Unleashing the Potential: Reimagining the Role of Board Members in Organizations

In this episode, we're diving deep into the often underestimated and underutilized role of board members in various organizations, from churches to nonprofits. Board members can be a powerhouse of support, strategic guidance, and shared responsibility, yet many organizations struggle to tap into their potential. We're here to challenge preconceptions and reveal the transformational impact a well-functioning board can have. Join us as we explore real-life stories from different contexts, discussing the challenges, successes, and lessons learned from embracing collaborative leadership. Whether you're part of a rapidly growing church or a nimble startup, this episode will inspire you to rethink how boards can shape your organization.

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Transcript

When my son graduated from high school, his buddy that he graduated with, we decided to do this like man trip. Part of the deal was we got them some axes. We were going to have the two of them cut down a tree together. This was going to be like the rite of passage into manhood. Halfway through it, we realized that this is a national forest.

And. And I looked at Pete, and I'm like, Should our boys be cutting down a tree in a national forest? He goes, I don't know, but we can't. We can't stop this like teachable moment right now. Welcome to the Elemental Leaders podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more resources and free downloads.

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. It's great to have you here with us today. My name is Paul. I'm your host. And of course, I am joined by Mike Steele and Dave Workman. Our fantastic panel for the day. We are jumping into an episode that I think is going to be incredibly tactile and practical. We're going to talk about board members.

And so before you turn us off, because that doesn't sound exciting probably to anybody. Let me just name the tension to get our attention a bit. Nearly 100% of the organizations that I'm personally working with, churches and nonprofit organizations are wrestling with how to utilize their board. Namely, their boards are underutilized. Maybe they're misunderstood. Is the board a resource that we should be tapping into more often to meet the demands of the workload that most of these great leaders have and their teams?

I was thinking through the demands of a leader, and I'm just going to list a few off mission. Clarity and alignment. Finances and budget. Leadership issues. Program impacts and evaluation. h.R. Volunteer Issues. Policy. Discipline. Development. Public relations. Community Image Branding. Adaptation to change technology and innovation. Strategic Planning. Crisis Management. The list just kind of goes on. And again, if you're a single celled church and you've got one staff member, you're kind of paying attention to all of that.

But even if you have 40 staff or 400 staff, you've got to at least have your attention on some of these demands. Those demands create pressure. Those demands create stress. Mike, maybe we'll start with you this time. Tell me the function of the board in your context. What do you love about it? What do you not love about it?

I work in a denominational setting and pressure in church, so we have a board of elders who oversee the church, who are in charge of different committees. And there's always a tension with our board. Good tension and bad tension. I think tension is good. I can confidently say most of our board members at the church I work at now are all in to the mission of the church, but it's taken a long time to get there.

It has taken years and years of intentional leadership training, intentional conversations. The best way to do that is through the nominating process that we have here at churches. We we really make sure that people are on board with our mission before they become elders at our church. What was the realization that led you to a point where you said, we need to develop them a little bit?

In our system, we'd have new elders coming in every 2 to 3 years. So then every year you have a new people come in and we're having to start from the ground level every single year with getting people up to speed. So we looked at everything and said, we have a systematic problem here that is slowing everything down to a halt.

Every single year at the same time. So that we can get people on board. So it's kind of like building an onboarding process for our board members at the church. An orientation? Pretty much, yes. So leadership. Leadership development, leadership training. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Elder training. Dave, what do you guys do? And I know that Cincinnati has gone.

Cincinnati Vinyard, you were the pastor at Cincinnati Vineyard. So I know you guys kind of went through several seasons of how to use your board, and I'm guessing it was very different than at Mike's Church. Yeah, very different because in church planning world, which is a major part of the DNA of the vineyard movement in the church planning process and vineyard world, it really is driven by the senior pastor, right?

So the senior pastor, the power of that personality, that's what drives everything. The ability of that person to attract and gather people and, you know, kind of get people focused on a common mission, so forth. It's all about that church planter. And so wherever that church planter has come from will be how he will or she will view the governance of the church.

Typically, people are planning churches come from places that are pretty strong senior pastors, and sometimes boards don't rank high in the governance spectrum. So we really didn't have a functioning board except on the fiduciary side. So they just kind of approved the budget and said, Yeah, yeah, that looks good, that's fine. It was really more rubber stamping than anything else, honestly.

So that's that's great on one hand, because you can be nimble and you can make decisions fast and you know, things can happen quickly and it's exciting and you're so evolving so quickly as a church, especially if it's a church, it's growing. We were going through rapid growth where there were some years where we were doubling in size.

So going from doing one service to services each weekend to at one point doing seven services every weekend and a midweek. So there was rapid growth. The challenge was our church planter is a good friend of mine, Steve SHOGREN, still a good friend. He was very type a driven guy. And and that can create issues down the road when the organization gets too complex for a single person to kind of drive it.

So at some point, we actually put together a governance task force. How is this place got to how's it got a function? How's this working? And it was quickly put on notice when our senior pastor went in for a routine medical procedure and they nicked his main artery twice and he almost died on the table. So we've talked about that in previous podcasts, but that changed everything because all of a sudden, you know, that's the classic, hey, what if the main person gets hit by a bus?

What do you do? And there wasn't a good plan. I'm taking on the role at that time of kind of leading the church, but it's de facto, it's not really a part of our protocol. So we're just struggling to put together a governance task force. And that group of men and women looked at, how is this working? Are we getting too complex?

And so forth? So eventually it came down to me stepping into the senior pastor role and that task force morphing into an empowered board, which is what I wanted, because at that point the organization was too complex and we were probably around 3000 people in those days trying to figure out how do we do this? Then the challenge became, what does this board really do?

Because there weren't a lot of large churches. There certainly weren't very many megachurches in our tribe, really. I can only think of three, maybe four in those days. So part of it is new ground for everybody trying to figure this out. What are other denominations, what are their churches doing? And so on. We had a group of people on that task force that morphed into the board came from a very structured, bureaucratic type institution, and they were all like, Well, we're the leaders of the church now.

That puts the lead pastor in a very different position than what they assumed was how we were functioning. And there was a lot of debate. It was challenging. It was a really difficult time. As we push through, what does it really mean to be on the board at this church? And are those leaders, are they elders? That wasn't even clear because before it was really a budget committee more than anything else.

I love the way this started because we're talking about two different extremes are two different very different models. And just to be clear for our audience, I'm not elevating one model over the other. At the end of the day, I think there are several different ways to do this, but there are definitely some common principles that need to be in play for a pastor or a CEO or a director of a nonprofit organization for a collective and a communal approach to just sharing the weight of the organization.

We had at that time, probably let's see, I probably had about 100 people on staff. So you have a big pastoral team besides, you know, directors and managers and people doing all sorts of technical things and so on. Now you've got a board of maybe seven, eight people. These people are mostly success for entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the community.

Should they lead the church? Say, you've got a guy who's working 60 hours a week selling insurance, and he wants to be considered a leader of the church. What do you do with these 15, 20, 25 pastors who are in the trenches every day doing pastoral work and they've given their life to this and not getting a whole lot of room in terms of financing, in terms of salaries and so forth, because everyone kind of gives up everything to go into ministry.

In many ways, I mean, we had big philosophical debates and arguments that were great actually, because it caused us to really hone in on what our values are and to take a really hard look at our biblical position on who our elders in the church. If you were to go back to that time, I mean, again, you were kind of no, thank you.

I. You were kind of forced into there. There must be a better way to do this, because right now it's all on me and maybe a couple of staff members. If back then you were looking at Mike's Church today. There's probably some things that you would pull from Mike's church because of the way we're doing it right now.

It's just unhealthy and not sustainable. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree. And I would say that the challenge in Mike's context, from my view, is would be one of bureaucracy. The challenge on my part was actually getting some bureaucracy right, was getting some organizational power in this board. My observation of churches in my tribe for instance, I think boards are the most underutilized group of people in the church.

Typically, they have very little power. They're kind of rubber stamping things. And the reason why I think, if I can wax philosophical here just for a minute, is because there are younger churches in terms of chronology. So they may have only had one pastor that entire time. Like in our case. So they haven't gone through 75 years of maybe five, six, seven different pastors.

Right. So in those organizations, boards become critical for continuity and for protection of vision and mission. That's really a big deal because pastors will come and go over the course of many, many decades. My experience has been there's been kind of two different types of boards, ones more advisory. Hey, you're doing a great job. Let me see the budget.

Let's go ahead. We'll ask maybe a couple of questions after the budgeting process has already kind of been figure it out so it's more advisory and then it's approval, right? The second one is more engaging, more hands on, even maybe some oversight or some pastoral counseling care over, you know, key staff members. They kind of fall into those two categories, right, advisory and more or more engaged.

Is there another category that we should probably talk about? No, I think you captured it right there. The challenge for us was there was kind of a pastoral staff us and then the kind of them. Right. Who had real serious power. They did my performance review each year based on the four or five initiatives that the pastoral team had come up with and the board agreed on.

So there was real power there. The problem was you don't want an us and them thing in the organization that's critically dangerous. So what we did in our case was we made the board and the executive leadership team of pastors. We made those two groups combined to become the elder ship. Got it. And so that group of people got together 2 to 3 times a year to really take a 40, 50,000 foot look at the church.

I mean, it's high level stuff that they're really wrestling with. That team was also involved with kind of high level, hey, where should we go even on our preaching schedule? Is that right? No. Or is that was that a different team? Yeah, that was really the pastoral team. The national team was really wrestling with those kind of things.

Okay. A little more internal, but when you put the two together, then it was like, oh, we're we're breaking down that wall between the US and them and we really are one team with a common mission and vision and that that was getting, that was exciting. So when I go back, I'll go back to some of the demands that I listed at the beginning of the podcast mission and clarity, vision, you know, finance, budget, leadership issues, maybe some program impact evaluation.

h.R. That team that came together, they started to mess with some of those areas. Is that right? Yes. Mike, with your board, do they involve themselves in some of those areas? Oh, yeah. I think we have like eight official committees. You know, you have stats development, finance facility mission who have their specific focuses. And it's interesting, I see so many parallels between kind of that vineyard way and what I'll call the Presbyterian Way.

And I think there is a sweet spot in the middle. You know, the grass is never greener. What's interesting, though, is in some of the older churches that I've worked with and especially the one I work at now, I think it really comes back to that process piece of things. What I've seen is there's just so much turnover in a board and a denominational setting that there's no process that people understand.

So we always tell a story here. When I six, seven years ago, I became the youth director here at the church. And it took him eight months to hire me because there is no process laid out and every group felt like they needed to have a piece of that hiring process and things like that. So I think it's similar stuff and when you're a younger church, you have that you have the ability to look at the process on a much smaller scale and say, this is how we're going to do it.

When you have all these years of experience, but we did it like this for this person and this for this person, and it just people just incrementally add to the process and then there's no process. I think there is that third option. There's the there's the first option, which is more advisory. There's the second option which is more engaged, fully involved.

And there's probably the third option, which is kind of a marriage of the two. And I think what Dave was forced into just as a matter of survival, and I'm sure his wife appreciated this at the time that he he just said, I need help. My shoulders are not big enough and I need other shoulders to help carry some of this weight.

I need to work smarter. Whereas in your system, Mike, you guys had that developed and you said maybe a little over developed, maybe a little bit too much bureaucracy. My own experience has been in both. I was in a Baptist church that was like 10,000 years old, but they had a committee for everything and it just didn't seem like we got anything done.

Beautiful group of men, beautiful church, but just didn't seem like we got anything done. Quickly, I went from there to a vineyard type church where it was all the senior pastor, and I thought, That's not the way to do it either. I was working with a large church and the pastor was just exhausted and felt like the whole weight of the church fell on him and so eventually got an executive pastor in place and that was exciting.

It was a good sized church and the language that we used together was it's just great having someone else in a boat rowing with you, isn't it? Yeah, that's great language. It just feels better. So then the push became What would it be like if you had a leadership team on your staff and you felt like those five, six other people were also rowing in the boat all of a sudden, exponentially, it feels better.

Everything about it feels like not all the weight is on you, someone else, some other people are staying awake at night. And that's that's a great feeling. Well, then the push became, you really don't have an empowered board, and why would you not want to take advantage of an empowered board? And in this particular church, there wasn't a great H.R. system.

They weren't large enough to be able to have a person totally sat on H.R. issues. But, you know, you had to deal with staff and you had this kind of things popping up and people come and go on staff. So to me, that's a prime example of someone needing an empowered, utilized board that could really be so beneficial to the lead pastor, be so helpful to have that many more people rowing together.

But then the question becomes this In developing the board, do you want technicians or representatives? You want specialists or representatives? So some churches use their boards as having representatives from the different ministries within the church, and they get together and it kind of it's a very Democrat kind of thing. They're there representing their district. So that's one idea.

The other way is to fill it with technicians or specialists because you need some specialists in areas. So it might be helpful to have people who are really smart and wise on the legalities of running a501 seat three hour church or whatever. So maybe you want a lawyer on there, or maybe you want someone who has really skilled in H.R..

Maybe they run H.R. for another company, a big company. That would be a huge benefit to have people like that on your board. Yeah. And if you can find someone who can fill both roles, that'd be fantastic. I remember I went from a church plant. I was a lead pastor of a church of about 120 people to the executive pastor of a church of, you know, between two and 3600 people.

And I remember getting handed this big budget. There was no budget process. There was no system in place for that. The one board member we had two board members actually, but there was one board member who was the CEO of the largest hospital system in South Florida. I took him to lunch and I said, Will you help me with this budget?

Teach me everything that you know about budgeting? I was pretty good with budgeting, but I wanted to make sure that there was somebody in the boat rowing with me because it was just such a monumental task. Again, it goes back to one of these burdens that leaders carry. It was so overwhelming that I was just absolutely not going to do it on my own.

And he said, Absolutely. Well, he happened to be one of these guys that was fantastic with budget. But then he had great wisdom, he had great oversight. He had he was a pastoral soul and it was just fantastic. It takes some work. Typically, when I'm asked about boards, I have some common denominators and I'll and I will refer you to our web page Elemental group dot org, and click on the Free Resources, sign up for the Tuesday morning email and just download as much free stuff as available, including one on the role of boards in growing churches and growing organizations.

Yeah, my guess is that most people that are listening to this podcast today are wrestling at some point with How can I maximize the impact of this team of men and women? It depends on your context so that they can be useful and help shoulder this burden of leadership, this privilege of leadership. But typically what I say to organizations is, depending on how you set up your board, I give them five key things that need to be in place.

You need a group of men and women who will commit to a spiritual relationship with God, with each other. You need someone who will be connected to respective networks. You need people who are committed to skin in the game financially. So at some level, there's got to be a financial partnership. They've got to be committed to your respective physical contribution.

Can they do something? Even if they go to lunch once a month and you just tap their brain for wisdom? The fifth one is probably the most important one to me. Are we committed to supporting each other no matter what? We don't have to always agree with each other to support one another. So however you want to frame those out, I think those five principles have to be in play.

I bet you've seen your share of bad boards. I have seen megachurches that filled their boards with other out-of-state megachurch pastors. Oh, yeah. And it gets so squirrely and so weird because those are the people who are setting salaries or start ups where they fill the board with a family members, which is just the craziest thing in the world.

I know you've seen some bad board policies. There are some people that I know over the last 30 years that I would love to have as a part of an advisory team where I can go to them and say, Hey, would you be willing to be on a team where monthly? I'm just going to give you updates how you can pray for me.

I'm going to navigate some issues because I just kind of want to I want to get out of my bubble and know how other people are doing it and other spaces. That's probably how I'd use that team. I don't know that I would give them that kind of authority and decision making power. That sounds like more of a coach or mentor type role.

Yeah. Yeah. That you're looking for rather than a board that's helping your organization focus on the organization first you as well. But then having someone who's there for you specifically is more of a to me that's more of a coach mentor. Yeah. Because aren't you looking for the board member just in what you were describing Mike, earlier, you want people who really get the organization's DNA, you know, and really clearly get the mission and vision of what they're about.

And love the church. They love what the thing is, it's all about. To me, that just seems critical. But what you're starting to poke at, Paul, I think, is what is the level of accountability that you want there? Accountability at the staff leadership level that a board may have oversight on. So in our case, we needed an empowered board that created accountability for the senior leader, especially as the organization got more complex.

It's a check and balance on the decisions that are being made as you move forward. I rarely made a decision on my own, even though I had the authority to do that. I would just submit to them even if it was by text. This is the thought I have. This is the idea. I think we should go. What are your thoughts?

It never hurts to to to run your thoughts with someone else. Why is leadership seeks the counsel of other men and women and it's just so radically critical it builds trust with not only your your board but for an a church perspective. Your congregation trusts if they see those things in place as well, which is really important when you think of financial reasons, this kind of talk systems and processes and governance structures and so forth.

I'm just telling you as a pastor, it just feels like unsexy work. We probably spent two years reworking our bylaws with the board so that if, for instance, I did get hit by a bus, there wasn't just an emergency plan in place, but there were clear bylaw procedures in which to find the next lead pastor. That stuff is the most uninteresting stuff for a pastor.

You guys know there's just the worst. You'd rather do anything else? Well, you'd rather than that, you'd rather do what we call superstructure work. You got into this for the ministry. You got in there? Absolutely. There's an impact you got. You don't you don't want to sit behind a desk. You don't want to get tossed and turned in these systems.

And the people who are helping you, the people who want to join your board are interested in that as well. And so one of the things we find most often as we work with organizations and churches is that these organizations are just killing it out there, doing really great work in the superstructure ministry, you know, the things you see above the waterline and they're just doing amazing things and they're so busy doing those great things that they often forget about the stuff under the waterline, which we would call infrastructure.

If you want to get healthier and you've got to pay attention to those things and you're right, that's great language. It is so unsexy, but it's legacy work. It's thinking beyond our position and our voices. And that's exactly I love that language for you. And I just did a workshop down in Asheville, North Carolina. And one of the things you brought up was that thing that we talk about a lot at Elemental is this organizational integrity triangle and those three points of the triangle.

It's personal, missional and systemic. All of those are interdependent. They all work together to make sure that the thing happens. The personal point is the leaders, personal integrity and so forth. But are there systems in place to make sure that that leader is healthy and is truly pushing the mission and the vision forward and is leading well, is not burning out staff is not, you know, whatever all those things are.

That's a systemic piece that needs to be put in place to guard and protect that lead pastor from flipping out and running through the middle of town naked with a gun. So hypothetically over that. Yeah, of course it's hypothetical. None of us have ever done that. I don't even own a gun. And I have a lot of black T-shirts here, a lot of clothes.

Yes. So but to me, that systems piece as connected with the personal leader, the senior pastor, lead pastor, that's critical systems piece. There is a board because the staff can't do that. So having a board in place that protects and guards and monitors the health of the senior pastor is so important and so critical. And I don't see that happening.

And you don't see it happening, believe it or not, in megachurches sometimes. And so we see these superstar pastors just flame out. And the first question everyone asks is, where was their freaking board? Where was the board when this guy or this woman was doing this or that and they knew where money was going and they knew this or that and yet did nothing.

The role of a board and that piece of that organizational triangle is really, really important. Yeah, that's so good. And we're going to we're going to land the plane here. You know, I'm jumping out of the plane. Are with your clothes on. Hopefully I jumped out of that blade ball. I, I just had a vision of, of Dave jumping out of that plane.

He's butt naked and he's got like two pistols and he's like, Wow. But anyway, there are no videos of that. Yeah. Don't go Google search that. Whether you're a small church, whether you're a large church. The nugget that we want you to get out of this today is this do not do it alone. You were not created that way.

We're better together. You need a community of leaders around you to help shoulder that weight. We would recommend, again, going to Elemental Group dot org and click it on that tab that says Free Resources sign up for the Tuesday morning newsletter and then download that PDF on boards and do your organization a favor and yourself a favor and just read through that and see what you can learn and then come up with a couple of next steps and then if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd love for you to write a review on it, pass it along to other leaders.

And so we'll just say from all of us, we're for you and we're cheering for you and we love you. And we'll see you guys next time. Take care. You've been listening to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more great resources.