The Head of School’s relationship with the Board exerts an outsized impact on the Head’s job satisfaction, stress level, and longevity.
There are many elements to managing this relationship effectively, including 1:1 meetings with the Board Chair, ongoing stewardship of individual Board members, as well as setting up appropriate governance structures and practices.
The foundation for most of these efforts, however, is quite basic. Board members’ impression of Board (and Head) effectiveness is informed primarily by their experience at ongoing Board meetings.
In many schools Board meeting preparation goes something like this:
Head: We have Board meetings on the first Monday of each month, right?
Chair: Yup
Head: That’s in two days. We should probably send out a reminder.
Chair: Oh. Yeah. What do we have on the agenda?
Head: Not sure. Let’s think about it. I can do a Head of School report. And maybe we can do a fundraising update if the Development Director can get it ready in time.
I have been there. In fact, I remember times when it was Monday morning that I remembered the meeting was Monday evening.
Though we often dread Board meetings, if we shift our perspective, they can become an opportunity to enhance relationships, build ambassadorship, and generally make the Head’s job a bit easier.
This shift in perspective includes moving from a reactive to proactive approach. John D’Auria tells us that “meetings are to leaders as lessons are to teachers.” Most of us were once teachers.
We know that the harder you work to prepare a great lesson, the easier it is to teach the class. We also know that you need the right strategies, tools, and techniques to make your preparation effective.
The problem is that we may have spent years learning those techniques for classroom pedagogy, and very few of us have the equivalent preparation or resource bank for Board meeting strategies.
Here are some key tools to get you started. Each one contains a brief explanation and a downloadable template ready for you to use.