This blog looks at some of the issues and idiosyncrasies in the world of boards and trustees that don’t have an easy answer (well I don’t have an easy answer, but others may).
Here are my eight mysteries of charity boards.
Can trustees have parental leave?
I have been on many boards but I have never seen a trustee get parental leave, or take a sabbatical, or go on sick leave. I mean this not in the literal sense but in the legal sense. In other words they step down from the full legal collective duty that a board of trustees has for the running of a charity. There doesn’t appear to be a mechanism for doing so. Of course, every paid employee gets parental leave, even after a short amount of time in post. It matters for trustees because would the Charity Commission consider a trustee still to have their full legal responsibilities if they were on maternity leave? I don’t know the answer and I haven’t met anybody who does!
Do treasurers have to be accountants?
Well of course, literally, treasurers don’t have to be accountants, but I think in the vast majority of ads you see for treasurers, they will make some reference to wanting an accountant. I will confess this doesn’t make a huge amount of sense: if you have a staff finance person who is an accountant, why does the treasurer need to be one too? They need to know about money and figures and all that. However, you don’t have a dog and bark yourself, but many boards do just that when it comes to their treasurer.
Do chairs have to be experts on the cause?
There are lots of boards who believe their chair needs to be some kind of expert on the cause, the ultimate oracle of wisdom and insight on it. There are others who feel it’s OK to have a chair who is a governance technocrat, rather than a cause expert (I exclude lived experience from this comparison). Wanting a chair who knows about the cause, and also about trustee stuff and running boards, can often reduce the pool of people who are willing and able to be chair, so it reduces diversity and makes it harder to recruit.
Do chairs have to be trustees first?
There are lots of boards who feel that their chair can only be recruited from within the board, because only an existing trustee could possibly know enough to be a chair. I got as far as being invited to interview for one chair role, before the board decided it needed somebody from within the board to be chair. Nobody thinks that a CEO has to come from within the organisation, so why do we think this should be the case for chairs?
Why do trustees have term limits but CEOs don’t?
Most boards now have term limits. Trustees can only stay a certain amount of time on the board – typically 8 to 12 years. This is definitely a good thing. It stops organisations getting stale, and provides a mechanism for renewals and new ideas. The strange thing is not that trustees have term limits, but that CEOs don’t. All the reasons that it’s good for trustees to have term limits apply to CEOs too (and their senior staff). Yes, it does happen, as a recent article about the 8-year contract for the CEO of Amnesty UK showed, but it’s incredibly rare, which is a shame.
Are references any use for trustees?
I am not sure they are. What is the point of asking somebody who doesn’t know what a trustee is, and has never served on a board with a person, whether they would be any good at being a trustee. I will confess that I think references for staff are pretty much a waste of time, but for trustees even more so. Recently I asked new trustees to provide somebody who could say they were a ‘fit and proper’ person as opposed to a character reference, but I am still not sure.
Why are young people the biggest diversity gap on boards?
There are all sorts of ways that a typical trustee board differs from the population as a whole: by gender, by education, by ethnicity and by disability as four examples. However, I suspect age is the biggest way that most boards differ from the population as a whole: our recent survey showed that 78% of the chairs and trustees who responded were over 55, while only 35% of the general population is over 55 – a gap of 43 percentage points. So while the majority of the population is under 55, most boards are over 55. Indeed I have been on boards where a 50-year-old is the youngster!
Why do boards waste all the talent, insight, wisdom, and energy of such a large chunk of the population? – and the same goes for all the other biases from the general population. Diversity is so important for boards.
Why do some chairs step down but stay on a board?
When a chair comes to the end of their term they should step down, and leave the board. That is my simple view. Yet I know a number of charities where the chair stays on the board. It’s common in the medical colleges – a person is President-elect, President for a year or two, and then past President. I have also heard of it in other charities. I just wonder whether it’s a good idea. It makes it harder for an incoming chair to make changes if their predecessor is still on the board. A CEO would never stay around having stepped down, so why is it OK for a chair to do so?
What are your mysteries of charity boards?
Do you have any conundrums about trustees, charity boards or governance? Or if you have solutions to my mysteries of charity boards, email me.
