How to Bring New Board Members Up to Speed

When board governance goes wrong, it can go very wrong.

Among recent high- profile scandals and embarrassments: the University of Virginia board’s firing its president and then rehiring her. University of Illinois trustees’ pushing for politically connected applicants. Penn State’s oversight failures in the Sandusky child-sex-abuse scandal. Sweet Briar College’s announcing it was closing, then reopening after a legal challenge. Most recently, trustees at Michigan State under fire for their handling of the Larry Nassar case.

Short of scandal, poor governance can lead to turnover in college presidents or a slow decline, with better-run institutions passing you by. Fewer and fewer institutions can take their future for granted, so it’s ever more important to prepare trustees well and give them the tools and support to succeed at the job.

Colleges face routine fiscal and competitive pressures, and they encounter frequent crises around free speech, academic freedom, Title IX, and other issues. Boards are urgently necessary to help guide institutions strategically through those choppy waters.

Rigorous Trustee Orientation Is Crucial to Good Governance

Board members must understand their responsibilities, and feel connected and engaged, from the start.

• 8 Tips to Get New Trustees Up and Running
• What One Trustee Wishes He Had Known Going In

“The job has gotten bigger, wider, deeper, and more complex,” says Richard D. Legon, president of the Association for Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. “You want a consequential board that will add value.”

But to have such a board, a college needs to get trustees up to speed quickly. They face a steep learning curve, says Cathy A. Trower, a consultant for nonprofit boards who was a trustee at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, and worked with Wheaton to assess its board.

“Having people sitting silent is not good,” she says. “It can lead to disengagement.” And a board’s disengagement can fester, resulting in members’ skipping meetings, ducking tough questions, and rubber-stamping the business at hand. It can also mean loss of revenue if disenchanted trustees choose to make their philanthropic gifts elsewhere.

On the other hand, overengagement, too, can be problematic. Trustees are not supposed to get into the day-to-day management of an institution but rather leave that to the president and senior staff.

How can colleges quickly get trustees into the rhythm of the work? According to a 2016 survey by the governing-boards association, a majority of colleges — 82 percent of private institutions and 54 percent of public — have mandatory orientation for new trustees. Twelve percent of private-college boards and 24 percent of public have an optional one.

The quality of those orientations varies, says Brian C. Mitchell, past president of Bucknell University and Washington & Jefferson College. He consults with colleges and has co-written a book called How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators, and Policymakers.

Often, he says, a session consists of a readout of the processes of a college that doesn’t put them in the context of higher-education trends. Board meetings tend to be similar, with time spent on backward-looking reports from different departments rather than trends and analyses predictive of where a college might head.

“You don’t have pieces of the puzzle that you’re putting together,” he says. The result is a board acting on an incomplete picture.

AGB and consultants like Mitchell and Trower are seeing a growing interest, from colleges and new trustees alike, in improving these orientations and the overall training process for new board members.

When Mary Zygala Schleyer joined Wheaton’s board nine years ago, it took new trustees about two years to feel comfortable speaking up, she says. They were overloaded with information at the beginning, and it was hard to retain. They were on their own to figure out the culture of the board, the people on it, and how things really worked. It took her more than a year, she says, to learn everyone’s name, and she was hesitant to speak up in meetings.

Now Wheaton has a more extensive orientation, says Schleyer, who leads the Wheaton board’s governance committee. The program includes pairing a new trustee with a mentor who can help navigate the board’s complexities and culture, arranging multiple check-ins with new trustees over time, and providing information on finances, fund raising, and so on, broken down into more manageable chunks.

“People have to hit the ground running and get as smart as possible as quick as possible,” says Monique Lee Bahadur, a Wheaton trustee who is in charge of new-trustee orientation.

The board has also built in more-informal opportunities, like gathering for a glass of wine in a hotel lobby after board meetings. That helps trustees get to know one another, especially those who are not alumni and may feel excluded. Schleyer says it was those informal gatherings that helped her feel part of the board. The collegiality and trust fostered there bring a level of comfort when it’s time to speak candidly on important issues. “Often what happens outside meetings is as important as what happens during meetings,” she says.

In order to maximize their value to a college and president, Legon says, trustees need to have a clear understanding of what their roles and responsibilities are — and what they aren’t. Ideally, that education starts before a trustee even agrees to join a board, and continues through orientation, the first year, and beyond.

“Really, trustees should never stop learning,” Legon says.

Every board is different, and methods of educating and integrating new trustees vary, too. Like the institutions they oversee — public or private, large or small, liberal-arts or tech-centered — each board has its own culture, history, expectations, and demands. What they all share is their responsibility as fiduciaries. Their collective trust is to protect the future of the institution, overseeing how it spends its money and hires its leader.

G. Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College, understands the source of the temptation to get enmeshed in the details. Board members care deeply about an institution — why else would they give their time and money? They also have areas of expertise, usually one of the reasons they are recruited in the first place. But the best adage, Starr says, is “Nose in, fingers out.” Be nosy about how things at your institution are run, but keep your paws out of the daily operation.

Board members might want to get involved in decisions about admissions or marketing in particular, because many come from business backgrounds and are used to running things, says Legon, of the governing-boards association. They are not accustomed to shared governance, and understanding it is a key part of their education.

David A. Greene, president of Colby College, has made one of his institution’s goals to outgovern the competition. From his perspective, a strong, strategic board is crucial, helping Colby make nimble, bold decisions to better position itself. Strategic goals include helping to revitalize Waterville, the former Maine mill town where Colby is located. The college is also emphasizing the humanities and its liberal-arts core and bringing in partners in the sciences.

When a new chair of the board was taking over, two years ago, Colby brought in a consultant who helped trustees rework their orientation program. What had been an informal process was changed to a formal one that includes a primer on college facts and finances, mentorship arrangements, and documents spelling out expectations and responsibilities. Those include attending all meetings, leading in gift-giving, and reviewing and approving broad strategies. What they’re not supposed to do is speak for the college or meddle in day-to-day management.

It’s not just trustee orientation that changed. The board also reorganized its committees to be less tied to a specific departments and more wide-reaching and strategic, Greene says — for example, a new committee on people and programs. The board also does its more routine work through phone calls, so that time during the three board meetings a year is reserved for the meatier issues that benefit more from face-to-face discussion.

The new approach, says Eric Rosengren, Colby’s board chair and head of the Boston Fed, allows trustees to tackle the Waterville revitalization, plans for which include building a boutique hotel and a downtown dorm. “We want to have a community that is as vibrant as the school,” he says.

Potential new members are told they are “coming onto a train that is already moving” in terms of the president’s vision. The board also selects people who are comfortable working in collegial consensus environments.

“I think it’s made people much more comfortable to speak up at an earlier stage than they would have,” says Rosengren.

As Colby has learned, one of the best ways to help new trustees understand a board and the college it serves is to assign them an experienced mentor.

Mentors check in with their mentees before and after meetings, especially a trustee’s first, to see if they have questions. A mentor can also be a safe person to talk with in private, answering questions a newcomer might be too embarrassed to ask in public. The mentor can explain roles and personalities and the board’s culture.

“You can’t figure that out in an orientation,” says Trower, the consultant and author of several books on college governance. “You have to get immersed in that room and watch the dynamics.” That might mean figuring out who has power and influence and why, or if certain topics prompt a defensiveness in administrators or are considered taboo.

Mentors can also act as a gentle check if a board member is getting inappropriately immersed in management details.

Ohio State University has had a longstanding mentor program for its board. Even the two student trustees — an undergraduate and a graduate student who serve two years instead of the other trustees’ nine — have mentors, says Blake Thompson, vice president for government affairs and board secretary. Mentors and mentees often develop friendships as well.

At Wheaton, the board changed how it paired up mentors and mentees, says Bahadur, the trustee in charge of new members’ orientation. Previously, Wheaton would pair up a new trustee with someone she or he had something in common with. Now the governance committee looks to find pairings of people with different experiences, backgrounds, or personalities that may complement each other’s and offer each a different perspective.

For instance, the committee has paired alumni with current parents, to get someone who has a deep history of Wheaton with someone who is relatively new to the community; a former tech executive with a consumer-health businesswoman; and alumni from different generations, say, a woman who graduated in the 1970s and a man who graduated in the 2000s.

In each of those examples, Bahadur says, “we aim to thoughtfully pair new trustees and mentors, not to have peas in a pod, as it’s so important and beneficial for them to share different perspectives.”

Like everything else in the higher-ed landscape, says Mitchell, the consultant and former college president, trustee training must become more efficient and sophisticated. The days of what he calls “mom and pop” governance are over.

Correction (3/19/2018, 1:42 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the location of Colby College. It is in Waterville, Me., not Watertown. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.