Trusting Your Leader for the Right Things

Let me begin by begging you not to ask my wife if she trusts me. The reason being that the list of things with which she would trust me is much shorter than the list of tasks she would not delegate to me. For example she does not trust me to dress myself using clothes with acceptable colour combinations nor does she trust me to do anything in the kitchen except dry the dishes and empty the dishwasher. Anything more complicated than changing a light bulb will have her calling a handyman or handywoman.

But after forty years of marriage, she is at least able to articulate those areas in which she has trust and those areas in which trust would be sorely misplaced.

Boards and leaders often don’t get that far. While one board can treat its leader like knight in shining armour who can do anything, another board begins with the assumption that it must check everything short of whether the teeth of its leader have been brushed.

Trust is a word that one does not want to throw around without context or specificity.

A board must start with two opposing assumptions. The first is that the leader will not instinctively know what the board does not want. This limitation is combined with the leader’s humanity which at times will be characterized by flaws, shortcomings and a less than perfect memory.  The second assumption is that the leader is endowed with a level of competence that does not require the condescending input of the board. (If a board has concerns about the competence of its leader, that is arguably a greater commentary on the incompetence of the board to do its job in hiring a competent leader).

When a board delegates unqualified responsibilities to a leader, that is more a reflection of the board’s mistrust in itself than its categorical trust in its leader. It believes that it has nothing to offer in terms of the overall direction of the organization. This is not only untrue; it is an abdication of the inherent responsibility a board has to govern on behalf of its legal and moral owners.

On the other hand what about the board which feels the need to respond or weigh in on every decision a leader makes? This is often seen as a board’s fiduciary responsibility or its provision of sober second thought. (Does this imply that the first thought was germinated in the soil of non-sobriety?) But I digress. The reality is the board has failed to articulate (a) what ultimately needs to happen as a result of the organization’s existence and (b) what it has set as unacceptable actions or inactions in achieving the heretofore unarticulated results. This two-fold failure on the part of the board to do what is arguably its only reason for existing, leads to aimless wandering through the backwater of irrelevant minutia which invariably leads to it becoming entangled with the barnacles of extraneous detail.

Once the board has the destination in view and identified the reefs that need to be avoided, it can turn over the sailing of its ship to the captain it has hired.