On Leadership: The Vital Importance of Listening
Many of us serve on boards and committees of nonprofit organizations. Some of those bodies are advisory, some are designed to foster engagement, and others provide governance.
I have served in various capacities, including leadership, on nonprofit boards and committees for more than 30 years. Among other assignments, my volunteer service has ranged from serving on and chairing the boards of editors of professional journals and committees charged with providing educational programs for an organization’s members, to serving as President of a metropolitan bar association, President of a law school alumni board, and chair of the Board of Trustees of a liberal arts college. In every capacity, I have been blessed to work with incredibly smart, talented, and selfless volunteers and staff who have made those organizations thrive during good and not-so-good times. I’ve learned a great deal from the people I’ve worked with and from the experiences we’ve shared. Much of what I’ve learned, through both my successes and my failures, has to do with what it takes to be an effective leader.
Today I want to focus on one indispensable quality of effective leadership: the art of listening, particularly as it relates to nonprofit boards.
In any organization, and especially those with large memberships, no one person holds a monopoly on wisdom. Rather, an organization’s strength derives from the contributions of multiple people invested in the successful fulfillment of its mission. The nature of those contributions can be summed up in the often-repeated, alliterative three-word phrase, “time, talent, and treasure.” Listening, as I’m discussing it here, resides within the “talent” piece of that equation.
Although a board leader occupies the best position to influence an organization’s decision-making and culture, the whole purpose of having a board and committees is to ensure that groups of people work collaboratively to set the organization’s direction. A leader’s commitment to listening to the views of those around the table is critical to fulfilling that purpose well. (One of the most important persons a board chair must listen to is the organization’s chief executive, the full-time staff person who in some organizations will bear the title “Executive Director” and in others, such as colleges and universities, “President.” This post focuses not on that vitally important relationship, but on the relationship between the volunteer leader and the other members of the volunteer board.)
Effective listening doesn’t just happen. It requires, first, that the organization create conditions conducive to sharing. Every person in a decision-making or decision-influencing role needs to know that they have a voice and that their voice matters. A good leader encourages discussion and, when a board- or committee- member is quiet, actively solicits their views. No decision brought to a group should be a foregone conclusion. A good leader welcomes dissenting views regarding any issue or proposal, and gives the group room to air them. If the group doesn’t reach consensus, then the voting process can allow the organization to move forward, often having benefited from the input of those not fully supportive of the majority’s chosen course.
But effective listening also requires that a healthy variety of voices fill the room. Listening begins with selecting and assembling those voices and deliberately seating people from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and demographics. Indeed, rather than having the same or similar personal histories, viewpoints, or demographic attributes, the only essential common denominators for any board should be a commitment to the organization’s mission and a willingness in good faith to receive, consider, and share ideas for how that mission may best be accomplished.
For example, an effective college or university board brings together people with a mix of genders, races, ethnicities, religious identities, and ages. It gathers the wealthy (who provide much of the “treasure” vital to the institution’s success), as well as those who have limited giving capacity but are valued for their judgment and perspectives. It looks for members whose professional backgrounds cover such areas as education, management, finance, real estate, medicine, public health and safety, science, law, communications, religion (for religiously oriented institutions), humanities, and the arts. It seeks to recruit senior members who bring the wisdom gained from decades of work and life experience, and younger members who are better positioned to understand the current characteristics, structures, functioning, and values of the institution and, importantly, to relate to the principal beneficiaries of the institution’s mission (i.e., the students).
A good leader is deliberate in surrounding themselves with diverse voices. They also are deliberate in enabling and empowering those voices to join the conversation. And they adorn themselves in vulnerability, allowing themselves to be guided and their views affected by all the voices in the room, even those that express views different from, and at times in conflict with, their own.
Although leaders are typically selected in large part for their knowledge and good judgment, that does not mean their proposals are always the best, or that their opinions are always the wisest. Rather, the first rule of effective leadership is (or at least should be) the recognition that the best decisions are reached collaboratively, and very often originate or take their optimal shapes not from the leader’s opinions or initiatives, but from the ideas and values of other participants in the decision-making process.
In short, effective leadership involves listening to a deliberately formed variety of voices. And effective listening is an active, not a passive, undertaking. Effective leadership and listening require humility and an openness to novel and at times conflicting viewpoints, and compassion and gratitude for the people who express them. It recognizes the responsibilities of the organization to diverse stakeholders and to the role of the organization in a diverse society. And, accordingly, it seeks to ensure that a wide array of voices are represented and heard.
Finally, effective leaders are faithful to the hallmarks of good process, such as transparency and opportunities for free and full discussions of the decisions being considered. They also ensure that the process is meaningful and does not constitute mere “window-dressing” in support of preordained outcomes. Rather, in exercising their fiduciary duties, leaders are charged with creating the structures and climate that allow every proposal to be subjected to the questions and critiques, as well as the approvals and endorsements, of everyone responsible for the decisions that will be made. And in doing so, they make every effort to be attuned to the voices, and even the silences, of every person who has generously devoted their time and talent to the organization’s success.