I have spent more than 35 years in and around nonprofit organizations — as an executive director, a board chair/member, a funder, and a consultant. I have a PhD in nonprofit management and governance. Throughout my entire professional career, I have watched the sector invest enormous energy in building the capacity of professional staff. Graduate programs in public administration, social work, and business have gotten sharper. Continuing education, coaching, and leadership development have become standard features of the field.
And in that same time, I have watched boards of directors stay largely where they were.
We are churning out nonprofit professional staff and we are not teaching good governance.
That is not an accusation. It is an observation — and it has structural roots. MPA, MBA, and MSW programs are designed to develop managers and administrators. There is no parallel investment in developing the volunteers who sit at the governance table. No graduate program in being a board member. No field-wide infrastructure for building board capacity the way we have built it for staff.
The result is a widening gap. Executives are becoming more capable, more sophisticated, more grounded in strategy and systems. Boards, on the whole, are not developing at the same pace. And the gap creates friction that most organizations manage around rather than address directly.
Here is what that friction looks like in practice.
A highly capable HR professional joins a board because she cares about the mission. She is skilled, experienced, and well-intentioned. Within six months, she is deep in personnel decisions — reviewing the employee handbook, weighing in on a hiring process, mediating a staff conflict. Not because she is overreaching. Because she brought the skills she has, no one offered her a different framework, and the vacuum pulled her in.
The same thing happens with the finance person, who finds himself essentially managing the budget rather than governing financial sustainability. With the lawyer, who reviews every contract. With the marketing director, who redesigns the website.
These are not bad board members. They are capable people doing what capable people do when given no alternative structure: they use the skills they already have.
Governance work is some of the most difficult and vital work in a nonprofit organization. It requires a different set of skills than management; not more, not less, but genuinely different. And we have never been serious about teaching it.
The sector’s standard response to this problem is the list. Give board members ten roles and responsibilities. Post them on a laminated card. Hand them out at orientation.
I understand the appeal. It is concrete, it is deliverable, and it creates the feeling that you have done something. But it does not work, not reliably, not durably, and not when it matters most. A list of roles tells board members what they are supposed to do. It does not give them a governing logic or a way of thinking that tells them how the whole system works and where they fit within it.
The difference between a job description and a governing logic is the difference between knowing your lines and understanding the play.
When ambiguity arises (and it always does) board members with a list of roles have nothing to stand on. They fall back on instinct, professional habit, the loudest voice in the room, or the most recent conversation they had with the executive director. The implicit understanding that seemed to hold during smooth times evaporates the moment there is conflict, transition, or crisis.
And you discover there was never a shared framework underneath it. There were just people trying their best with the tools they had.
This blog series is about what a real framework looks like, and why it matters more than most boards realize.
In the posts that follow, I am going to lay out an argument I have been building for three decades. It is grounded in a governance model that is not new, but is still far less understood and far less used than it should be. It is an argument about power: where it goes in nonprofit organizations, why boards give it away, and what it would mean to govern with genuine intention.
The goal is not to make boards more compliant. It is to help them become what they are capable of being, and what the communities they serve actually need them to be.
Stan Holt, PhD is co-owner and senior advisor at Partners for Impact, LLC a North Carolina consulting firm that does capacity building and systems change for nonprofit organizations and government sector.. He has served as an executive director, board chair, funder, and governance consultant for more than 35 years.