As Edwin H. Friedman once wrote, in talking about leadership by means of likening leadership issues to what happens in the natural world, “One of the major advances in modern medicine has been the effort to stamp out disease not by trying to eliminate all the disease agents in the environment, but by enabling the body to limit a toxic agent’s invasiveness. This immunological approach to disease is in line with what has worked for life from the beginning, for the toxicity of an environment is only one variable in survival. Another often more determining factor is the response of the endangered organism or species.” His words often come to mind when I think about governing boards, and how they respond to situations.
In our age of heightened anxiety, governing boards are too often devoid of an immune response. They don’t draw on their own resources–namely, developing a board that follows appropriate practice in all that it does, including the stewarding of board member behavior, whether in-meeting or between meetings; instead, they too easily focus on what they perceive to be the ‘outside agent.’ They resort to blaming rather than owning, when it comes to a given challenge. The capacity for a board to take responsibility for its own destiny has a prime requirement: integrity. It is far easier to cast blame outward, rather than take responsibility for its own condition.
“I know all about governance” is a favorite quip, especially popular among board members who have been engaged (by others) in discussion around their roles or behaviors, when, in fact, these members know next to nothing about governance. Or worse yet, they may indeed have cognitive awareness of it, but choose to practice none of it. Their favorite approach is to displace the focus onto something else: a classic avoidance tactic. They put all their effort into grafting anxiety onto their chosen displacement issue, with the result that the board can no longer be objective about the nature and extent of its real problem(s). The board has been shown a shiny object, and it would rather be distracted by the shiny object than focus inwardly on more painful matters.
It is at this moment that a pathological board member can derail an otherwise healthy board; they cause division by means of displacement, and their actions prevent an otherwise good board from looking inward and owning whatever the particular challenge may be. A good example is when a board member who has founded a school–and consequently served as board chair for a number of years–rotates out of a role that has afforded a certain degree of authority, whether real or perceived. Founder’s syndrome kicks in, whereby that founder does everything possible to maintain disproportionate power and influence, creating a ripple effect of problems in the institution. Typically, the displacement issue generated by the founder has something to do with the head of school, who is seen by the founder as having the disproportionate power and influence that the founder has ‘lost.’ The founder finds some reason (the shiny object) to blame the head of school, so that the founder can feel important and needed once again. What the founder fails to recognize is that it is only *after* they rotate out of that original, powerful position and the organization can stand on its own two legs and wash its own face that the founder’s legacy can be realized. The founder needs the head to lead the organization.
Another typical example is a board that has become dysfunctional, not observing the well-evidenced proprieties of effective school governance. “Things will only get better,” they believe, “if we bring in an outside expert to tell us what to do.” The expert arrives, works with the board to identify the evidence base around effective governance, but board members who recognize their behaviors as incompatible with the evidence base look further afield for some other magical evidence that will support their behavior, rather than engage in the challenging work of personal behavior change. Again, in a moment of blame displacement, they search for another victim onto which to fix their energies: the head of school. They can’t or won’t change themselves; instead they decide to change the head of school. The displacement makes them feel better about themselves, coalesces energies around engaging with the community to identify the strengths of the school, but yet creates instability and disruption. The illusion is complete.
