Tag: board savvy transit CEOs
Bagging Three Big Feathered Friends
Let me tell you a tale of two authorities’ very different approaches to presenting financial performance reports at their monthly board meetings. Authority A takes a pretty traditional approach. The authority’s CFO thoroughly reviews the multi-page financial report, consisting of rows and columns of numbers, with the board’s finance committee, which passes the report along to the full board in the monthly board meeting packet. The CFO presents highlights from the report at the full board meeting and answers any questions the board might have.
Authority B’s approach is dramatically different. The CFO takes the board’s performance monitoring committee through … Read the rest
The Board-Savvy CEO: De Facto Captain of the Strategic Governing Team
Governing is a team sport if there ever was one. I’ve never in my 30-plus years of working with public and nonprofit organizations come across a public transit board that has successfully – on its own – transformed itself into a really high-impact governing body, much less managed to carry out its governing responsibilities in a full and timely fashion, without strong executive assistance. High-impact governing is always, in my experience, the product of the board, its CEO, and the senior executives working closely together as a cohesive “Strategic Governing Team.” Of course, we expect the CEO to provide our … Read the rest
Caveat Emptor: an Axiom All Really Board-Savvy CEOs Take to Heart
To judge from participants’ questions during and after the workshop that Dave Stackrow, Carm Basile and I presented on September 25 at the APTA Annual Meeting in Nashville, one of the concepts we discussed that struck a real chord was that “board-savvy” transit CEOs are a preeminent key to building a solid board-CEO partnership that can withstand the inevitable stresses and strains at the top of every transit authority. And one characteristic of board-savvy CEOs that sparked the most discussion during our workshop was the ability to spot dubious assumptions about the rapidly changing field of transit governance that we … Read the rest
Demonstrating Your Board Savvyness
Experience has taught me – and I’m sure many if not most of this blog’s readers – that the more board-savvy its CEO, the more effective a transit board is likely to be as a governing body and the more favorable the odds of building a rock-solid board-CEO partnership that can withstand the inevitable stresses and strains that come with leading a modern transit system. So transit boards have a big stake in recruiting CEOs whose governing intelligence is well developed. This is certainly a point I strongly made in the program I co-presented with Dave Stackrow, APTA Vice Chair, … Read the rest
How Are You Doing as Your Board’s Chief Governing Partner?
One of the topics that Dave Stackrow (long-time Chair of the Board of New York’s Capital District Transportation Authority) and I are planning to cover in our presentation on July 24 at APTA’s Board Members and Board Support Seminar in Chicago – “Building a Rock-Solid Transit Board-CEO Partnership” – is what questions board members might ask to determine if candidates for the CEO position in their authority are board-savvy enough to function at a high level as the board’s “Chief Governing Partner.” This is a really high-stakes matter since experience has amply demonstrated that truly board-savvy CEOs who embrace the … Read the rest
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