Volunteer Leaders Learn by Example in Governing for Nonprofit Excellence

Social Enterprise Newsletter, Summer 1999

Mike MacLeod was more than a bit disconcerted by a case about a leading advocacy organization he read as a participant in Governing for Nonprofit Excellence (GNE) —a three-day Executive Education program for leaders of nonprofit boards. And it wasn't only that the organization's volunteer board had made strategic mistakes so significant that "they were confronted with the potential loss of their franchise," he says. It was more personal than that.

"It dawned on me that I would have made the same mistakes this group's leadership did," notes MacLeod, chair of the board of directors for Oxfam America. "The case was a stark reminder that the responsibilities of nonprofit boards go beyond their legal definitions. And it forced me to go back to Oxfam and focus on a long-term strategy to get through some shark-infested waters. If we didn't, it would be so easy to fall into the same trap as the organization highlighted in the case."

This case was one of 10 case studies MacLeod and his 63 fellow participants -all nonprofit board leaders —studied, discussed, and dissected. Covering a range of topics of concern to nonprofits, the GNE cases "created a seamless tapestry of experiences," MacLeod says. "They raised overarching issues about nonprofit governance that may have seemed fairly simple on their face, but they illustrate that if you don't handle each situation properly, any one of them can cause real problems."

Even issues of the "micro-level" can be damaging, he notes, pointing to the case of an independent boarding school. A minor disagreement between a parent who also happened to be a board member and the school's principal over what constituted appropriate transportation to a school sporting event built into a "torrent of activity that brought the very values of the school to the forefront," MacLeod says. "It showed how crises can come from anywhere, even one small incident."

For Dola Stemberg, a director of the Stemberg Family Charitable Trust, GNE provided a valuable opportunity to come together with other nonprofit directors. "It can be very lonely in the nonprofit world," she says. "There is little media coverage of the issues that affect this sector and few resources where leaders can turn for perspective and assistance," she notes. "It's tremendously valuable to be able to look at issues facing other nonprofits, even when the organizations are very different from your own. As you discuss a case or listen to colleagues discuss their organizations, you find yourself sitting back and thinking 'this feels familiar, we've been here before'."

For Stemberg, GNE had an immediate impact as well. "I walked into the program thinking about a particular issue that affected me as a mentor of a nonprofit," she says. "We discussed the issue in my peer consultation group and then used it as the subject for the Balanced Scorecard." (The Balanced Scorecard is a management system developed by Professor Robert S. Kaplan that measures organizational performance across four balanced perspectives: financial, customers, internal business processes, and learning and growth.) "I was able to leave the program with concrete ideas for developing a long-term solution," says Stemberg.

Participants are not the only ones who find benefits in GNE. The program's faculty take away something as well, often gathering ideas for their own research that will ultimately benefit future participants.

According to Professor Jim Austin, chair of GNE, "GNE has a tangible impact on individual organizations that send their directors to the program and, no less significantly, in how it grounds our own conceptual frameworks in reality. In fact, a number of cases have originated from Executive Education participants."