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50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit — Challenge 25: Challenging Board Dynamics
This is the thought process I know many nonprofit leaders face before every board meeting: "I'm presenting our annual strategy to a retired pediatrician, a commercial real estate developer, a graduate student, and a woman who runs a flower shop. They all get one vote. None of them do what I do for a living. And somehow we're supposed to come out of the room with a coherent direction."
And here's the thing — none of those are bad board members. That pediatrician has served families in the community for thirty years. The developer understands facilities and capital. The graduate student brings data skills nobody else has. The flower shop owner knows the neighborhood better than anyone at the table. Every one of them cares about the mission.
The problem wasn't the people. It was the structure.
In a for-profit boardroom, three conditions usually hold. First, the board is composed of peers — typically CEOs or senior executives from comparable companies who speak the same professional language. Second, the CEO usually chairs the board, meaning the person running the company also runs the room. Third, everyone measures success the same way: financial performance. Earnings per share. Revenue growth. Return on equity. The scoreboard is visible and shared.
In a nonprofit boardroom, none of these hold.
Your board members may be a retired judge, a marketing director, a community organizer, and a college professor. They bring different professional vocabularies and different assumptions about what success looks like. They are not your peers in the professional sense — and you are almost certainly not the board chair. You report to the board. The board doesn't report to you. And the metrics by which your organization's success gets measured? Those might be crystal clear, or they might be a fog of competing definitions that nobody has reconciled.
This is what my book calls "challenging board dynamics." It's a clinical phrase for what most executive directors experience as something more visceral: the disorientation of answering to people who don't share your training or your definition of success.
The cost goes well beyond uncomfortable meetings.
Strategic drift. When board members can't agree on what success means — and nobody forces the conversation — the organization drifts. Not dramatically. Incrementally. One board member pushes for expansion because that's what success looks like in her world. Another pushes for deepening existing programs because quality matters more than scale. Without a shared framework, the ED tries to satisfy both. The result is an organization that's a little bit of everything and fully committed to nothing.
Executive isolation. In a corporate setting, the CEO has a peer relationship with the board chair. They speak the same language. In many nonprofits, the ED has no true peer in the room. The board chair may be deeply committed but professionally distant from the daily reality of running the organization. That gap can leave an executive director making consequential decisions with no one to think them through with — at least not anyone who carries governance authority.
Decision paralysis. A retired surgeon, a social worker, and an attorney walk into a board meeting. It sounds like the setup to a joke — but the punchline is that they approach the same problem through incompatible lenses, and the default outcome is delay. Not because anyone is wrong, but because the group lacks a shared process for resolving legitimate disagreement. The board tables the decision. Asks for more information. Forms a committee. Meanwhile, the window for action closes.
These aren't hypothetical costs. If you've led a nonprofit for more than a year, you've felt at least one of them.
Here's where the story gets interesting.
While nonprofit leaders struggle with the structural mismatch on their boards, the corporate world is actively recruiting for something nonprofits already have.
According to the Spencer Stuart Board Index, 67 percent of new S&P 500 directors appointed in 2023 were women, members of underrepresented racial or ethnic groups, or LGBTQ+ — up from 38 percent a decade earlier. Nearly 60 percent of S&P 500 companies have now separated the chair and CEO roles. Corporate governance consultants push skills matrices designed to ensure boards include a range of professional backgrounds, not just financial expertise.
The motivations differ — corporate boards are responding to investor pressure, SEC disclosure rules, and a growing body of research on decision quality. But the structural outcome is the same: they're hiring executive search firms, retaining governance consultants, and building board assessment tools to get perspectives at the table that are different from the CEO's. They're trying to get the retired pediatrician and the flower shop owner into the room.
You already have them. The diversity of perspective that Fortune 500 companies are deliberately constructing? Nonprofit boards have it by default. The separation of the chair and CEO that corporate governance reformers have fought for over decades? Nonprofits have always had it.
But here's the catch — and it's a significant one. Having diverse raw materials in the room doesn't automatically produce better governance. A 2025 study by Evans, Kuenzi, and Stewart in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly confirmed what most practitioners already sense: board diversity is positively associated with nonprofit performance, but only when paired with inclusive governance practices. Diversity without structure is just friction.
The corporate world seems to understand this. They pair their diversity recruiting with onboarding programs, skills assessments, and explicit role definitions.
Many nonprofits, by contrast, put a diverse group of volunteers in a room and hope the chemistry works. But chemistry is not always benign. Drop a chunk of potassium into water and you get a violent explosion (very cool but also very dangerous) — not because either ingredient is dangerous on its own, but because nobody accounted for the reaction. A boardroom full of smart people with incompatible frameworks and no shared process can produce its own kind of detonation.
So what does "inclusive governance practices" look like in real terms? Three moves matter most.
Name the mismatch out loud. Most nonprofit boards never talk about the structural differences. Nobody says: "We are a group of people with fundamentally different professional frameworks, no shared success metric, and an unusual power dynamic — and we need to account for that." Instead, boards default to Robert's Rules and hope for the best. The organizations that govern well start by acknowledging what makes their board different from a corporate board — and building their practices around that reality rather than pretending it away. This means explicit role descriptions, clear boundaries between governance and management, and onboarding that addresses the actual structure rather than handing new members a stack of bylaws.
Build your own scoreboard. Corporate boards have earnings reports. Your board doesn't have an equivalent unless you build one. This is actually an advantage in disguise. In my experience, organizations that build their own success frameworks — whether through a theory of change, a logic model, or a simple outcome dashboard — often develop better strategic clarity than companies defaulting to quarterly results. But it requires deliberate work. If your board members can't articulate in a sentence how the organization measures success, you don't have a shared scoreboard yet. Get one. It eliminates half the drift.
Invest in the chair-ED relationship as infrastructure. Since your ED isn't the board chair — and shouldn't be — that relationship is the most load-bearing joint in your governance structure. Governance researchers and practitioners consistently point to this partnership as the single most important relationship in the organization. Yet most nonprofits treat it as informal: a phone call before board meetings, maybe a coffee now and then. The organizations that get this right schedule regular one-on-ones between the chair and ED, define decision-making protocols between meetings, and treat the relationship as organizational infrastructure, not personal chemistry.
Pull out your board's onboarding materials — whatever you give new members when they join. Read them as if you were a retired pediatrician joining a nonprofit board for the first time. Ask yourself: do these materials explain how this board actually works? Do they name the ways it differs from a corporate board? Do they describe how the group makes decisions when smart people disagree?
If the answer is no, you've found your starting point. Not because your board is broken. But because the raw materials for strong governance are already in the room — and they need structure, not luck, to do their work.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the 50 challenges outlined in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Subscribe to Nonprofit Good News Premium for implementation tools and deeper analysis.