Avoiding a Board of Detractors

As someone who has worked with nonprofits for over twenty years, I've seen one issue rear its ugly head more times than I can count. The issue, which I'm sure has been around since The Hospital of St. Cross, the first recorded charity established in Britain in 1136, is poor board recruitment, training, and management. Granted, the monks back in the Middle Ages were still figuring out how to run things, but I'm sure there was at least one blowhard who insisted that they were right and dismissed everyone else's ideas to make sure their agenda was the one that prevailed. Sound familiar? You don't have to work in a nonprofit to be exposed to that sort of bombast, but the very nature of charities sometimes attracts people who attach themselves to organizations for all the wrong reasons. This is one reason you need liability insurance to cover your board and volunteers. 

Like a regular corporation, charities are created because someone saw a need they believed was not being addressed. Unlike a traditional industry whose mission is to provide a product or service that can be sold with profits distributed to investors, nonprofits have a social entrepreneurial spirit that gives back to the community it serves. 

Once the charity's mission is established, the next step is to create a board of directors. In some states, it can be as small as three people, usually the group's founding members. The goal is to increase the number of board members who can help raise the organization's profile. But first, they need to have a good understanding of the definition of a functioning board.

According to the National Council on Nonprofits, board members are the fiduciaries who steer the organization toward a sustainable future by adopting sound, ethical, legal governance and financial management policies and ensuring the nonprofit has adequate resources to advance its mission.

         

The very nature of an honorable cause can sometimes bring around people whose intentions are not honorable. That's why I tell people who work at nonprofits to be very leery of anyone who comes in, seems to have all the answers, and then wants to take on a lot of responsibility with very little oversight. At first, the person seems like an answer to a prayer and is charming and willing to go above and beyond what is called for. But at some point, they can become manipulative and controlling. These individuals can cause fissures in an organization that can take a very long time to heal.

I've seen my share of bad board behavior. Here are a few tales that go under the heading of "Don't let this Happen to You!"

Cautionary Tale #1:

An arts group had managed to bring on board members from all over the community and wanted to make sure that its artists were represented. One

reliable actor was interested in serving on the board. It seemed like a natural match; the theatre had board members who represented the community and had the financial and legal skill set needed. Still, it needed someone to represent the performance side even though the Artistic Director was also on the board. Things were going well at first until the actor brought up a play that he had always wanted to do. The content was not keeping with the theater's mission, and the piece was voted down. The actor kept pushing, and the Artistic Director explained that it did not jive with the other plays they were considering. 

The actor persisted to no avail and then shifted his tactic to get the board to remove the Artistic Director. Luckily, the members saw through his manipulation, but it took months to get him off the board, damaging the group's cohesiveness. 

Cautionary tale #2

I was the executive secretary at a child welfare agency that included foster care. Ideally, foster parents are trained to take care of the children in their stead with the idea that it will not be a permanent placement but a place where a child can reside outside an institutionalized setting. At the same time, the state tries to facilitate reunification with their biological family. 

One of the foster care parents at this agency had nurtured a young girl

since she was an infant. The parents were getting back on their feet, and the state wanted to reunify the family. The foster mother understandably had grown close to this child, who was two years old, and had let a few people at the agency know that she was interested in adoption. She was told that unless there was a termination of parental rights by the state, the goal for the family was always reunification. The foster mother didn't want to help facilitate the supervised visits, making it difficult for the biological parents to meet with their daughter.

When it looked like the biological parents would receive custody of their daughter, the foster mother fled with the young girl in the middle of the night and left her husband and young son to contend with the press and legal fallout. The fact that a foster parent decided to take such a drastic action was bad enough, but the reaction from the Chairman of the Board of the organization was even worse.

She was a friend of the woman and called a press conference unbeknownst to the Executive Director to say that she completely supported what the fugitive foster mother was doing. This proclamation of support jeopardized several state welfare contracts, which would have significantly reduced the services the organization could offer and might subsequently cause staff lay-offs. None of this had crossed the Chairman's mind while she expressed her righteous indignation to the media.

 The woman and the child were found in the middle of the state. Luckily, she had not crossed the state line, or the legal ramifications would have been even more significant. The young girl was reunited with her biological parents, and the foster mom ended up in a world of legal trouble. 

 As a result, the Chairman resigned from the board. A new communication and board policy was put in place in which only the Executive Director could speak to the media on behalf of the agency. It took years to rebuild the trust between the government entities and donors with the organization just because one person decided to go rogue.

Here are a few suggestions on how to prevent a volunteer leadership implosion:

• Make sure you have liability insurance for board members and volunteers. These cautionary tales are a prime reason you need coverage if your board members go out of bounds and you are sued for damages.
• Develop a board handbook that each board member signs to ensure they understand their responsibilities and how to counter toxic behavior. Board members should attend an orientation where they can ask questions so everyone is on the same page. 
• Always ask a potential board member to serve on a committee first. If you start to see negative issues, you can deal with them before they join the board and serve as a legal entity.
• Do your due diligence. It's not enough for one or two people to vouch for the potential board member; do a background and reference check to verify their credentials. 

There is no better feeling at the end of the day than knowing that you made a difference in the world by doing charity work. Safeguarding that mission from someone whose intentions are unscrupulous, even if they seem magnanimous, is one of the most difficult challenges a nonprofit can face. Recognizing and stopping malignant individuals is a vital skill to hone and one that might determine the long-term sustainability of your organization. You don't need to be a monk from the 1100s to understand that.

The Parable of Tim Tool

In this blog, I want to build on the last one about how promoting someone who is not a solid manager wreaks havoc on your business.  This one involves the food service industry, which has one of the highest turnover rates of any industry, both private and public - overall, it's about 70%.  Some fast food chains like Burger King can experience a 210% turnover, which means in a year the entire staff quits and then the people hired to replace them quit as well.  Now, in their defense, food service often hires students who are going back to school or seasonal employees - but having to constantly train new employees can strain even the best manager.  If your manager is not well equipped to handle the constant transitions, then it's just a matter of time before things go down the crapper.

When I was in college, I worked at a corporate restaurant in Miami as a waitress.   Our General Manager (GM) was named Mr. P  – a guy from New Jersey, and he was the real deal.   He could curse a blue streak in the kitchen to get the cooks motivated - then go out into the dining room and kiss the grandmas with the same mouth.  He had a very blue sense of humor that the cooks, the waiters, and even the waitresses loved.  It was never demeaning – it was more – "Good God, did he just say that?  I was thinking it too!”  Thankfully, HR was never around to hear him.  He would work the line, cook, and wait tables if we got slammed.  It was never in a way that said you weren’t doing your job - he just knew if you were “In the Weeds” (restaurant slang for overwhelmingly busy), he needed to step in and help.  Mr. P was also a company man. He could play the corporate game and wanted to get promoted outside of the Miami store. 

Corporate restaurants run differently from mom and pop joints.  There are

pluses and minuses to that.  For instance, everything needs to be up to spec or specifications, which means that the food is consistent no matter who is cooking.  It's the same recipe and the same ingredients every time. The downside is that you don’t always get a choice in who you hire in management – you’re at the mercy of the area director who decides who will become an assistant manager and then eventually a manager.  When it was time to get another Assistant Manager, the powers that be decided to send Tim Tool – a British guy who had higher ambitions than just being an Assistant Manager.  He had sandy red hair and a recessed chin, brown beady eyes, always wore a tie, and was never caught sweating even if he was behind the cook’s line.  He had seniority because of his time at the other restaurants within the corporation, so if for some reason Mr. P got promoted, transferred, or died – he was literally one heartbeat from being the General Manager.  Mr. P and Tim's relationship was rocky from the start - you could tell the Englishman and the Jersey boy did not think much of each other, but the Area Director liked both of them, so they pretended to be best buds whenever he was around.  

About six months after Tim arrived, Mr. P got his wish and went to be the GM of the Passaic, NJ restaurant.  It was great for him to go back home as a hit, but bad news for us because Tim was a power-hungry, conniving son of a bitch who would stab his own mother in the back and then throw her under the bus.  We had little faith that this guy would pick up where Mr. P had left off.

So as Tim's first official act as GM, he made it clear he would take all the daytime management shifts.  The problem with day shifts was that they were quiet except for a short lunch rush, so he had no idea when the busy times were at night because he was never around.  As GM, he scheduled himself from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and left the crappy shifts (the 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. night and weekend shifts) for his Assistant Managers.   He never allowed the waiters to try the specials during shift meetings to save money.  So if customers asked us how the specials were, we'd have to lie because we frankly had no idea how it tasted.  Mr. P let us taste everything - but Tim thought that we should buy the specials at full price if we wanted to try them.  He kept on saying it would help the bottom line. Did I forget to mention that the guy was a tool?

One time, Tim had to work a Sunday night shift because one of his Assistant Managers called in sick.  Sunday nights are usually dead after 8:00 p.m., but this one night they got a last-minute rush after Tim had let half the wait staff go for the night.  They got slammed and were profoundly in the weeds.  Tim could not handle the flow and shouted at everyone.   It was a genuine cluster cuss for lack of a better word.  The ticket times were about 60 minutes from order to food on the table, which is way over the maximum of 30 minutes, which is the general policy.  Tim was apologizing left and right and comping meals - he really hated comping meals.  A few days later, a woman wrote a letter complaining about how disorganized that Sunday night was.  Tim ordered a mandatory meeting for all servers and cooks on a Saturday night, which is generally the busiest restaurant night of the week.  I couldn't make it because I had specifically asked for that night off.  When I told Tim, he mentioned that I would get a demerit and it would go on my permanent record.  I feigned looking horrified at the fact that a demerit would probably keep me out of any really good job 20 years down the road and told him that there was no way I could be there because of a family commitment.  If he wanted to make the meeting in the afternoon, it would be a different story, but he insisted on keeping it at 7:00 p.m. because he had golf earlier in the day.  

I later found out that he reamed the entire wait and cook staff out while there was a nearly full restaurant that fell behind again because of his bad decision-making.   Because the meeting took everyone off the floor for 20 minutes, the dining room completely fell apart - babies were crying, hungry, cranky kids, angry diners who couldn't find their waiters because they were in the meeting. People were walking out.  The waiters and cooks who were off that night but came for the meeting had to jump behind the line for about an hour to help the dining room catch up.  Still, Tim seemed oblivious to the fact that he was creating the problems with food times and service.  He yelled at the group for not taking care of the customers and left shortly after the meeting to go to a movie with his wife.  

Eventually, Tim's style of management started to wear on the Assistant Managers, who had had enough.  They were tired of working all hours and Tim taking credit for their promotional ideas that included ways to get people to come out to the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration.  The Assistant Managers started to transfer out or quit to take jobs at other restaurants.   We were in a constant state of flux, and it was one big screw up after another, which was never Tim's fault.  He somehow had the Area Director convinced that all the people leaving was his way of "cleaning house," although none of those problems existed when Mr. P was the GM.

So spring starts to roll around and it's time to plan the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration, which helps constitute about 25% of that quarter's sales for just that one day - it's huge.  You rent tents, have activities for the kids like a petting zoo, green beer fountains, a DJ- you name it.   Unfortunately for Tim, all the Assistant Managers who had the contacts and the to-do lists on how to put together an awesome St. Patrick's Day had left.  Since Tim had taken credit for their work, it was assumed that he could pull it off himself.   Those of us who had done some of the organizing tried to pitch in but Tim was determined to do it all himself so he could get all the credit.   He didn't have a media plan to promote it and didn't buy ad space early enough.  He depended on the fact that the past customers would come back, forgetting that other restaurants also had huge events planned for St. Pat's.  So the big day arrived and the Area

Director came by to check things out. There were no live radio remotes because Tim had hired a wedding DJ rather than one from a Miami radio station.   The green beer fountain cost a fortune, but the beer looked more like a green frothy slime than an Irish adult beverage. We had a few rushes here and there, but it was not jam-packed like the years before.  The waiters didn't pull in the money they were used to and worse, rather than making 25% of the profits in that quarter - that St. Pat's Day actually LOST money.  When the Area Manager later asked the staff if they had helped plan the event, we all smiled and said it that all the credit went to Tim.   We expected him to be fired but they kept him on for whatever reason.  He had a hard time living it down and started to fire people he considered a threat - like me for not attending those spur-of-the-moment staff berating meetings on my off days with less than two hours' notice. 

My roommate Darcy continued to work there, and I wondered when Tim was going to get his comeuppance - it had been six months since St. Pat's and still nothing had happened.  I had moved on to another job as a business temp and was glad to not work late nights and weekends. I heard more horror stories from Darcy and was glad that I didn't work there anymore. I wondered what happened to the corporate gods of vengeance to help put this guy in his place.  The staff had turned over by 80%, and the ones who were left felt pretty demoralized.   The atmosphere there was not fun, and business was dropping.  When was this asshole going to get his ass handed to him?  

Then Darcy came home with some amazing news. The Area Director had decided to demote Tim back to an Assistant Manager and transfer him to - wait for it - the Passaic, NJ store with Mr. P.  All this just four months after Tim had closed on his lovely house in Ft. Lauderdale, which was on the water.  Karma had outdone itself - Tim was going to work with a guy he despised and exposed to brutal Northern winters rather than the 70-degree Decembers we had in South Florida.  

So the moral of this parable is that lying sacks of crap survive only for so long by taking credit for other people's work, not taking responsibility for their own mistakes, and ruining morale.  While that behavior might be tolerated if they can still put up impressive sales numbers, eventually people will see through it.  It might take weeks, months, or even years.  But as anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business can tell you, some bottom lines should never be crossed.