What Makes an Effective Board, Board Member?
Berde, an impact player, shares tips rooted in decades of experience
A small-framed woman standing only a little over five feet, Carol Berde doesn’t seem to be your typical, high-profile impact player.
Her name isn’t known throughout the world like soccer star David Beckham’s, she isn’t cheered by tens of thousands of fans like tennis star Maria Sharapova, and she hasn’t earned millions of dollars through commercials and product endorsements like quarterback Peyton Manning.
The Ways to Work national office staff and Carol Berde (left to right), Frederica Martin, Matt Mueller, Cheryl Sarasin, Jeff Faulkner, Berde, Peter Goldberg, Pam Beyer, Deborah Smith, and Quincy Scaggs.
However, if you define an impact player as someone who is a “game-changer,” someone whose performance is such that it has a huge affect on others, then Berde—and her decades of work improving the lives of perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children—embodies the definition thoroughly.
Berde’s field of play has been and continues to be Ways to Work, the ground-breaking economic self-sufficiency program featured in this issue of the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine on page 18. The positive outcomes experienced by the organization vividly demonstrate the positive and even life-changing impact of the program, and by extension, of Berde’s work.
As for a team, Berde has played on several. First it was The McKnight Foundation, where she served as executive vice president and worked closely with the board of directors. McKnight is the foundation that initiated and funded the predecessor to Ways to Work, currently an Alliance for Children and Families sister company in Milwaukee, under the name Single Parent Loan Program.
Later Berde joined a new team, playing for the Ways to Work Board of Directors, first as a member and later as chair.
The collection of these and other experiences staffing and serving on boards of directors taught Berde much about what makes teams—in this case, boards—work effectively.
Three Keys to Effectiveness
Effective boards, Berde says, involve three main elements:
First is information. Boards work best when the directors or trustees come to board meetings well-informed because staff have provided them with the tools they need to engage in meaningful and generative discussions.
Second is questions. Effective boards ask insightful questions during their meetings, questions that are based on the information they have received in advance, filtered through the context of each board member’s experience.
“A good staff person and an effective board member ask questions that make others think about issues in a different way,” Berde says. “That’s what I’ve always tried to do with any of the boards I’ve been a part of, either as a member or as someone who’s staffing it.”
Third, and finally, is decisions. Effective boards make decisions. The members are energized by the nature of the discussions and welcome the opportunity to contribute their knowledge, experience, and expertise to the deliberative process.
Berde feels board members retain their interest when they know their time spent at a board meeting is going to lead to some decision. “Simply presenting information doesn’t keep people excited about the mission of the organization,” she says.
“I learned very early on at McKnight,” Berde adds, “that the pre-meeting written material has to be shaped in a way that leads to decision making, and you need to set up the discussion so it inspires informed decision making.”
Individual Effectiveness: Part of the Larger Picture
But, Berde says, information, questions, and decisions are not enough. Boards will never be effective unless the people they’re made up of are effective. And she’s seen them both: effective board members who are engaged and visionary, as well as those who aren’t.
What’s the difference between the two?
It begins with engagement, in Berde’s view. “Board members who are engaged in an organization’s work outside of the formal board meetings can participate in those meetings in a much more informed way,” she says.
Making this happen is a shared responsibility, she adds. “It starts with the executive director or staff leadership, but it’s also incumbent on the board member to let staff leadership know how much they can be engaged, what aspects of the organization’s work interests them, and how they think they can contribute to advance the organization’s mission.”
This allows the board to take advantage of each board member’s expertise without placing undo burden on a single person.
Valuable assets to every board are those members who are comfortable living in the clouds. “An effective board member has the ability to ask questions at the 20,000-foot level,” Berde says.
She acknowledges that board members have to understand basic nonprofit finances at the 10-foot level. But in terms of strategic direction, which is the other primary responsibility of board members, effective members have to be able to look at the situation and ask questions at a higher level too. These are the questions Berde says are capable of moving the organization to affirm its course or do something better, or different.
Concern About the Role of Wealth
Some may be surprised to learn that Berde’s list of criteria for effective board members doesn’t include one commonly sought characteristic: a connection to wealth.
“The traditional role of nonprofit board members is that they should either be wealthy themselves or have access to others who are wealthy,” Berde says. “There’s no place for them unless they can bring money one way or another.
“I’ve had a problem with that for my whole career because I think that often makes it difficult for other perspectives to be heard on a board,” she says. “Such a requirement limits the board’s diversity, effectively quieting the voices of people who don’t have wealth or don’t have access to people with money.”
She says an effective board member can and must contribute in other important ways, adding that “intellectual or substantive connections can be just as valuable.” The value of these relationships on the intellectual and substantive levels is something she knows well from experience.
True, Berde isn’t the type of impact player who can’t score a goal on a header from 30 yards, serve an ace, or throw a tight spiral 60 yards down the football field. But the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been enriched by the programs supported by The McKnight Foundation or impacted by Ways to Work probably don’t mind.
Additional Content — Where it All Started
The McKnight and Ways to Work Connections
For Carol Berde, the opportunity to be an impact player came early during her tenure at The McKnight Foundation.
“It was 1984. I don’t know if the term ‘economic self-sufficiency’ had been invented then,” she says. “Regardless, at the time the hallmark of The McKnight Foundation, as it continues to be, was using its financial and program resources to help make life easier for struggling people.”
The Single Parent Loan Program began as the result of a dinner meeting hosted by Berde’s boss (the CEO of McKnight), a professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of social work, and Berde. A dozen women were invited to join them. Each was a single, student mother.
“At that time you could still be on welfare and be a full-time student at a four-year institution,” Berde says. “But their welfare grants had been cut substantially; this was the first round of welfare cuts in the (President Ronald) Reagan administration. And the question we put to them was, ‘What do you and your family need to advance economically?’”
She continues, “Not surprisingly we heard that the answer was money.” But what was surprising was the form in which these 12 women said they wanted to receive that money: as a loan.
“No more handouts, no more grants, no more gifts. They wanted the dignity of a loan that they could repay,” Berde says.
That appealed tremendously to leadership at The McKnight Foundation, and thus the Single Parent Loan Program was born.
Later, the Alliance for Children and Families, then know as Family Service America, came into the picture in the form of its president and CEO, Peter Goldberg.
Berde says, “Peter led an organization that had, as members, several hundred organizations whose expertise was social work for just the kind of families that the Single Parent Loan Program had been helping.”
Berde recalls a neighborhood tour she participated in with Goldberg during a national funders’ conference. “If I remember the details … Peter (Goldberg) was sitting next to someone on the bus from the Bank of America, and the banker drew on the back of an envelope a little outline of how the program could be funded and expanded on a national level.”
Goldberg was enthralled by the expansion opportunity and the ability of the Alliance and its network of members to take the program to the next level under a new name, Ways to Work. As for Bank of America, it remains one of Ways to Works’ major supporters.
Initially, Berde says the thinking was that the funds for expanding the program would come from Congress. That didn’t happen, but The McKnight Foundation made a loan—later, in 2000, converted to a grant—of $5 million to Ways to Work to get the program started, along with support from other valued early funders.
McKnight also made some smaller grants to start the program at a handful of Alliance member organizations. Today, Ways to Work has been expanded so that it operates at more than 40 Alliance member organizations—and more growth is planned for the future (see article on page 18 of this issue of the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine).
However, the path to success wasn’t without challenges. “I think there has always been a very healthy tension in the program between the banking part and the social work part,” Berde says. “Our challenge is to keep a balance. Over all this period of time, it’s never gotten to the point where one overpowered the other.”
That’s largely, she says, thanks to strong stewardship of the program on the part of Ways to Work (and Alliance) CEO Peter Goldberg and Ways to Work President Jeff Faulkner, as well as former Ways to Work leaders.
“They deserve a lot of credit for making sure that the board was composed of people who represented both of those lines of thinking,” she says.
Berde has also had a stewardship role. She has been a member of the Ways to Work Board of Directors since 1999, and for seven years she served as its chair.
“As a generalist, I have been able to help maintain that delicate balance between banking and social work because I have just enough knowledge of social work and just enough knowledge of banking that I can’t get too deeply into either one of them,” she says. “And I can therefore appreciate that both are essential to the program.”
Despite the tensions, changing times, and new challenges, Berde says the Ways to Work mission hasn’t wavered. “I continue to marvel at how the mission of Ways to Work is identical to the purpose of the original Single Parent Loan Program,” Berde says. “It has not changed in 25 years.”
Additional Content — Sharing Her Intellectual Capital
Berde’s “encore career” as a consultant
Now that she has retired from The McKnight Foundation, Carol Berde has embarked on an encore career. For the last three years she has been a consultant to nonprofits and philanthropic organizations across the country.
“Most of my work is of a strategic nature,” she explains. “Sometimes that means strategic planning, sometimes it means strategic thinking in a variety of ways.”
She says she brings to her role as a consultant many of the elements she outlined in the accompanying article.
“Perhaps the most important attribute is to ask the 20,000-foot level questions that the people who are engaged with the organization every single day don’t have the mental space to think about,” she says.
“I’ve also been able to help a lot of organizations work through a great deal of material to make decisions,” she says. Berde offers an example of this, explaining how she “can take a lot of material, such as you might gather in a strategic planning exercise talking to stakeholders, and say, ‘Here are the three big messages.’ So now the challenge is to ask the question ‘What does this mean for the organization?’”
Most, though not all, of Berde’s consulting work has been in Minnesota, where The McKnight Foundation is also based. Nearly all of it has involved work related to children and families or related to community development, especially affordable housing.