Chapter 1 (continued)

What This Book is About

Ask almost any organization about its recruitment and orientation process, and they are likely to either answer with only a chuckle or define their process as follows:

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“We give names to the nominating committee, and they contact the individuals and ask if they would like to serve on the board. The prospects attend a board meeting, to see what their job will be, and then at the next meeting, we vote them in.”

Our orientation process? We give them a ton of materials on the organization in the board manual. Then they attend board meetings until they figure out what committee they want to sit on.

If your organization is like most we hear about, you spend more time, money and energy recruiting and training your janitorial staff than you do in preparing new board members for their new job.

We forget that recruiting new board members is really hiring and training people to do a job - the critical job of leading, guiding, and making decisions on behalf of the community.

So how can we make sure we recruit the right people and prepare them well for the job ahead?

The answers can be found in the following steps:

While most of this workbook will focus on Step 4, all those other steps are critical - both for the “fit” of your board members, and for the effectiveness of your board in leading, guiding and making decisions on behalf of the community.

Therefore, before diving in to the actual recruitment and orientation processes, we will briefly address the most critical of all pre-requisites to recruitment: Heeding the warning signs that might make recruitment the worst thing you could do at this time.

If you are hoping recruitment will solve some of your organization’s woes - or if you are not even aware that you have these woes - the following pages will be critical if you want to build a strong, capable board.