Richard Chait

To reach the highest level of performance and provide the greatest institutional value, boards of directors must practice three modes of governance—fiduciary, strategic, and generative, according to Richard Chait, the closing plenary speaker.
     Chait, professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, based his talk on his recently published book, Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, co-authored with William Ryan and Barbara Taylor. Boards of trustees usually work in one or two of these governance modes and, as a result, aspects of governance are neglected, Chait noted. They should work in all three modes in order to be effective, he said. Two of the modes, fiduciary and strategic, are familiar; the third, generative, is less so.
     Chait explained that “in the fiduciary mode, boards oversee operations, deploy resources wisely, ensure legal and financial integrity, and monitor results—this fundamental work provides colleges with legitimacy, integrity, and accountability to sustain the public trust. In the strategic mode, boards think and act like a strategic partner—they scan the environment, monitor performance relative to benchmarks, provide the technical know-how needed to produce advantage, and operate as a general management consulting firm with a wide range of professional expertise.”
     Boards operating in the generative mode, on the other hand, think and act like a source of leadership for the college—they discern and frame central problems with the president that are not easy to answer. “This mode demands a focused effort on such broad areas as: What’s the question? What meaning do we make of what’s happening? In concert with the president, the board confronts harsh realities, and is steeped in the values, cultures, and traditions of the college,” Chait said.
     The goal is to have a standardized, uniform approach to board governance, but in the generative mode, the board provides distinctive contributions well into life of institution. Working in this mode requires that board members “be in a different place and think in a different way literally. The greatest leverage of leadership is when problems are not yet grasped and when we ask: How else might we look at this? Is the problem really the problem? Presidents should invite the board on a regular basis to the headwaters of the decision-making stream, where challenges are framed rather than ambushed downstream.”
     Chait suggested new practices for boards and presidents:

     In the generative mode of governance, Chait stressed, “collegiality supplants congeniality on the board, and the pedagogy of governance taps the collective mind of the board rather than the individual expertise of an individual…. This results in less micromanagement in exchange for macroengagement, and fusion of thinking—not division of labor.”
     Chait said his book issues an invitation to institutions to think about doing business differently, which “requires a change of mindset about what governance is and new ways to gauge output.” And he urged presidents who want to move in this direction to “just do it—don’t make big announcements about your plans. Do something that you think will engage the board in active discussion, for example, conduct a self-study of the board and ask trustees whether their talents are fully utilized and what they think the institution should be worrying about.”
     Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards can be purchased online from BoardSource at www.boardsource.com.