Services and Programs

Building Board Effectiveness

People serve on Boards out of a commitment to contribution and service.

How do you build on that commitment to create an effective and powerful Board? Board members come from diverse backgrounds and represent a variety of interests, skills and experiences. Molding a group of people into an effective Board takes both the commitment of the individual Board members and a process for forming the Board as an effective team guiding the organization.

Our Board Effectiveness program is based on four simple principles:

• Identify what is important for both the Board and the organization
• Make what is important do-able and manageable
• Make choices that reflect what is important
• Adopt practices that enhance effectiveness

These principles underlie the key elements of our Board Effectiveness program:

• Defining the role of your board in guiding the agency
• Defining the accountabilities of the board and of individual board members
• Designing your board committee accountabilities, structures and practices
• Creating an on-going board development program
• Inventing a shared vision and mission for your board
• Designing long-term and short-term objectives
• Creating strategies and plans to guide the work
• Identifying and designing key projects
• Fashioning clear priorities to guide the work
• Designing ways of working together that foster one team and one mission.

Our work combines our personal experience in serving on Boards with our skill as management consultants to organizations of all types and sizes, including nonprofits.

Our approach includes workshops, meeting facilitation and retreats. All our work with your board is designed to address the needs, issues and concerns of your board and agency.

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“The Board and I have never experienced such an energetic, compassionate, and well-orchestrated Board retreat. With your guidance, we accomplished a considerable amount in one day."

— President, Board of Directors 2000 Petaluma People Services Center

"Sunny and Gary allowed us to create among ourselves a powerful presence while they artfully and skillfully guided us toward developing effective consensus-based decisions. They supported us in creating a very safe space that enabled us to dialogue-discourse and disagree, yet build a very high-performing team. As a result, our planning process over the last two years has allowed us to develop our mission and vision for the future that I do not believe would have been possible without the eye-opening assistance of effective environments."

— President, Board of Directors
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