The Board Chair Relationship Is Your #1 Priority

The number one thing that I wish I knew when I was a new nonprofit ED was this: The single most important relationship of your first year as ED isn’t a funder, your staff, or your community.

It’s your board chair (or president).

Get this one wrong and every other relationship gets harder (trust me, I know). Get it right and you have air cover for the hard calls coming in months 6, 12, and 18.

What working with your board chair looks like when it’s healthy:

• 🌟 A standing weekly or biweekly 1:1 - not optional, not skippable, and absolutely critical. Make this a priority and things won’t get lost in the mix. #dothisone

• 🌟 A shared definition of what they handle vs. what you handle. This can make or break things. And figure out how to check on this in a diplomatic way. THAT can be harder than you think.

• 🌟 Permission to bring half-formed problems before they’re crises. I really wish someone had told me about this one early on. I assumed that this was a safe place to bring all the ideas, and not everyone was on the same page. #lessonslearned

• 🌟 Honest feedback in both directions. This one can be SO HARD for people who exist in the traditional corporate world. This is ONE of the ways in which nonprofits don’t act the same way as the for profit world. One of my favorite nonprofit peeps, Joan Garry, uses the analogy of the twin engine plane. A plane can’t fly without two engines and for a nonprofit, those are the Executive Director/CEO and the Board. Each needs to be pulling their weight and if one of them stalls out, you’re MUCH more likely to crash.

If your chair won’t meet weekly in your first 90 days, name it kindly: “I’d like us to build a rhythm of working together. Can we try weekly for the next quarter?”

New EDs: what’s working in your board chair relationship, and what isn’t?