I have sat on both sides of the board table. As a board president planning a retreat, and now as the person public boards call in to facilitate one. And I can tell you the exact moment most of them go wrong.
It happens when there is no agreement between what is governance and what is management. Boards want to talk about priorities. But they do not have a clear idea of their role as governors versus the district's role as management. That is where most of it goes wrong, right there.
Governance is oversight. Management is implementation.
Governance is policy oriented. It is oversight. Management is implementation. Governance decides what issues to discuss, and management reports on how it is addressing them. Governance does not say you should fire this person or keep that one. That is not what a governance stance should be.
I watched a board meeting where the district was presenting its budget for approval, and a board member said, why do you have to fire this school counselor? That is a management decision, not a governance decision. The governance question in that room was different. Our test scores are not indicating that students are learning to read. What are you doing to improve that? And then management comes back and says, here is our curriculum, here are the teachers we are hiring, here are our standards for teacher evaluation.
“We are not going to drill down into your budget far enough to say you should keep this teacher or get rid of that one. But we will ask why students are not learning to read.”
The line moves, and that is the point
The work I most like doing with boards is helping them figure out where that line sits, because it varies by board. When you have a brand new chief executive, the board might be a little more instructive. If you have a chief executive who is messing up, the board might need to be more instructive. If you have someone who has been there four years and clearly knows what they are doing, the board can be more hands off and allow a lot more management flexibility.
Whatever that arrangement is, there has to be a shared understanding of what the board sees as governance and what it sees as management. And it should be revisited every year. A superintendent who has been in the seat three years is in a different relationship with the board than one in month two.
The big four, with student achievement at the heart
When a board asks me what it should actually be focused on, my answer is four things. Superintendent supervision and evaluation. Student achievement. The budget. And board policy. Everything else management owns. Student achievement sits at the heart of all of it, because what is the point of the district if it is not helping kids learn to read, write, and do arithmetic?
The pre-retreat assessment almost everyone skips
The other mistake boards make before a retreat is not doing any kind of pre-retreat assessment to find out where people actually stand on the hard issues. So the board shows up to talk about governance and management cold. Three of the seven members think firing a superintendent or a principal is the board's job. Four do not. And they just argue.
With an assessment in hand, I can walk in and lay it out. Here is what most boards treat as management and what they treat as governance. Here is what you said. Three of you believe the board should be firing superintendents, four of you do not. Let us discuss that. Let us look at what other boards do. Let us look at what state law says your role actually is. Same disagreement, completely different conversation.
Start with values, not the agenda
The one conversation I make sure happens before anything else is not about the job description. It is about values. I give board members a chance to share their stories. Here is why I ran. Here is who I am. Here is how I live my life around these principles.
A value is something you should not have to articulate if somebody knows you, because they could already name it by watching how you spend your time. That matters on a board, because nothing happens without a majority. If you are trying to get two people to agree and you do not understand where either of them is coming from, you are not going to get there on policy.
Why boards rarely fix this themselves
Boards can rarely fix their own problems. It is like asking when my wife and I can fix a really deep problem on our own. Most of the time you need a mediator, a counselor, somebody who can make each side own what they are doing wrong instead of cataloging what the other side is doing wrong.
If you are willing to own your mistakes, you will be a great board member. If you are going to blame your colleagues for everything, even when you are right, you will be a difficult one. Nobody wants to be blamed, and you do not get anywhere as a victim.
Planning a board retreat?
I facilitate these end to end, from the pre-work through the follow-up meeting that makes it stick.