Tip #43 Be Driven by Purpose: The First "P" for Building Your Board Team
In our last Tip for Effective Boards, we identified 4 P’s for Building Your Board Team: Purpose, People, Plan and Process.
The first of the 4 P’s, Be Driven by Purpose, involves the following:
Be clear about your organization’s purpose. Set your organization’s purpose or what your organization is for in terms of what people you choose to benefit or serve and what benefits you choose to provide them, that is, what good is to be produced for them, how their lives are to be better because of your organization. At the level of Purpose, the focus is not on the activities, services or means your organization uses or might use but on the desired outcomes or end results to be achieved. A board’s identification of its organization’s purpose should be informed by its ongoing conversation with the organization’s key stakeholders, that is, those people on whose behalf the board governs and to whom it is accountable.
Hold your CEO accountable for achieving your organization’s purpose. Convert the results to be achieved into measurable standards. Monitor organizational performance to ensure that the desired results or outcome standards are being achieved. Recognize organizational performance when merited. Take corrective action when the board’s performance expectations are not met.
Thoroughly embrace your board’s role to define and be driven by purpose. A central component of a board’s job is to define organizational purpose (in terms of identified results to be achieved for selected persons) and to ensure that those results are being achieved. Accordingly, in the Policy Governance® system, a major portion of board meeting time is spent on gathering and processing input from key stakeholders about organizational purpose, participating in relevant ongoing board education, actual defining and re-defining of organizational purpose, and reviewing performance data measuring achievement of organizational purpose.
For additional information on this topic, you may wish to check out Tips for Effective Boards, Tip #3: Board Policy Focused on Organizational Results and Tip #28: Three Steps to Being a Results-Driven Board by clicking on https://www.BoardsOnCourse.com/blog. (When I was developing the framework for board team building, I settled on “Purpose” instead of “Results.” Then I’d have 4 P’s instead of 3 P’s and an R. But, actually, I like the concept of “Organizational Purpose” because it includes results but is broader than results. “Organizational Purpose,” in my mind, embraces all three components of the Policy Governance® concept of Ends: the results or benefits to be provided, the persons for whom those results or benefits are to be provided, and the worth of the results, that is, ensuring that enough of the right results are being provided for enough of the right people to justify the resources expended.)
Being driven by purpose is the basis for a workshop I currently offer entitled “The Results-Driven Board.” I will be happy to customize this workshop for your board. For information about this workshop, click https://www.BoardsOnCourse.com/services/workshops-for-all-boards-4/. Also, I will be happy to customize a workshop for your board on any or all of the 4 P’s. If you would like more information, please respond to this email or contact me via jpbohley@gmail.com.
In subsequent Tips for Effective Boards, we will focus on the other three of the 4 P’s for building your board team.
While the 4 P’s incorporate insights from the Policy Governance® system, the 4 P’s also draw from other governance writers and from the group dynamics and team-building literature. For more information about the Policy Governance® system, please go to https://www.BoardsOnCourse.com/policy-governance.