Starboard’s Blog

While I can be accused of having a definite bias against establishing advisory committees, the reality is that others have achieved a level of success with them.  With that said, what I’ll offer here, based upon my own experience, and the good advice of others, are some tips to keep in mind as you consider establishing and running your own advisory committee: 

• Make sure you are committed to the work of recruiting and (most importantly) providing ongoing support to another group of volunteers.  Don’t underestimate the time involved or the damage you can do if you don’t keep your eye on the ball.
• Keep in mind that your “advisors” are going to expect that their advice will be seriously considered, if not followed. Find a way to demonstrate that the board is listening, taking the advice seriously, and implementing some of what is offered. Regular interaction with the board is a good thing.
• A great role for an advisory committee is the dual role of serving as advocates in the community and providing community feedback. Think about recruiting volunteers with these requests/questions:

“Help us understand/appreciate what is going on in the community.” 

“What should we be paying attention to?” 

“You are closer to the action than we are, what are you seeing or hearing?” 

“How do you think people will react?”

• Some advisory committee members will get excited about ideas and want to get going on implementation. If you like where they are heading and are ready to put them to work, develop a “task force” that works outside of the advisory committee. The task force might report-in to the advisory committee on their progress, but don’t let the task force’s work consume the purpose or the focus of the advisory committee or its members. 
• A well run (note the stress on “well run”) advisory committee can be a good testing ground for potential board members, a way to engage former board members, or to engage donors in a manner that doesn’t involve a heavy-duty commitment. 
• Choose a really good chairperson with proven leadership ability and experience in leading meetings to help you get things off on the right foot. Be very direct with the chair about what you want the advisory committee to accomplish (even if one of the goals is simply to encourage increased giving by the participants) and enlist his/her help in keeping the advisory committee and its members on track.
• Most important of all, recruit your advisory volunteers with very, very clear expectations (I can’t possibly stress this enough).  They need to know that they aren’t joining a board, and they aren’t a task force or a project committee. They are advisors, and use every opportunity to remind them just how much you value their advice.

I would love to hear some success stories of advisory boards that fill an important role and earn great reviews from the participants. Please share your tips for success!

I’m always looking for tools that will make life a little easier. One of the free on-line tools I recommend all the time is Meeting Wizard.  It is an easy to use on-line tool to help you simplify the process of setting-up meetings among groups of people. So if you are trying to pick a date for a committee meeting, go to www.meetingwizard.com, simply select a group of dates that work for you, plug-in the e-mail addresses of the committee, and send it out.  In short order, you’ll be able to see which dates work best for the majority of your committee (no matter what method you use, it is unlikely that you’ll get a 100% response or full attendance).  I may be making it sound easier than it is, but I encourage you to give it a try. 

I don’t have a stake in the company or any reason to promote the service other than to say that it has worked for me.  Click here to take a look.

If you’ve found other meeting software that has eased the challenge of scheduling groups, it would be great to hear about it!

As part of my work with one organization to revise their mission, lots of good work was done to describe what they value. While the mission succinctly tells people who you are, value statements describe what you care about, how you treat people, and what you value most.  Strong value statements will stand-up to this test: “Would we keep doing this even if we were somehow penalized for doing so?” A value like, “We will treat all clients, our volunteers, and each other with the utmost dignity in all of our interactions” probably meets that test for most. You would likely choose to go out of business rather than knowingly treat people poorly.

A discussion about organizational values is a great thing to do with board and staff (either separately or together). You’ll learn what really matters to people and how they, themselves, want to be treated. Along the way, you’ll create a document you can come back to from time to time or even print-up to accompany your mission. We include our business values on the Starboard Leadership web site, and the Rotary Club to which I belong displays its values (The Four-Way Test) at the front of the room, and someone reads them at every meeting. How you print them up or where you display them, however, is not all that important. There is no requirement that you have a list of value statements, and it is unlikely that anyone will ever ask you for them. What is important is that you have the discussion in the first place.

Ideally, the values become interwoven with everything you do. So, if one of your values is treating everyone with dignity, take the time to review your employment practices, your customer relations, and your other procedures to see if your practices live up to your values (see “Customers or consumers?” Why the answer matters for more on this).  Making sure that your practices align with your values demonstrates your integrity and is time well spent.

There is an old saying that goes something like this: “Do the right thing and you’ll never do wrong.” Take the time to have a values discussion with your board and staff so you can make sure everyone agrees on what “right” is. Then figure out a way to keep those values alive.