Relationships Between You and the Board Members

Presentations, of course, require personal interaction between you and the members of the foundation's board of trustees. Foundations vary widely when it comes to policies about contact between staff and trustees. Some encourage such interactions, on the theory that staff and board can bring mutually useful ideas and experiences to the common enterprise. More common are those foundations that build a veritable Berlin Wall between the two, on the theory that board members should set policy and not get involved in day-to-day operations. The majority of foundations operate between these two extremes, allowing episodic but not consistent contact between board and staff members.

Whatever stance a foundation chooses, it is imperative that it make the rules governing such mixing as straightforward as possible; otherwise, awkward situations will inevitably arise. The classic example occurs when a foundation board member receives a proposal and forwards it to you for disposition. Should you give such a proposal priority attention, or can you place it into a queue with all the others? Has a decision already been made to fund the proposal, or can you place it into the regular review process? Should you work with the board member in responding to this request? Should you merely keep the board member informed? Or does the board member want nothing more to do with the proposal? In the absence of clear rules or instructions, you are placed in a very awkward—and fundamentally unfair—position in having to handle such a request.

No matter what the rules that govern the interaction between board and staff members, you should take care to scrupulously observe them. In those foundations where never the twain shall meet, nothing will make a CEO more nervous than the suspicion that a program officer is “freelancing” with a board member. This kind of situation underlines yet again the crucial importance of creating clear rules to govern such interactions. Here truly is a case where policy ambiguity leads directly to problem superfluity.