Abstract
At the International School of Geneva I inherited a board of governors that was and remained, despite my best efforts, dysfunctional. The membership was overloaded with parents and former students, a lethal combination. The former wanted action by the end of the week, usually on some trivial issue that directly affected their own children, while the latter wanted to preserve the traditions of their own golden age a generation earlier. There was no sense of corporate responsibility and bad-tempered meetings would end well after midnight.
I wrote those words almost a decade ago and, looking back from the safe haven of retirement, I am reminded of the daily challenge of working with that group of 21 intelligent, hard-working people who had little idea what they were supposed to be doing but were determined to do it with energy and commitment. Small wonder then that I was the school’s seventh director general in a dozen years; large wonder that I was able to set a record of 8 years’ tenure.
So let me start by making my own position clear. I believe that a strong governing board is an essential feature of an international school that wants to be taken seriously. I believe that the board has three main functions: first to appoint and appraise the CEO (whom, for the purposes of this review, I shall call ‘the head’), second to ensure the school is carrying out its stated mission, and third to act as a final court of appeal for the school’s stakeholders. With luck the governing board will also be a source of wise informal advice.
Logically, it is the stakeholders (those who have a material interest in the school) who should compose the board’s membership. But logic does not always apply and the most effective governing board I have ever seen (while chairing an accreditation visit to an international school in Portugal) was made up of people who had no personal stake whatever in the school. Their commitment was in no way diminished; on the contrary, their wisdom was focused objectively on the long-term health of the institution for which they were responsible rather than on the day-to-day diversions within it. There is more than one model of successful school governance.
As my opening quote suggests, the governing board in Geneva did not understand its responsibilities, did not contain the best people, did not know how to conduct an effective meeting, and did not act as a cohesive force for good. Would its members have benefitted from reading a copy of Governance in International Schools (GIS)? Turning first to the biographies of the 6 authors who, between them, contribute 11 chapters, we find an encouragingly rich and varied background of experience in business, the not-for-profit sector, national and international education. Next I turn to the end of each chapter to look at the references, and here I find confirmation of what I knew already: this is not a well-researched area and most of the evidence (like my opening paragraph) is anecdotal. GIS is a handbook, a user’s manual, full of useful advice and pragmatic suggestions that would certainly have helped me to help my board in Geneva. Its broad scope is laid out in the first chapter ‘Introduction to the World of Governance’. Here, we meet the issues that will be developed in more detail in the chapters that follow: understanding the board’s role, acting as one body, recognising the special relationship between the head and the board, and focusing on strategy and avoiding micromanagement, all summed up in the first of many volleys of bullet points.
The remaining chapters follow from this introduction. We are reminded that a new breed of international schools aimed at recruiting local students is growing rapidly, particularly in the Middle East, South East Asia and China. Will these schools, many of them owned by for-profit commercial enterprises, need a new model of governance? Will their owners want to appoint a governing board at all?
Another important chapter examines what many would see as the key to a successful school board – the harmonious relationship between the chair of the board and the head of the school. This is summed up as the basic need for both parties to consider each other as their coach, confidant, strategist and friendly critic, and I have no doubt that my survival in Geneva was due in large measure to the support of two chairs who had an abundance of those four qualities.
A theme running throughout GIS is the necessary separation of strategy from management, the board being responsible for the former and the head for the latter. The author of the key chapter, ‘The Board and Strategic Planning’, writes, while many boards and school managers often repeat the mantra ‘the board must be strategic’, not so many have a clear idea what this means in practice.
and at this point, I begin to part company because, for a number of reasons, I believe the mantra is based on a myth. In practice, strategic planning is an iterative process in which broad policy is built from specific actions which, in turn, are influenced by the developing strategic plan. The speed and depth of the process will be determined by the school’s tolerance of change. No strategic plan has ever been written on a blank sheet of paper; it builds upon what already exists.
There are other reasons for my difficulty in accepting a clear distinction between strategy and implementation. In practice, each ‘side’ will contain experts in the other’s domain. I cannot believe that a competent head has no contribution to make in developing the school’s future strategy, and the board is almost certain to contain members who have an expertise, perhaps in finance or human resources or curriculum development, that it would be perverse to leave untapped.
Then we need to ask if it realistic to expect board members to have experience of strategic planning. How many will feel comfortable planning the school’s future development, in a world of strategic gaps, environmental scans and action plans? And, given the turnover in a typical international school, for how many will there be time to learn? At the end of my 8-year tenure in Geneva, not a single member remained of the governing board that had appointed me; I had outlived them all. We need to look beyond the bullet points, check lists and tick boxes and ask how new governors can be encouraged to participate in the most positive and constructive way. How will they contribute to that first meeting and to the many subsequent opportunities for participation?
GIS has little to say about the preparation, conduct and follow-up of board meetings yet, and especially in an international school, listening and reacting to a multicultural range of opinion is an essential skill. I remember a distinguished Chinese professor who found it impossible to join in the typical cut and thrust of a Western boardroom. He would remain silent for long periods while he carefully assembled his thoughts and arguments. Then, during a lull in the lively exchanges, he would deliver his thinking in a long, calm monologue. This could be irritating – why could he not behave like everyone else – but in the hands of an experienced chair it could provide a very different perspective on an important issue.
Many board members of international schools will be parents who most likely have been associated with an election campaign based on one particular issue. Very quickly they have to change from being the parents’ spokesperson on controversial topic X to a governor who carries broad responsibility for all aspects of the school. One way of effecting this transformation is through membership of a board committee, and GIS contains an excellent chapter entitled ‘The Board and Its Committees’. Here, the inexperienced governor can learn procedures and gain information away from the tensions and publicity of the main board.
We have seen how GIS emphasises the importance of the board–head relationship, and at its heart lies effective communication. The head’s regular reports to the governing board, what they include and what they leave out, will be an important factor in building trust. Because behind all those bullet points (I counted 99 in just over 100 pages of text) lies one clear goal, expressed in the ‘Final Review’ as the hope that the concept of the integrated team, that is the board, the head and the senior management team working together, will be the future way forward.
And back in Geneva: was all sweetness and light after the disproportionate amount of time and energy that I had devoted to the governing board? Well hardly … a series of clashes three years after my departure provoked the board into seeking a vote of confidence from the school community. It lost and the board resigned en masse. Perhaps if its members had read Governance in International Schools, things would have worked out differently.