What Formal Practices Can - and Can’t do for Board Meetings

In our last post, we talked about the importance of three areas of focus for good meeting design:

• Formal practices,

• Informal practices, and

• Equity.

Each of these are needed.

The interesting (and hard!) thing is that none of them will work in isolation.

Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, a colleague, who is a Person of Color and knew about my work on racial equity with boards, asked if I would lead a retreat for a nonprofit board that she was on that was having some challenges around racial equity.

I preferred not to do this on my own, so I reached out to a Black colleague who also works with boards. But she was not available and also said that she generally didn’t lead one-time trainings.

So I agreed to lead this workshop on my own.

We went through the usual retreat planning process of forming a Design Team and coming up with an agenda of conversations that felt appropriate to the group.

After a few drafts, we had a thoughtful agenda.

We opened the retreat with Meeting Agreements. We discussed the norms for our conversation together. Board members were engaged and had a lot to say about the topics on the agenda.

Then one man, who I’ll call Carlos, raised his hand to speak. Carlos began to share about how he was an immigrant and a Person of Color, and he had noticed a big difference in ability to succeed between members of his immigrant community and People of Color who were born here.

To be clear, this was an offensive and hurtful comment.

As someone who makes a practice of amplifying the kind of speech I want to see in the world, I feel uncomfortable even repeating his words.

I knew that as the facilitator, I had to speak up to protect the safety of the space.

So I did – in a way that felt gentle but also assertive, “I hear what you’re saying, and I want to acknowledge that some People of Color might feel offended by your comment.”

Carlos did not acknowledge the validity of my perspective, nor did he apologize, but he did walk back his words a bit, saying, “well, I didn’t mean in that way.” And then he dropped it.

The unexpected aftermath.

In the retreat debrief, I learned that Carlos had gone to the next breakout room and had spoken with the other board members about how upset he was because I had violated the Meeting Agreements by not acting kind towards him.

Oh, wow!

At the time, I was upset. Sadly, this situation shifted some of the focus away from what the board needed to do and more towards whether I had violated the Meeting Agreements.

Did I act unkindly?

I did call Carlos out. It is possible that he felt criticized. But if I ignored his comment, I would let board members continue to do the kinds of things that had brought me there in the first place.

What I learned.

I learned two things from this experience. First, my Black colleague was right – it had not been a good idea to lead these charged conversations as a one-time training. Group members need to build trust with one another over time. There also needs to be space to acknowledge that many of us make “mistakes” on the path to speaking with one another in an affirming way – and when we make these mistakes, we need time and space to repair the relationship and figure out how to do better in the future.

And, second, as a white person, I usually refuse to lead a board conversation on racial equity that includes People of Color without a co-facilitator who is Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color (BIPOC). Since I do not have lived experience of racism, it is difficult for me to “hold” the conversation for those who do. I ignored my intuition, almost as a favor, but should have followed the guidelines previously set. These conversations are never simple and I prepare myself for them through years of training, listening to and learning from peers with lived experiences, and thoughtfully and tactfully engaging with the group.

Not foolproof!

But thoughtful.

All of this is to say – to create inclusive, impactful board meetings, you should include those formal structures such as Meeting Agreements. They set the board’s work in the right direction, regardless of board demographics.

But they do not guarantee impactful, inclusive board meetings. In the same way that stop signs do not guarantee that there will be no traffic accidents!

For that, we also need Informal Structures and Equity – which we’ll be talking about in our next two posts.

Does your board need deeper work to become impactful and inclusive? In collaboration with Christal M. Cherry. we offer a Racial Equity Training for boards – reach out directly to either of us to learn more.