I should have known that someone in the audience would then ask a perfectly logical follow-up question: If we got rid of the current model, what would take its place?

Caught off-guard, I sputtered.

I eventually mentioned the author and consultant John Carver’s Policy Governance Model, which has been around for more than 20 years and is more a refinement and clarification of the current model than an alternative to it. Policy Governance encourages boards to focus on organizational purposes and goals and to give the chief executive greater clarity about boundaries and expectations.

I also cited Community-Engagement Governance, a framework that was developed through the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. The Community-Engagement approach seeks to expand governance beyond the board to include other constituents and stakeholders. This model also focuses on community impact, the concept of governance as a function rather than a specific structure, and the idea that decision making and power should be shared.

This approach also acknowledges that no one-size-fits-all model works for every group. Each organization will require structures and processes tailored to its needs, size, mission, and stage of development.

In a recent article, the author Judy Freiwirth reports that organizations that use this framework are showing encouraging results. These groups say they have more support for their missions, have improved their ability to collaborate with other organizations, and have increased fundraising capacity and sustainability. She also notes significant challenges inherent in sharing power and decision making.

Considering these two approaches together highlights a central difficulty in proposing a new model of governance: There’s no consensus on why many boards don’t currently work all that well. And without agreement on what problem we’re trying to solve, there’s even less agreement about how to make things better.

Mr. Carver’s approach attempts to distill and clarify the work of the board, both to help boards become more focused and to make it less likely that boards will interfere with their chief executives in unproductive and arbitrary ways.

That’s certainly a problem that bedevils many boards, but is it the main problem?

The Community-Engagement approach seeks to make governance more democratic and inclusive by engaging a much larger group of people in making decisions and setting direction.

At least theoretically, this should help organizations be more responsive to community needs and might also help them engage more people and raise more money.

But is lack of inclusiveness really the major factor that drags down board performance?

Neither approach changes the core of the current model. Both approaches address significant problems experienced by some boards but also add complexity and may create new problems of their own.

I’d be interested in hearing from the leaders of organizations currently implementing either of these models about the benefits and drawbacks. I’d also like to hear from everyone else about whether we need more audacious proposals for new models of governance.

My own two cents: The current model is complicated enough; greater complexity seems likely to produce even worse performance. And boards’ current problems may have as much to do with the people we bring onto boards and how we recruit them as it does with structures, models, and definitions.

The next time someone asks me about alternative models for boards, I’d like to have a more complete answer.

Is there a better model for boards?

Hull House was started by Nobel laureate Jane Addams in 1889 to help Chicago’s immigrants build “responsible, self-sufficient lives.” Until last month, Hull House had continued Addams’s legacy by offering foster-care services, job training, counseling, and literacy and other education programs at more than 40 sites throughout Chicago.

On January 27, its 300 employees received layoff notices and final paychecks, and Hull House shut its doors.

On the day the organization closed, a blogger for Crain’s Chicago Business asked a question she said she’d been hearing from many people in Chicago’s nonprofit community: How could a board that included prominent lawyers, management consultants, financial advisers, and corporate executives have allowed a 120-year-old community institution to collapse under its watch?

A good question, with no simple answer.

Hull House board chairman Steven Saunders, in an NPR interview, blamed the economic climate for the organization’s failure. Others experts quoted in the story described a scenario that has become familiar over the past four years: A challenging economy creates increased demand for social services but also causes government agencies and foundations to reduce their support.

While the economic climate certainly had an impact on Hull House, its collapse can’t be summed up as a simple case of increased demand and reduced resources. The organization’s Form 990 informational tax returns reveal that Hull House had serious financial problems even before the recession.

Its June 30, 2007, balance sheet showed that its unrestricted net assets were negative $2.3-million, meaning Hull House was millions in the red before the recession even began.

In an interview for a Chronicle of Philanthropy article, Mr. Saunders said that financial reports prepared by management had sugar-coated the situation and that because staff members had maintained a positive attitude, the board failed to understand the magnitude of the financial problems until they were too large to solve.

In the same article, Clarence Wood—a former chief executive of Hull House who retired last year—criticized the board for not understanding the idea of “living on the edge.” According to Mr. Wood, “the reason the staff members like me were staying positive in attitude was that we are very used to social-service agencies always being on the brink of destruction.”

Those contrasting views illustrate what may have gone wrong at Hull House. And the same dynamics are being played out in the board rooms of other organizations that face similar challenges.

As I pointed out in a previous blog, most board members are volunteers, and few are adept at reading financial statements. But that was not the case at Hull House, whose board included finance and management experts. Even a cursory review of the organization’s publicly available financial documents reveals deep financial problems. And one of the board’s jobs is to exercise independent judgment and ask reasonable questions about the information being presented by management.

In short, responsible governance requires a strong partnership between the board and the chief executive, and each party has to do its job for the system to work. Hull House is a sobering case study of governance failure in which neither the board nor the staff seems to have recognized the crisis while there was still time to turn things around.

Hull House’s situation was far from unusual. Thousands of nonprofit organizations are heavily dependent on government financial support, have no operating reserves or are in debt, and are seeing increased demand for services.

The executives and boards of these organizations need to recognize that being perpetually on the brink of destruction is not normal or sustainable, and it does a tremendous disservice to an organization’s mission and the people it serves.

Without more financial discernment on the part of boards, a more honest and candid partnership between boards and executives, and bolder actions while there’s still time, more organizations are going to fold.

As I prepared that presentation, I found myself wishing we had done more analysis of executives’ responses about their relationship with their board chairs and examined more closely how those responses correlated with executives’ happiness in their jobs and satisfaction with the performance of the entire board.

CompassPoint’s Marla Cornelius, one of my co-authors, came to my rescue with some additional analysis, and the correlations are striking.

Among the 3,000 executive directors surveyed, a majority (52 percent) characterized their relationship with their board chair as functional. A large minority (39 percent) described the relationship as exceptional, and just 9 percent called it dysfunctional.

Compared with executives who described their board-chair relationship as merely functional, those executives who reported an exceptional relationship were more positive about their jobs in several key areas: Ten percent less felt isolated, 8 percent less felt burned out, and 15 percent more experienced higher overall job satisfaction.

An exceptional relationship with the board chair also had a significant correlation with executive directors’ satisfaction with board performance. Seventeen percent more executives who felt they had an exceptional relationship with the chair were very satisfied with board performance over all.

While I’ve learned not to overclaim what the data prove, many years of experience with executives and boards have given me plenty of evidence that executive directors with strong working relationships with their board chairs are happier in their jobs, are less likely to be burned out, and believe that their boards work better because of the chair’s leadership.

Which suggests that we who believe that nonprofits need stronger boards, or are concerned about executive-director overextension and burnout, should view board chairs as key to supporting executives and strengthening boards.

And because board chairs matter so much, we need to create better systems and resources for training and supporting them.

What qualities and skills do board chairs need to be effective in their role, and how can we increase the number of executive directors who have exceptional partnerships with strong board chairs?

A majority of those who commented (11 of 19, or about 58 percent) said the executive was ultimately responsible for board performance. But it was hardly a ringing endorsement (even though I agree).

As I re-read the comments, two things stood out.

First, this is a complicated issue. Many comments acknowledged the murkiness and complexity of the question—so much so that in some comments, it was hard to tell which viewpoint the comment supported.

One reader wrote that the executive director had the responsibility for sustaining board performance but that the board must first step up and accept its responsibility to perform. Another noted that boards depend on executive directors to “guide them to leadership issues and the best way to advance the organization” but went on to characterize the executive’s role in doing this as “unspoken, stealth, and very complex.”

These acknowledgments of the nuance and inherent contradictions of the board-executive partnership made me feel guilty for attempting to force a simple, either-or answer to a really complicated question.

The other striking thing about the comments was the number of people who weren’t really happy with their answer. For example, one reader wrote that she would like to believe that the board chair is in charge of board performance but that unfortunately she had rarely seen board chairs step up.

These comments point to the significant discrepancies, not always acknowledged, between how boards ought to function and how they actually function in real life. Acknowledging these disconnects, rather than pretending that they are the exception rather than the rule, seems like a good first step toward a healthier and more realistic conversation about how we can strengthen nonprofit boards.

I’m looking forward to more of that conversation in the year ahead.

Rarely do these conflicting ideas get argued in public. But at the annual meeting of BoardSource, I had the opportunity to debate the point in front of an audience. Two-person teams argued opposing points of view on that and other controversial topics. At the conclusion of our comments, the audience voted.

I was teamed with the author and nonprofit management expert Jan Masoaka. We attempted to convince our audience that the executive director is ultimately accountable and responsible for board performance.

Our opponents, Karen Beavor of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits and Dave Sternberg, a fund-raising consultant from Indianapolis, made several compelling points.

Jan and I conceded that boards are accountable to the Internal Revenue Service and state charity officials for overseeing their organization’s affairs—ensuring fidelity to mission, financial integrity, and legal compliance. A board member facing scrutiny by a government agency would have difficulty arguing that any other party was responsible for the board’s performance.

Boards also answer to their donors, to those who receive services, and to their communities. Clients, donors, and volunteers can take some reassurance in the fact that an independent governing body is holding the executive director accountable.

Boards supervise the executive director and can fire a leader who isn’t working out. An executive, by contrast, can’t remove the board.

All those points are valid. But they are also primarily theoretical. When we view the board-executive partnership in practical terms, in light of how most boards function in real life, the issue is less clear-cut.

Boards do their work using information provided by the executive director. Executive directors plan the agenda for board meetings (sometimes in close consultation with the chair, but sometimes with little or no input).

Executive directors send out notices and reminders for meetings, produce materials for board review, and draft the minutes. The executive keeps track of board-member terms, supports the work of the nominating committee, and often plays a major role in recruiting new board members.

Given the importance of these tasks and the impact on board performance if they are done poorly, it seems illogical to argue that the executive director is not responsible for board performance. At a minimum, the executive has more impact on board performance than any other individual.

The executive director understands the organization’s field, its business model, and its major organizational challenges—and is therefore more likely than anyone else to notice when there is a disconnect between what the organization needs from the board and what the board is bringing to the table.

This is not to suggest that executives are able to address every board performance issue head-on. The board is definitely in charge, and an executive director’s efforts to improve board performance need to be grounded in a fundamental acknowledgment of and respect for the board’s role and authority, along with tact and diplomacy.

During the debate, Jan cited the influential author and management consultant Peter Drucker, who said that the executive is responsible for all aspects of organizational performance.

The board, while in charge of the organization, is also part of the organization. If poor board performance is damaging an organization, the executive director has an obligation to do everything possible to improve it. And no one else within the organization, including the board chair, has as much power to affect board performance.

Jan and I lost this debate (albeit by the narrowest of margins, 51 to 49 percent). But we’d like to hear from you.

Do you agree or disagree that the executive director is accountable and responsible for board performance? Please be clear which side you’re on, and I’ll tabulate and report on your comments.

And for more views about the topic, you’ll want to read an article Holly Hall, The Chronicle’s features editor, who wrote on this topic in the new issue.

Trustees have many reasons to lobby against cuts in government support to charities and the people they support.

While the altruistic reasons usually get all the attention, one national nonprofit leader is blunt about the direct hit board members themselves will suffer if governments continue to slash spending to deal with deficit woes.

Proposed cuts in government support to charities are “a notice to nonprofit board members” that they must raise or donate more money for the charities they serve, Tim Delaney, head of the National Council of Nonprofits, an advocacy group that represents charities, told the conference here.

“You are in the target zone,” said Mr. Delaney. “It’s in your self-interest to get engaged in public policymaking. Wake up and use your voice; it’s the right thing to do.”

To bolster advocacy by board members, he urged trustees to create special public-policy committees to focus attention on the big issues in government spending that affect their organizations. Such committees are not common, he said, but are increasingly needed at a time when governments are making such big changes in how they support charities and the people they serve.

Mr. Delaney said he hoped trustees would lead advocacy efforts that focused not simply on spending that affects their own organizations. For example, he said, they should ask elected officials to take action to slow the growth of  poverty.

He said he worried that many nonprofit trustees would be deterred from participating in advocacy because of bad advice from local lawyers. He said he has heard lawyers suggest that charities must refrain from any effort to influence lawmakers and other government officials.

Charities face limits to how much advocacy they can do, and they are not permitted to get involved in partisan politics, but there is still plenty of room for them to make their views known, notes Mr. Delaney, who served as solicitor general in Arizona and has had a long legal career.

Much of the job to be done in coming months, says Mr. Delaney, has nothing to do with the kind of arm twisting many people may associate with lobbying. Instead, it is more important to educate lawmakers about how nonprofit groups work and where their money comes from. Many don’t understand the basics of how nonprofits will be affected by government cuts, he says.

“Policy makers think that nonprofits can just get more foundation grants,” he says.

While the polarization in politics, coupled with the difficult budget situation, has led to increasingly shrill conversations about spending, Mr. Delaney cautions trustees not to stoop to that level.

“Don’t demonize governments,” he said. “We serve the same communities. Treat them with respect.”

As charities face money woes and increases in requests for help, some groups have decided to merge with other organizations. But mergers aren’t the only way to reduce overhead and grow more efficient, said Jean Butzen, an Evanston, Ill., consultant.

Ms. Butzen, who has worked with many groups on what she called “strategic restructuring,” said that charities must carefully evaluate alliances because the risks are high—but so are the potential returns.

She outlined four types of collaboration that are helping charities across the country deliver services more efficiently, often at lower cost:

Joint-venture partnerships. Two or more nonprofits can share a business, a building campaign, or other project. For instance, a charity that finds work for people with disabilities and another one that provides technology to the needy created a business to clean up technology waste. The business employed people served by both organizations, and the two groups share the revenue.

Management-service organizations. A group of nonprofits that have similar needs,  such as hospitals or United Ways, form a separate tax-exempt organization that provides accounting, annual audits, human resources, online databases, or other services. This type of arrangement usually saves the member groups money while allowing them to concentrate on their missions.

Shared-service alliances. Day care charities or other groups that are similar in size and mission often divide up specialties, like screening new employees or billing.  The groups in the alliance pay the organization that provides those services, often at lower cost and  better quality than what they can get independently.

Parent subsidiaries. Organizations that work on related causes, such as providing housing for people with disabilities or adult day care, set up a single “parent” organization. Each group then decides which services (such as financial reporting, custodial and grounds care, fund raising) it wants the parent to assume so it doesn’t have to.

Has your group tried any of these approaches? Do they work? Let us know.

Why do we need you?

That’s what anybody recruiting a board member should address before making a pitch. But nearly nobody does.

Most people neglect to say which skills matter and instead assure potential board members that the job won’t be much work. What they should say, says Susan Decker, a senior consultant at BoardSource, is exactly what talents and connections the charity wants to tap in a potential board member.

Ms. Decker offered that tip as part of a two-day course in Atlanta for trustees and staff leaders that covered nonprofit boards’ responsibilities and how to train new trustees.

While the course was not inexpensive—$895, or $795 for BoardSource members—participants were provided with numerous tips, several books, and a thick binder of sample policies and exercises for trustees. They also received reading materials on topics such as dealing with problematic trustees and the relationship between the board chair and chief executive.

Among the tips that Ms. Decker and others shared during the course.:

• Create a special orientation for board chairmen. Many charities provide an orientation for new trustees, but people who lead the board may not get everything they need from such programs. The skills and abilities those trustees need to be successful are markedly different from those of rank-and-file board members.

• Recruit board members with good skills in listening and building  consensus. “Soft skills,” such as the ability to be diplomatic while asking hard questions, are just as important when recruiting board members as other skills such as legal expertise and desirable qualities such as ethnic diversity. But charities and board nominating committees often ignore soft skills.

• Create “dashboards” for nonprofit board members that show key pieces of data at a glance. Board members, worried about their responsibility to provide fiscal oversight, often spend enormous amounts of time on minute details of financial reports when they could instead undertake more productive activities to lead the organization.

To avoid this tendency, charity leaders should create a “dashboard” of key, easy-to-understand financial information that can be quickly shared at every meeting.

While every organization is different, a financial dashboard could include the current and prior-year figures for the following: cash balances in checking, savings, and other accounts; endowed funds, if any; current revenue compared with projections; expenses; and operating reserves.

Much to my surprise, most readers who commented thought foundations should indeed do more to strengthen boards. A third suggested more grants to support board development. A handful requested more foundation-sponsored training for boards, and one practical soul suggested that foundation staff members roll up their sleeves and help grantees find board members.

Your comments helped overcome my initial skepticism about whether boards need more intervention from foundations. Most of you think boards need the help. And the comments from my colleagues at other foundations indicate that a growing number of grant makers agree—and are tackling the issue with vigor and creativity.

Assuming that many foundations want to do more to strengthen boards, how can we make sure their efforts don’t do more harm than good? Here are five suggestions, grounded in your comments and my own experience as a grant seeker, grant maker, and nonprofit-board nerd.

1. Raise the issue.

Foundations can send a strong message that they believe boards are important by simply asking a few questions about the board during the application process or during face-to-face meetings. This may seem rudimentary, but many grant makers don’t do so or they ask only perfunctory questions.

2. Lose the checklist.

Asking thoughtful questions about the board and governance does not mean whipping out a clipboard and running through a checklist about compliance with “best practices.”

While checklists have their place—and do demonstrate a level of due diligence—they generally fail to illuminate whether the board is actually doing a good job. Having a conflict-of-interest policy, term limits, or a governance committee doesn’t automatically produce a high-performing board.

A few probing questions tailored to the organization, its stage of development, and its most pressing challenges will yield better information than a one-size-fits-all checklist.

3. Communicate high expectations.

Foundations need to do much more than talk about boards. We should have high expectations of the boards of grantees, and we could certainly do a better job of being clear about what those expectations are. If we expect 100-percent board giving, for example, we should say so. If a weak board was a factor in turning down a funding request, we should provide that feedback—and in specific rather than general terms, if possible.

4. Consider governance when making funding decisions.

Talking with grantees about their boards helps elevate the importance of boards, and communicating high expectations helps grantees understand what the foundation is looking for.

However, if board issues go unaddressed after many conversations, or if the problems are too big, foundations may need to discontinue funding. This can be particularly difficult, since some grantees with weak boards do good work and have charismatic and persuasive staff leadership.

Foundations need to consider carefully the circumstances under which a weak board might lead to a grantee losing its funding. Foundations that profess to be committed to building strong boards while supporting organizations with weak boards that are making no effort to improve undermine their own credibility and risk creating the impression that they are only paying lip service to the need for stronger boards.

5. Strengthen our own boards.

The medicine we so freely prescribe for grantees should also improve the health of foundation boards, which have the same basic responsibilities and face many of the same challenges. It’s unreasonable to ask our grantees to do things we’re not willing to do ourselves.

These five suggestions don’t require additional resources, special grants, or foundation-designed programs or initiatives. They don’t include the idea of providing money for consultants to work with boards or for board training, though foundations with the commitment, staff expertise, and resources to train boards and pay for consultants should do so.

But these suggestions do require some expertise, and foundation staff members who regularly ask grantees about board issues—and listen carefully to their responses—will quickly increase their understanding of effective board practices.

If more foundations put these ideas into practice, would it lead to stronger boards? I think so, but I’d love to hear whether you agree.

That insight comes from a report called The Board Paradox, by CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation, where I work. It’s the last in a series of three briefs that report on a national study of more than 3,000 nonprofit executive directors.

The briefs present survey results that were not included in the recent Daring to Lead 2011 report, which was released last month. (I am a co-author of the main report and the sole author of the brief on executives and boards.)

The online survey for Daring to Lead asked executives a series of questions about their boards. We asked about their relationships with their board chairs, how much time they spent working with and supporting their boards, and whether they were getting help from board members in key management areas.

To supplement this survey data, 70 executive directors participated in focus groups in San Francisco and Washington, DC. In all five focus groups, executives spent much of the time discussing their relationships with—and in many cases their frustration with—their boards.

In analyzing this information and putting together the brief, two things stood out.

First, many executive directors don’t spend all that much time working with their boards. More than half of survey respondents said they spent 10 hours or less per month supporting their boards. Ten hours may sound significant, but that is just 6 percent of a full-time executive director’s time. Maybe even less, since many executives work more than 40 hours a week.

Second, executives who spend more time on their boards are more satisfied with their boards’ performance. As an example, among executive directors who said they spent less than five hours a month supporting the board, just 13 percent said they were very satisfied with the board’s performance. Among those who spent five to 10 hours per month on the board, 34 percent were very satisfied.

Taken together, these two findings suggest that many executives may be under-supporting their boards—and suffering the consequences.

And that, in part, is the paradox referenced in the title of the brief. Some executive directors view their work with the board as an unwelcome distraction from their “real” work. For that reason, they spend as little time on the board as possible, at the same time wondering out loud why the board can’t be more self-sufficient and why it doesn’t give them more help.

However, this “neglect and grumble” strategy doesn’t improve board performance. To get more out of their boards, executives need to invest more time.

I recognize that this is a tough sell for overextended executives. But our evidence suggests that it pays off.