ENERGIZE YOUR BOARD – ENGAGED, EMPOWERED AND ACCOUNTABLE

What a great week-end! It all started off on Friday with a meeting with a new client and the opportunity to meet all the staff. The room was filled with energy – and everyone was looking forward to the journey that we were going to embark on. We talked a lot about creating a workforce that was engaged, empowered and accountable and this resonated with everyone. When I left there I was so looking forward to our next meeting.

My week-end continued when I attended some meetings where we were looking at our Board structure to align it with the mandate, goals and objectives of the Association. Some of our initial attempts seemed to be clouding the issue for some around the table and the buy in seemed to be off on the horizon someplace.

We took a step back and looked at this from the aspect of developing a structure that is focused on functions required to deliver the services needed to meet our mandate, goals and objectives rather than on people. That is a hard thing to do when you have the people in the room that are doing some or all of the work today. It is difficult to distance yourself from the emotional attachment that you have to what is the here and now!

We discussed the aspect of increasing the engagement factor, empowering certain functions and obviously the people who will be performing those functions. We also discussed the aspect of accountability. When you become more engaged and empowered there are degrees of accountability that go with that. You could see from the body language around the room that this was becoming a lot clearer. With some mentoring – the framework could be built and then expanded on to develop the structure complete with the functions to move the association to the next level.

I had been observing that we were slowly becoming less engaged as time went on. We were a Board that was far too large and not as strategically focused as what we should be. As a result, we struggled to meet our mandate. Some very valiant efforts were being put forward but the changes were not taking place fast enough and may not have been sustainable.

We have a lot of work to get done in the next few months to take this to where we can begin to implement the new structure, functions and model. This will most definitely be a very exciting journey as well as we will be developing an engaged, empowered and accountable Board focused on meeting and exceeding its mandate, goals and objectives. We will work together – mentoring each other as we share some of our best practices, learning and growing as the new structure begins to evolve. All of this enabled through the “power of mentoring” and a mentoring culture.