Ineffective Board Members

As a senior executive for ten years before becoming a consultant, I’ve known many ineffective board members. In a recent Business Week article, Jack Welch described several types of ineffective board members. The article brought back many vivid memories. To protect the guilty, I will not use their real names.

Kenneth was the Do-Nothing type. He obviously never read his board reports and was perfectly content with whatever the CFO (me) said about the financial reports. While I appreciate the high level of confidence he had in me, the role of the board members is to challenge senior managers. At the end of every discussion, he would simply ask, “What would happen if we did nothing?” Sometimes that’s a valuable question to ask; sometimes it’s completely worthless.

George was the Peace-At-Any-Price type. At the first sign of controversy, he recommended cutting a check to silence any opposition. This practice undermines management trust in the board. The board should oversee management and offer support, not abandon management at the first sign of conflict. Management is always under attack from various stakeholder groups, the media, and Wall Street. Believing that senior management has the organization’s best interests at heart is a good assumption.

Tom never understood that the board must function as a single unit. While a spirited debate is healthy before the vote is taken, it’s dysfunctional after the vote. Tom often had his own agenda. As a Personal-Agenda type, Tom worked on his issues with or without board support. Tom spent much of his time trying to control a board-within-a–board.

Clarence was the classic Meddler type. He liked to think of himself as the CEO of the branch in the city in which he lived. He would stop in the branch office to “help out.” In effect, Clarence was “holding court,” where he would change policies established by the board, the COO, or branch manager. “Good directors focus on the big-picture issues,” says Jack Welch. I agree. Clarence’s role should have been one of organizational oversight, not running day-to-day operations.

Finally, Raymond was the Pontificator type. Jack Welch accurately described Raymond as “opining on matters of state, such as world events, social trends, the company’s history, or his own area of expertise.” Obviously, these distractions added little to board effectiveness.

Effective board members spend hours perusing the board reports, including the financial statements. Effective board embers ask tough questions. Effective board members provide wisdom, sound counsel, and support. My hat is off to all you board members who do your job well.

For more information on this and other organizational effectiveness issues use the Search function on my blog, and read my book, “Strategic Organizational Change” (available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble bookstores, or my website http://www.mikebeitler.com/). There are also many free resources on the Free Stuff page on my website.

After-Action Reviews

I teach an MBA elective course called “Organizational Learning.” It has become a popular course because MBA students, many of whom are mid-level executives, have heard senior executives proclaim “the knowledge of our people is our most important asset.”

While this proclamation typically makes people feel warn-and-fuzzy, it does not reveal how senior management plans to develop this “most important asset.” Unfortunately, many senior management teams don’t know how to enhance organizational learning and knowledge.

Every knowledge-driven organization should have a plan to create/acquire, capture, and disseminate organizational knowledge. The creating/acquiring function can largely be accomplished with the use of after-action reviews (AARs).

In my “Organizational Learning” course, my students watch a 20-minute video about how the U.S. Army uses AARs. Immediately after every army action the entire team stops wherever they are (in the field, if it’s a field exercise) to review what happened. They ask themselves:

∙ What went right?
∙ What went wrong?
∙ Why?

Since the video gives the impression that the Army AARs (they use the term “AAR” as both a noun and a verb) everything, I asked a retired-officer friend if the Army, in reality, AARed everything. His response, “Mike, the Army even AARs its AARs.”

While AARing everything is not practical in most business organizations, the process of after-action reviews should play a part in the organizational learning efforts of every organization.

Earlier this week, Preston Yarborough (a colleague of mine here in North Carolina) sent me an academic article entitled “Learning From Successful and Failed Experiences: The Moderating Role of Type of After-Event Review” (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2006, Vol. 91, No.3, pp.669-680). The three researchers (Ellis, Mendel, & Nir) concluded, “After successful events, the most effective review is that of wrong actions; whereas after failed events, any kind of event review (correct or wrong actions) is effective.

While I appreciate the researchers’ desire to maximize the AAR process, I’d be happy to see organizations doing any kind of systematic after-action reviews. The AAR process is time-consuming, but it’s time that’s well investing.

For more information on this and other organizational learning issues read my book, “Strategic Organizational Learning,” available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble bookstores, or my website www.mikebeitler.com. There are also many free resources available on my website.