation of all directors. Frequently it involved bussing participants to an “out of town” community hall or farm.  Even the bus trip involved some planned “getting to know one another” time.

Trust cultivating questions

If it’s not the weather, there are lots of topics that help us keep social conversation light and friendly. We sometimes call it “small talk”. For many this has developed into an art form. Going a bit deeper to get to know one another requires intentional work.

A quick search of the internet will reveal lot of suggestions for questions that help to cultivate stronger, or at least less mysterious relationships. There are articles on the “best 55 questions” to the “best 200 questions”. I do not like all the suggestions partly because some put people on the spot, are a bit invasive or could reflect gender stereotypes. They are not soul bearing questions or deeply personal. So here are some of my favourites, one best asked in the context of a shared conversation.

• Where did you grow up?
• What are the origins of your family (on either you mothers or fathers side)
• Do you have children (or brothers and sisters)? Tell me more.
• How big a family do you have? Where are they living?
• Do you think you are more of an extrovert or introvert and why?
• What is an ideal weekend look like for you?
• Do you have any pets or animals in your life?
• What are a couple of the activities that engage you outside of your work and our board responsibilities?
• What do you do for fun?

Its pretty easy to do

The work of increasing trust around the board table, or at least the activities required to build some, is not difficult or likely to encounter resistance. The intent of such work, cultivating trust, probably needs to be transparent. All that is really required is a willingness to depart from the board’s routine and be open to some experimentation. A couple of social interventions over the course of a year can make a difference.

(Note: I have created a one-page “Getting To Know One Another” exercise based on the question ideas above. It is posted in the Governance Guides section. I hope it is of some value.)

The value of some leadership on this front from the board chair is pretty obvious too; it is certainly not the executive director/CEO/s job.Board members themselves may well take up the trust building challenge by showing up early, lingering afterwards, or inviting one another out for a beer.

Building trust is about us all being less “unknown or scary quantities” around the board table. If we are less scary we can both listen better and be more forceful. When we are all less scary our worries become our strengths, our passions a source of energy to the board.

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The image for this post is a picture of a little sculpture I came upon on the pavement in the playground attached to our local community centre. The artist or artists are unknown.