Picture this: a well-established organization provides trauma-informed care to low-income clients. Guided by the steady hand of a CEO who both understands the non-profit’s mission and values, and defines and embodies them, it grows steadily into a widely admired enterprise that serves the needs of its community. Over the years, board members come and go, as board members tend to do. Meanwhile, the organization continues to grow and flourish. One year, a new member is recruited to join the board. She is recruited specifically for her deep sector and CFO expertise and strikes everyone as an excellent choice. What could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out.
The new board member soon begins to involve herself in ground-level operational decisions. She reviews program costs line by line and questions the time staff spend on relationship-building. She suggests replacing in-person intake conversations with standardized online forms, shortening client interactions to hit “throughput targets,” and eliminating community advisory meetings because they’re “non-essential and expensive.”
Her directives are upsetting to the workers given how flagrantly they violate their understanding of the organization’s values. The kind and level of care they provide to clients requires trust and human connection, not speed. Removing clients’ voices from the equation, or virtually sidelining them, flies in the face of a core conviction: elevating their voices and building trust through active listening. Similar “suggestions” follow from on high.
Predictably, the CEO and board member start butting heads, infighting breaks out among the other board members, and the working environment grows increasingly toxic. Feeling pressured and morally compromised when asked to treat people like units on a spreadsheet instead of treating them like human beings, front line staff become dispirited, lose their passion, purpose, and stop raising concerns. Funders lose confidence. Clients become disengaged, and program outcomes decline, even as efficiency metrics improve. The CEO leaves and staff follow her out the door. In less than a year, a once mighty organization unravels. The irony is that its demise was entirely preventable.
This story is an illustration of a problem I see a lot working with purpose-driven organizations. When conflicts arise between boards and leadership teams, I think they arise because most boards see their primary role, and in some cases their only one, as guardians of their organization’s fiduciary health. But what if a board had another—and equally important—role to play? What if it also functioned as a brand steward?
At the operational level, brand stewardship means acting as the caretaker of the organization’s meaning, credibility and protector of its purpose. Practically, it means ensuring that what it says, does and delivers, its programs, partnerships, fundraising tactics and messaging, line up with its core promise and reflect what it stands for.
Stewardship also entails taking values from abstraction to action. It manifests in how staff speak to and work with partners and communities, how impact is measured and reported, how trade-offs are handled when things don’t go exactly as imagined. If values can’t be observed or tested, stewardship isn’t working.
At the board level, brand stewardship means setting the bar for credibility and truth: pushing back on inflated language in annual reports and serving as the final backstop against inflating impact. It also entails focusing on purpose during moments of pressure or opportunity: questioning strategic initiatives that will dilute the organization’s focus even if funding is available, evaluating prospective mergers or partnerships in terms of identity and not just efficiency, asking questions like, “If we do this, how will people see us in five years?” Not just, “Can we?” but “If we do, what does this decision turn us into?”
Enlightened boards understand that not all money is neutral and are willing to accept slower growth to protect the organization’s credibility. As one executive director who’d seen the fallout when boards fail to steward the brand told me, “the best boards know that taking values into account will make some decisions harder, not easier. That’s how you know they’re working.”
Limited data exists specifically tying board-led brand stewardship to organizational steadiness, since much of the governance research focuses on broader strategic functions rather than brand stewardship as a discrete board role. But as a branding professional who has worked with more than 30 purpose-driven organizations, I believe that if boards understood they had a twofold mission: to protect fiduciary health and steward brand values, they’d foster cohesion within their organization, thus helping to strengthen and drive it forward. But getting boards to embrace that dual role can be a heavy lift.
In a previous issue of Unpacked I wrote about the hard eyeroll I often get from clients when I mention brand values. I attributed that response to the fact that many people unfamiliar with the brand strategy process tend to think of values as marketing fluff. They view lines such as, “Integrity: doing the right thing, even when it’s difficult” or “Excellence: holding ourselves to the highest standards” as empty, pie-in-the-sky statements: fine for posting on websites and social media, but irrelevant when it comes to the serious business of governance.
But brand values that have been clearly delineated by hammering them out through a strategic process aren’t merely hype. They’re strategic tools that play an essential role in guiding healthy governance, and board-level instruments for navigating problems that arise within an organization. For instance, when we work with clients developing a brand strategy, we engage the entire team and stakeholders in an intense, strategic process to tease out a deeper understanding of their organization’s purpose, mission and the values that drive it. Ideally, participants emerge from that process with a much clearer idea of its messaging and what people outside of the organization understand that message to be.
In my view, the best way to educate boards about the importance of brand stewardship is by bringing them into that process. When everyone from board level to the frontline participates in defining the values, then everyone will have buy-in—and therefore a vested interest in championing them. That, more than anything else, is the best antidote to the board and team on the ground winding up on a collision course.
What’s more, boards familiar with their organization’s values will also be likelier to carry that understanding into the recruitment process, as well as use them as a touchstone when defining the traits they look for and choose to reward at the executive level. They won’t just recruit or reward based on background and expertise (legal, marketing, financial, whatever). They’ll recruit based on how in tune candidates are with their organization’s values and their capacity to act as a brand steward.
I think involving the board in the brand strategy development process is a no-brainer. And yet, if I had to name the one issue that most divides the members of leadership teams, it’s how much to involve them. On one side are those who want to keep the board as far away from the process as possible, especially the team exercises to tease out brand values. They fear involving the board will prompt it to interfere in matters it knows little about, hijack the process, or so misrepresent or water down the organization’s values, they’ll no longer be recognizable.
On the other side are those who argue that inviting the board to participate will help them become more engaged with decisions at the operational level and informed about the values that drive them. While I understand why this issue is so hotly contested, I don’t think you can expect a board to make decisions that champion your organization’s values if they haven’t had a role in determining what they are. While it may seem simpler in the short term to keep it at a distance during the brand strategy process, in the long term, that decision could backfire.
So how do you turn your directors into enthusiastic brand stewards? A few suggestions:
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Involve the board in stakeholder experience surveys and encourage them to think beyond the numbers. Share stories of how non-profits can turn values into action and speak the language of boards by walking them through specific ways they can use brand values as board level performance indicators.
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Keep a list of all the decisions your organization has made because of your values, and what, if any, hard decisions you’ve made to stay in tune with them.
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Make a habit of starting every board meeting mentioning values-driven decisions the board and leadership team have made, and how they’re tied to performance.
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Involve the board annually in auditing your values using your measurement criteria.
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Include compatible values as hiring criteria during the board recruitment process.
The board in the illustration above just assumed the candidate it hired was in sync with its values so members didn’t bother to discuss them. Since nobody had thought to enquire about values during the interviewing process, the board left itself open for trouble down the road.
In the end, the board’s job is to ensure the organization remains recognizable to itself. If, in stewarding the brand, it becomes architects of its resilience, champions of its clear communication, and guardians of its accountability, how is that not part of the job? Or, for that matter, the serious business of governance?
