3 Quick Fixes That Won’t Corral the Rogues on Your Board
Last week’s post at this blog talked about tried and true approaches to reining in “rogue” board members. I defined them as “trouble makers who march to their own governing tune at their own tempo, with little concern about the impact on their board colleagues” and observed that their behavior “can erode a board’s governing performance and poison a board’s culture, while in the process occasionally even tarnishing a transit authority’s image in the community.” The most effective approach to fencing your rogue board members in and preventing them from wreaking havoc, according to last week’s post, is fully developing … Read the rest
Successfully Reining in Rogue Board Members
“What can we do about rogue board members?” I’ve heard this question countless times over the years in governance workshops I’ve presented at APTA meetings, most recently the CEOs Seminar in Chicago a couple of months ago. Rogues, as you know, are trouble makers who march to their own governing tune at their own tempo, with little concern about the impact on their board colleagues. Their behavior can erode a board’s governing performance and poison a board’s culture, while in the process occasionally even tarnishing a transit authority’s image in the community. I always preface my response to this predictable … Read the rest
The Creativity-Innovation Nexus: Part One of Our Creativity Series
The innovation process – and the role of the chief executive as your authority’s “Chief Innovation Officer” – has been a major focus of this blog, and several posts have featured real-life cases of successful implementation of significant innovation initiatives. Our focus on innovation makes the best of sense in light of the challenges facing all transit authorities and other public/nonprofit organizations in these times of rapid change. Building your authority’s capacity to innovate is the key to future stability and growth, and standing pat, clinging to the present, is a sure-fire recipe for decline.
Up to now, our posts … Read the rest
Don’t Let Silo Committees Trap You and Your Board Members
I spent a couple of hours with Board and Executive Team members of the Chatham Area Transit Authority (CAT, headquartered in Savannah, Georgia) in a special work session earlier this week. We were reviewing the functional descriptions of four new Board standing committees being recommended by the Board’s “High-Impact Governing Steering Committee,” following up on a daylong retreat in February: Strategic and Operational Planning; Performance Monitoring/Audit; External/Stakeholder Relations; and Governance.
At the February retreat we’d discussed the benefits of well-designed committees, including:
- Dividing the highly complex and demanding work of governing into “chewable chunks,” making more in-depth deliberations possible and
Board Evaluation of CEO Performance Can Be a Powerful Relationship Builder
Dave Stackrow and I weren’t able to cover the segment on board evaluation of CEO performance because we chose to leave more time for the CEO panel following our presentation at APTA’s CEOs Seminar on April 14. Since it’s such a critical subject, which we address in our new book, Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership: A Practical Guidebook for Transit Board Members, CEOs, and CEO-Aspirants (https://boardsavvytransitceo.com/building-a-solid-board-ceo-partnership/), we decided to share some of the key points that we make in the book in this post.
Experience has taught us that a well-designed process for board evaluation of CEO performance … Read the rest
Why We Wrote Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership
This article is drawn from Chapter One of our book Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership: A Practical Guidebook for Transit Board Members, CEOs, and CEO-Aspirants. Readers will find a description of our book’s contents and order information at: https://boardsavvytransitceo.com/building-a-solid-board-ceo-partnership/.
Doug Eadie and David Stackrow
Experience has taught us that governing is both the highest form of leadership and a tremendously complex and high-stakes function that under the best of circumstances is difficult to do at a consistently high level. The decisions that your board makes, working closely with your authority’s chief executive officer and executive team, establish your … Read the rest
Comet CEO John Andoh Wearing the Innovator-in-Chief Hat
Experience has taught me that successfully implementing significant out of the box change initiatives depends on the strong leadership of a chief executive officer wearing what I call the “Innovator-in-Chief” hat. CEOs I’ve observed over the years succeed at the Innovator-in-Chief role have without exception been what I think of as “change-savvy.” This means that:
They’ve been technically very knowledgeable about best practices in the rapidly changing area of change planning and management, which means they haven’t been wedded to conventional planning wisdom and out-of-date approaches. You’ll never hear a change-savvy CEO extolling the virtues of traditional long-range (or “strategic”) … Read the rest
What Makes Women Such Effective Board Members?
Earlier today, I interviewed John Andoh, Executive Director/CEO of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority (the Comet), for a podcast about a number of innovative mobility initiatives launched in the Columbia, South Carolina region on his watch. As we were recording the podcast, I was reminded of the following article, which Karen Philbrick, Executive Director of the Mineta Transportation Institute, wrote for this blog almost three years ago. There’s no question that, as Karen points out, a growing number of women serving on boards have added a large dollop of creativity to the governing process , and as we all … Read the rest
The Prohibitive Cost of a Weak Board-CEO Partnership
Dave Stackrow and I are pleased to tell you that our forthcoming book, Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership: A Practical Guidebook for Transit Board Members, CEOs, and CEO-Aspirants, has gone to press. It should hit the streets in late March 2019. The following fifth and final excerpt from our book talks about the high cost a transit authority will pay for letting the partnership between its board and CEO remain weak or deteriorate.
Your transit authority can expect to pay a high price for failing to develop a close, positive board-CEO partnership or for allowing it to deteriorate. For … Read the rest
GM Jeff Knueppel Walks the Employee Engagement Talk at SEPTA
Early in my career I experienced at close range a CEO not walking his talk. I was serving as chief of staff to the president of a large three-campus community college. With the urging of his board’s officers, my boss decided that he needed to focus far more heavily on the institution’s external agenda – specifically, on building close working relationships with the chief executives of critical stakeholder organizations like the community foundation and neighboring universities. So, as a strategy to buy precious time for his expanded external role, the president tapped his executive vice president to become the college’s … Read the rest
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