How our District Board Works
by John Sanders, President
Our District Board consists of nine members, four officers and five directors elected at large, each having three-year terms staggered so that normally two thirds of the board will have served during the previous year. In addition, our District Executive and UUA Trustees serve as ex-officio members of the board without vote.
Our NNED Bylaws are structured so as to allow our District Board to choose the form of governance it wishes to use. By governance I mean “the manner in which the board directs the organization”. Last June, after studying several possible forms of governance, our District Board decided to adopt John Carver’s Policy Governance®. This form of governance defines the work of the board as the deciding of "ends" rather than "means." The board decides what good the organization is to produce, for what people and at what cost. It also defines limitations on managerial "means" for the Chief Executive Officer (in our context, the CEO is our District Executive) and then the board delegates the job of achieving its ends to the DE and the district staff. The DE must pursue the board's ends without violating its "executive limitations." It is a form of governance that allows our board to focus on the long view, the strategic view – i.e. what we should be doing as a Unitarian Universalist District in order to become the best we can be – rather than getting bogged down in micromanaging the district’s detailed day-to-day operations.
Adopting Policy Governance® is a long process, typically taking several years to put fully into effect. At our September 2008 meeting, our board adopted a starter set of policies in three of the four policy areas: namely “Executive Limitations Policies” (which establish prudent and ethical boundaries on staff action, thereby freeing them to choose the best course within those boundaries), “Board-Staff Linkage Policies” (which set out the way that responsibilities are delegated from the board to the staff and the way that the staff is held accountable for its results), and “Governance Process Policies” (which describe how the board will do its job.) The fourth of these policy areas, the “Ends Policies” (which establish long-range, strategic goals for our organization), is the part that typically takes several years to put fully into effect. At our January meeting, our board drafted a proposed Global Ends Policy, which establishes a boundary that will encompass all of our future Ends policies. Future meetings will focus on particular policy areas that lie within that Global Ends Policy boundary.
But we need your help. In order for this form of governance to work effectively on behalf of all the congregations in NNED, our board will need interaction with and feedback from as many congregations as possible in order to insure that our ends truly represent what we strive for (what good we are to do, for whom, and at what cost). Therefore, we will employ a number of methods for getting as much feedback as possible. At each of our three board meetings a year (one in each state), we will invite members, lay leaders, and ministers from nearby congregations to a Saturday night gathering where we will talk about what matters most to us, about whether proposed policies reflect our deepest values - what good we want to do in the world, for whom, and at what cost. At our Annual Meeting and again at cluster meetings throughout the year, we’ll hold similar discussions until we are sure that we are speaking with your voice.