Our backgrounds have given us a unique perspective on club governance relative to how boards function in the corporate and non-profit worlds. We’re both CPAs who have spent considerable time in C-suite roles and as partners and board members of multiple corporate and tax-exempt entities. We’ve also both been club presidents and we’ve dedicated more than a decade each in service to the boards of our respective clubs.
In our observation, the most striking differences between clubs’ boards and those in other realms are the frequency of board turnover and the fact that clubs tend to operate in isolation. In the absence of information about club-specific best practices, club boards are prone to fill the void with home-grown practices they either inherit or create from scratch in each new cycle. Frequent board turnover and a lack of access to club-specific education about best practices are idiosyncrasies of the club industry that make it extremely difficult to develop and maintain a commitment to strategic leadership.
We believe the key to breaking that cycle of disruption is implementation of a thorough and consistent board orientation program that gets repeated every year for the benefit of both new and existing board members. New board members may have the best of intentions, but as the saying goes, “they don’t know what they don’t know,” and that combination of naivete and enthusiasm can quickly derail even the best laid plans.
We recommend a thorough self-evaluation for the entire board—new members and tenured members—at the onset of the orientation process. The goal is to identify gaps in board education, diagnose alignment issues and establish a baseline for areas where targeted education will be beneficial.
Over the last 13 years, we’ve worked with other club industry leaders to identify a set of best practices that have ultimately became the framework for a Club Governance Survey that has two specific functions:
- To provide an effective self-evaluation tool for individual club boards that measures understanding of and alignment around identified best practices in club governance and serves as the grounding point for the annual orientation process.
- To gather information and compile survey findings in an annual report that advances the industry’s awareness and understanding of best practices for club governance.
The results of the Club Benchmarking’s 2020 Club Governance Survey have been summarized in a whitepaper that is available at clubbenchmarking.com/governance-survey-2020.
Joe Abely and Dave Duval are Club Benchmarking executive consultants specializing in club governance and board education. They can be reached [email protected] and [email protected].