Helping to Strengthen Nonprofit Leadership
• Nonprofit Board Strategic Planning Retreats
• Board Governance: Using the Policy Governance Model to Enable High Performance Organizations
Nonprofit Board Strategic Planning Retreats
GRA has discovered the following principles in its highly successful practice designing and facilitating transformative Nonprofit Board Strategic Planning Retreats:
• What you don’t want to end up with as the outcome and deliverable of your retreat is the typical, long laundry list of organizational “To Do’s” that make up the meat of most strategic plans, looking impressive but often gathering dust on the CEO’s shelf.
• What you do want is to:
- Generate an exhaustive list of the issues facing the organization and then boil that list down through strenuous debate to the 3-5 high level strategic issues that the organization has been struggling with for years without clear resolution
- Embark on a thorough process of business case analyses of the alternative paths of transformative action lead by the board and CEO.
- Vigorously and vehemently debate the options
- Facing the complexity of the process, make final strategic decisions about the path the organization will take and develop an action plan around those decisions that literally begins as the board leaves the retreat
This is what GRA practices and very successfully, as we are willing to demonstrate by putting you in touch with our past and present customers.
Please feel free to call us at 214-632-3541 (We do answer the phone), or e-mail us at gener214@airmail.net for more information and/or references.
Nonprofit Board Development: Using the Policy Governance Model to Enable High Performance
GRA also assists boards to improve their practices and processes with the outcome that the boards clearly deliver higher levels of performance and better outcomes. In order to do this GRA introduces the boards to the Policy Governance model developed by John Carver that has achieved widespread adoption around the world.
Typically this is linked to the board’s annual strategic planning retreat or it is also often done as a separate engagement. As a result of mastering the basics of this model GRA has experienced boards are better able embrace and master their primary role as in shaping the long term vision of the organization though the development of a crisp governance process that actively involves everyone at board meetings in policy formation. They then develop a set of policies starting with Ends Policies that lay out a crystal clear set of outcomes statements that then can be handed off to the CEO for implementation.
GRA has found that this kind of process results in high performance for the organization. It also results in a higher level of ownership of the vision of the organization by the board and, as a result, the board’s active role in brokering resources for the organization. Also board meetings become much more interesting because the emphasis moves to a priority on strategic decision-making. Therefore much less time is spent on people reporting about activities and this is replaced by concise reports of outcomes delivered.
Please feel free to call us at 214-632-3541 (We do answer the phone), or e-mail us at gener214@airmail.net for more information and/or references.
