Meeting an Expectation of Delight

How’s your Board experience?

Should you delight your board?  Should you not? Is this even a question you ever contemplated?

“Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”*  and “The Secret to Delighting Customers”*

were both published by Harvard Business Review:  the first in 2010; the second in 2013. Very different titles, but very similar premises.  A satisfied customer is one whose whole experience is satisfactory. Not just a single episode of customer service; or a single phone call experience. It is the gestalt of the experience with the company that either keeps a customer loyal, or sends her away.

The same is true for Board experience. Have you seamlessly delivered what you promised your Directors or Trustees when they first joined the board?

Did you set out Board expectations before they accepted a Board position? Are you holding them to it?

Did you promise to keep them regularly informed? Are you delivering?

Did they expect to have meaningful, generative discussions about the future of your organizations? Are you creating an atmosphere so that can happen?

Were they passionate about your cause when they joined? Are you feeding that passion?

Did you tell them you needed their wisdom and insight to plan for the future? Are you actually using that talent?

In the course of two, four, six years of board service, there are bound to be times when a trustee’s experience on a board will be less than satisfactory.  There are going to be times when finances are tight, or a capital campaign stalls, or an Executive Director leaves, or there are obnoxious people taking up board space (no, never!). But overall, have you made their Board experience worth their time and talent?

The nonprofit world focuses on the competition for dollars. But the competition for good Directors and Trustees is also fierce. Good board members ask hard questions before they join your board, and will hold you to the answers. But they’re worth their weight in gold, because with an engaged, passionate, knowledgeable board, you can aspire to higher heights.

But they’ll only stay if their Board experience keeps them coming back for more.

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*Read “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” 

**Read “The Secret to Delighting Customers”

How is Improv Comedy Like Appreciative Inquiry?

For years, the words Appreciative Inquiry seeped into my consciousness.

It began at a two-day national development seminar, and most recently at a five-day conference for lay leaders, nonprofit professionals and clergy. By this time, it appeared everywhere, either explicitly or implicitly; there seemed to be a whole track of sessions that demonstrated appreciative inquiry in different settings.

On a very simple level, Appreciative Inquiry begins with:

  1. appreciating and valuing what is;
  2. envisioning what might be;
  3. engaging in dialogue about what should be; and
  4. innovating to create what will be.

So what does Improv Comedy have to do with Appreciative Inquiry? Good question. Two main rules of Improv Comedy are “Yes, and…” and “your main focus is on your partner.”

First, whatever is thrown at you, you have to accept it and build on it. Man talking into a bananaFor example, if someone picks up a banana and uses it to call you on the phone, you can’t say, “you idiot, that’s a banana!” You have to go with the flow, answer the phone, and say, “Hey! I was just about to call you – your Mom’s here and wants to know what you did with her gold-plated antique chamber pot she inherited from your Dad’s Aunt Phoebe in Alaska!” The point is, you have to accept what has been handed to you, and figure out what to do with it.

Second, with every sentence being a potential surprise, you have to focus closely on your partner, listen to whatever is being said and try to understand where she’s going with it.

In a nonprofit setting, if a board member says, “our students aren’t showing up for tutoring,” the response is “yes, and let’s figure out the ideal situation.” If you can envision an ideal situation, then you can work towards that ideal. If you say, “yes, but they’re dealing with issues at home, the buses aren’t running at the right time, their parents don’t push them….” you’re not adding to the conversation. You’re focusing on problems and seeming defensive, instead of hearing that the board member cares about the situation and inviting him to a shared vision of a better future.

“Yes, and…”

acknowledges that the comment was made,

appreciates that it is a concern,

inquires into what would be better.

And starts a dialogue about creating a better future.