That Nice HR Lady: Board of Miscommunication

Dear Nice HR Lady,

I'm a volunteer board member for a small local nonprofit with eight employees. Our executive director keeps assuring the board that everything is going well, but over the past two years we've had five staff members leave, including one who was fired and another who quit unexpectedly. Lately we've also been hearing concerns from volunteers that don't seem to match what we're hearing in board meetings.

We don't want to undermine our executive director or micromanage the organization, but we're starting to wonder if we're asking the wrong questions—or not asking enough of them.

At what point does trusting your executive director become avoiding your responsibility as a board?

— Trying to Be a Good Steward

Dear Good Steward,

This is hard. I’m so glad you reached out with this caring question. I’m sure you’re not the only board member out there with concerns like this. If we’ve been paying attention, we’ve seen some similarly difficult situations play out publicly in our wider community in the last couple of years. Not fun. You signed up to do a wonderful thing in your community: to give your energy to an organization that’s supporting something you believe in, with a mission you love. You didn’t sign up to oversee the executive . . . or did you? Serving on a nonprofit board can be hard. It can be glorious, it can feel intimidating, and it can also be a bit of a mystery, all at once. 

I think what I hear you asking is “what’s the courageous next step.” 

So, dear Good Steward, set down that 48 page board report (kaTHUNK!), and let’s try to unravel things. I’m going to do my best to talk about governance, say a good deal about stewardship and courage, and provide a hint of HR.

At this early stage, I would encourage you to stay clear headed. This isn’t necessarily about whether the GM is trustworthy. There are many factors that might be at play right now. Staying neutral and using an exploratory, questioning approach will serve you better than running into the next meeting firing off accusations. 

Orient yourself to your role—in general, as a board member, your job is stewarding and upholding values, fiscal oversight, ensuring ethical standards, setting a vision and providing oversight and direction for your one employee—the GM. Reviewing your own board governance documents should help set the general stage for you. 

An initial thought I want to share about the board’s role managing the General Manager: Trust and oversight are not opposites. Boards can sometimes fall into one of two traps: they confuse healthy governance with the polar opposite of healthy: micromanaging and/or blind trust. 

I’m going to assume that Board micromanagement isn’t happening in this situation—that’s another advice column, frankly.

With that in mind, as one of the first steps in evaluating a possible personnel issue, I find it helpful to check in with my biases and look for logical fallacies and traps that I want to avoid during the process. Naming biases and fallacies is a great way to begin to deflate their power. We’re familiar with anti-bias checks in social justice work, and those are helpful in board work, and certainly would be helpful in this situation as well. Specifically, however, reviewing for bias when undertaking performance reviews or reviewing possible workplace issues, is another layer. One resource I found after a quick search, is this list of 12 bias examples, and how to fix them.

Once you’re oriented, walk through the facts here. Not what Pat in Finance has to say about it (and there may be a LOT that Pat has to say about it), but the observations you have in hand right now: five staff departures, conflicting reports, volunteer concerns and consistently positive reports from leadership.

Patterns here deserve your curiosity lens, so resist the urge to immediately schedule an executive session to present your conclusions. 

Start the next step by asking good questions. Ask for the turnover trends reports, the exit interview summaries and staff surveys. Metrics matter—looking at the data helps to distinguish patterns from anecdotes. The executive board, with the help of an HR professional, may want to interview a couple of key people directly. Perhaps the staff who departed quickly. If this inquiry and review points to more of an issue, it’s time to seek help.

I’m going to make a recommendation here—I know that you want to both fulfill your duty of care and to uphold the people and systems who make important work happen. Unless you have an HR professional on the board, as a group you may need more understanding of the legal employment landscape at play here, in order to make a “next best step” assessment. If, during your curiosity process, you identify even more questions than you began with, I strongly recommend that you hire an outside 3rd party Human Resources professional with investigation and compliance experience. That 3rd party will seek the answers and provide advice about next steps, if it becomes clear that next steps are necessary.

Sometimes, the best medicine is prevention. If your Spidey senses are tingling, the answers to these questions might help:

• Are independent audits discouraged or undermined or dismissed? This might look like strong pushback against bringing in an audit team, or an HR professional. 
• Are there robust feedback loops? Are they being upheld? For example: Is your all staff survey administered yearly (ideally by an outside organization)? Are suggestions encouraged? Is problem identification encouraged?
• To what extent do you have access to staff? Are you as a board strictly forbidden or discouraged from speaking to any other staff member, even for casual or routine matters?
• Are you being presented with selective data? To what extent are you being presented with data only when things are going well? Are negative trends buried, or in footnote heavy appendices?
• Are you receiving vague answers to direct questions (such as "we are handling it" or "everything is on track")?
• Is the board presented with major, fully-formed crises only when emergency board approval or funding is absolutely required?
• Are you seeing sudden or frequent departures of senior management, financial staff or long-term key employees without logical explanations?
• Is there defensiveness during questioning? When standard oversight questions are asked, are they met with anger or accusations of lack of trust? 
• Are board meetings themselves limited in unhealthy ways? Are board meetings scheduled to limit time for open discussion or for executive sessions? 

If the answers to many of these questions are yes, it may be time for some course correction before things need more intervention.

In closing, Dear Good Steward, thank you for caring. Courage sometimes looks like asking one more respectful question, and you’ve done just that. I’ll be looking forward to seeing an annual report that includes your organization's commitment to the strength of its accountability and feedback loops.

As always, 

That Nice HR Lady — Not your legal counsel, just your friendly neighborhood risk prevention advisor. 

Do you have questions about that new co-worker’s body odor? Or about the extra work you’re being asked to perform, now that the front desk staff finally up and quit? Drop me a line at thatniceHRlady@jeffcobeacon.com. Questions will be printed anonymously, with identifying details removed to protect the innocent.