Three discussions have recently come to light: paying trustees, board innovation, and how a board changes with organisation size.
Paying trustees or board members – what is your experience?
In one of our recent social media posts we described chairs as ‘always unpaid’. The indefatigable Brian Seaton from Small Charity Support emailed us to point out that this wasn’t true. His stat was that about 1.6%, or over 2000 charities, paid their trustees. I must admit I was amazed by this figure: I thought about three charities paid their trustees or chairs. I knew that Wellcome Trust paid their chair, but she is a former Prime Minister of Australia!
Many people believe that paying trustees is a route to increasing the diversity of boards. As long as boards are unpaid, then it’s mostly the wealthier, older, semi-retired who can ‘afford’ to sit on boards. There are equally as many people who take the opposite view – if paying trustees is normalised then it becomes another cost involved in running a charity.
A final observation is that many other non-profit boards do pay their members – NHS trusts, University boards, Housing Associations, local councils, and the like. And others don’t – like school governors.
If you have experience or strong views on paying trustees, or experience of a non-profit that paid board members, we’d love to hear them. Do email me on [email protected] with your thoughts, or to set up a call to discuss.
What innovations has your board tried?
A member got in touch the other day to ask what I thought were the innovations in charity boards. I hadn’t quite expected the question and was a bit lost for words.
“Oh, co-chairing” I gasped, and waffled off some other stuff. But it’s a really good question. How are charity boards innovating? Is co-chairing (of which I am a big fan) the only tool in our innovation toolkit? Surely not!
I have just finished reading one of Richard Dawkin’s books, and it brought home how evolution by natural selection is a powerful force because random mutations bring about innovations, changes, in an organism. Some of these work and most of them fail, but over time what improves an organism’s chances of survival and reproducing spreads through a population.
The same should be true of innovation in the way we run charity boards. The good ideas flourish, and the poor ones fail. But this is only true if bodies like the Association of Chairs help spread the good ideas or good ways of doing things. And we can only do that if people tell us about them. So please get in touch and tell us what your board has tried for better (or worse) and we can spread the word.
How does a board change with the size of the organisation?
I have sat on charity boards from my kids’ PTA to the £100 million RSPCA. How those boards worked was completely different. At the PTA, along with many other small charities, the trustees were also the people who made things happen. There were no staff. In other small charities, there are completely over-stretched staff members.
In the big charities, the boards are entirely different. Trustees are a little more like the judges on Strictly. The staff present papers, and the trustees make approving or disapproving comments – “I felt your footwork was poor on the risk register” and “I wanted to see more musicality in the accounts” (to hideously mix trustees and Strictly judges. Sorry – can’t resist).
When I wrote a paper at the RSPCA as a trustee, the gasps from my fellow board members were like the shocked tones of an eider duck. “Writing papers is what staff do” was the unspoken message.
On another board, the CEO used to say “trustees do strategy, and staff do operations”. The fact that the CEO presented the draft strategy to trustees never seemed to ruffle the perceptions of this rigid schism in their heads.
I say all this because we don’t talk enough about how the workings of non-profit boards should change with size. We need to help people see how the nuances of board operations change according to the size of the organisation. We need to challenge how the spoken or unspoken rules of behaviour change with size, or any other factor.
If you have any thoughts, from experience or observation, about how boards differ between large and small organisations we’d love to hear them. We can then harness your experiences in some blogs/briefings/thoughts to help chairs and trustees understand more about what works, or doesn’t, on other boards.
Get in touch with me at [email protected] to share your thoughts. It would be great to hear from you.
