“The President’s Binder”

Consider the idea in your position as a leader, that the organization you lead will be around much longer than your tenure. After you go, eventually, the wheels on the bus will keep turning. No big deal, right? Your team will remain, the learnings of your business will be passed on.

But now consider that at some point in the future, perhaps sooner than you think, everybody on your executive team will have moved on. Now the question is whether the insights that you’ve gained, as individuals and as a team, will be passed along in a useful way for consideration by a future team. And if not, why won’t that future team just run into the same old problems, and try the same old solutions?

On June 1^st I stepped into a one year team as board president for a Bay Area professional network. One of the traditions of our board is that the outgoing and incoming presidents meet for a meal to do the handover of “The President’s Binder.” And with the words “Paul, now this binder is in your hands,” Andrew had the biggest smile I’ve seen in the three years I’ve known him. I imagine he felt lighter—Andrew was in fact president of the organization for the past two years.

In looking through the binder, it really came home to me that several generations of boards (which for our organization are really combined boards/management teams) had done all of the things that we’re doing. They’d done strategic planning, created visions for the future, and put a lot of work into the organizations. What struck me was how few of the initiatives had “took hold” and resulted in lasting programs or infrastructure. And so I had to ask myself “what happened?” as well as “why will my year be any different?”

A unique challenge for non-profit boards is that in California, board terms are limited to three years. This is great in that it keeps the board fresh and changing, however it creates a big challenge for organizational learning. Although all organizations face this in one way or another, the three year turnover is striking.

I’ve created a shared succession planning worksheet that projects the membership of the board in future years. In June of 2012, everybody from the current board will be gone. Will they be building on the work we’re doing now, or will they do something totally different? Will they be moving forward, or stumbling over the same challenges that we’re solving right now?

And so this brings me back to the binder. It is if anything a reality check for an incoming leader—it is humbling to see all that’s been tried before. I see it as my duty as the current president to add to the binder so that future boards can benefit from the learnings that we’re going through every day.

One tool I'm using, among several otheres, to meet this need to pass along these learnings, is an online archive. The way it works is that we simply forward key emails to a special email address, and have those emails kept in a secure, searchable archive. In this way, I hope to create an online “binder” for future boards to add to and reference.

Having said that, I think that the tradition of the “passing of the binder” should remain. An online archive has many advantages, but being handed a binder that’s a decade old? That hits home.