You were chosen to be a trustee because you are wise. You have the character and experience that made you an attractive addition to your board. You have demonstrated your ability to think critically in your professional and personal life. My question for you is: “Is that experience and expertise helpful to you as a trustee?”
The unfortunate answer is, for the most part, no. An important fact that has emerged from cognitive psychology in the last few decades is that there are limitations to the generalizability of expertise: Being skilled at chess makes you a good chess player, but that skill doesn’t help you much in your other endeavors. If you are going to be a successful trustee, you are going to have to build a new set of knowledge and dispositions.
In other words, you are going to have to learn, without a roadmap, and learn quickly. Not only will you need to leave behind what has worked for you in other settings, but you will have to forsake the educational techniques that have served you as well. The world of governance is a classic example of what Warren Bennis calls a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Your role as a trustee is often just as vague. A successful trustee is one who can be in charge and, yet, not in charge. A trustee’s job description is more like a Zen Koan than a set of clearly defined expectations. Such an environment requires a learning strategy that is quite different than can be found in an established curriculum.
Traditional methods of education like classes, lectures, and tutorials are useful when learning content that is stable and routine. Unfortunately, these methods won’t work for you. You are in uncharted waters; there are few best practices to follow. As a trustee, you will need to both generate questions and discover the answers. In other words, what worked for someone else won’t work for you. You need to use a self-directed learning approach. You need a Personalized Trustees Development Plan (PTDP).
A Personalized Trustee Development Plan (PTDP) is a well-organized roadmap for building the knowledge and skills necessary for trusteeship: It directs your learning efforts. The plan recognizes your experiences and interests. Without a plan, your efforts are likely to be sporadic, unfocused, and potentially counterproductive. The goal of your development plan is not to turn you into an expert but to help you think clearly, critically, and creatively about your institution’s situation.
Your institution has a number of strategic priorities; I recommend you focus your development plan on a few of them. Successful institutions are able to move quickly and effectively because its people, including trustees, are all moving in the same direction. By focusing on strategic priorities, you model behavior that demonstrates their importance. You should always ask, “What is the institution trying to do and what is my unique role, as a trustee, to make that happen?” The answer to that question will form the foundation of your PTDP.
Questions are a trustee’s most powerful tool. They allow you to look at the organization with fresh eyes and find areas of opportunity that may have been overlooked. As you will see in the steps below, questioning, tied to strategic priorities, is the central activity of your PTDP.
The steps to creating a PTDP are as follows:
- Identify strategic priorities
Governance’s primary function is to establish the mission and strategic priorities of the institution. As a trustee, you should be doing whatever you can to maintain the institution’s focus on these priorities. By focusing your own development on strategic priorities, you provide a model for the institution to follow. - Brainstorm questions
Strategic priorities should generate questions. You should spend some time brainstorming questions to unpack your priorities. A good exercise is, as a group, to spend 20 minutes thinking of every question that comes to mind regarding all of your strategic priorities—then allocate them to specific trustees for placement in their own development plans. - Categorize the questions
Questions can be categorized in a number of ways depending on the type of response they demand. Some questions you ask will be factual and can be answered with data. For example, what is the enrollment for the spring semester in the College of Arts and Sciences? Other questions require an opinion or speculation. For example, what do you think our best opportunities are for new programs? - Identify what resources you might have to answer your questions
Trustees usually have access to their presidents and their executive staffs. Additionally, trustees should seek out opportunities to pose questions to students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members. Everyone is a potential source of information. Use questions to interact with staff, colleagues, and constituents. Note the answers you get, the opinions you hear, the thoughtfulness they produce. Notice if the responses you get are inconsistent depending on who you ask. Systematically ask questions from your list at every opportunity. - Organize your findings
The next step is to track and organize your findings. Keep notes on what you have asked and of whom, as well as the responses you received. This makes it easy to follow up and to share your findings. - Find opportunities to share what you’ve learned
The PDTP should be designed to be a shareable document so that you are not only engaged in self-development, but in organizational development as well.Try to cross-check the responses you hear with other constituents. This gives you an opportunity to test out your findings. Do the responses you have collected represent a consensus or are they idiosyncratic individual comments? Periodically, share your findings with colleagues. Test your conclusions and inferences on them. Share your findings with your president and executive staff and give them an opportunity to turn those ideas into operational solutions. - Keep adding questions
Being a great questioner is largely a matter of habit. To keep learning, continually update your development plan with new questions. Find time, on a regular basis, to intentionally create new questions. I have found that a daily practice of generating 10 new questions is an important task to personal development; it keeps me in a state of inquiry. Remember, your development plan is a living document; the more you put into it the more useful it becomes. - Make decisions based on your findings
As a trustee, you, of course, will be voting on resolutions at every meeting. Each vote is an opportunity to discuss how the issue relates to a strategic priority and to share what you have learned regarding that priority through your PTDP. This type of commentary is useful in providing the university community with a transparent look on board decisions. - Set up a system of accountability
A PTDP process requires detailed record keeping. While it is critical for the president and the board chair to help you construct your PTDP goals, you will need someone else to support the effort on a day-to-day basis. Your board professional is ideally situated to provide support for this effort. Board professionals can keep a running log of potential goals, track progress, find resources, and provide feedback. Perhaps most important, your board professional can remind you of the importance of self-development; a small amount of nudging may be enough to keep the program on track.
A board’s annual retreat is a great opportunity to report on and to review PTDPs. Lessons learned can be used to not only reinforce the importance of the strategic priorities, but to recommit to them and revise them if necessary.
The table on page 23 of the digital edition of Trusteeship and hard copy of Trusteeship illustrates how a PTDP plan might look based on two example strategic priorities: 1) stabilize and enhance enrollment, and 2) budget reserve utilization.
Your PTDP is a living document. At the end of the year, you most assuredly will have developed a unique point of view on what those priorities mean to the institution. This unique perspective is an important value-added contribution; it is exactly the kind of outlook that makes governance important to the institution. The type of engagement fostered by a PTDP is ideal from the institution’s perspective; it keeps trustees engaged using knowledge that is evidence based, organized, and actionable while maintaining a focus on issues of governance and not operations.
Trustees often ask, “Is my work on the board worthwhile?” and, “Am I making a significant contribution?” Meaningful work requires meaningful preparation. Institutions that neglect trustee development are not positioning the board for meaningful work. If your institution doesn’t already have a development program, it is your responsibility to proactively create one; it sends the signal that you take your responsibilities seriously and that you expect meaningful work. Use your PTDP as a tool to become knowledgeable, engaged, and focused. Use it to ensure that you are prepared to be a significate contributor to your institution.
David Richard Moore, PhD, is the executive secretary of the Board of Trustees at Ohio University. He is a professor of innovative learning design and technology. His research focuses on the design of educational experiences for executives.
Takeaways
- A Personalized Trustee Development Plan (PTDP) is a well-organized roadmap for building the knowledge and skills necessary for trusteeship. These plans are flexible and should teach trustees to think clearly, critically, and creatively about their institution’s unique context, governance issues, and strategic priorities.
- The nine steps to creating and using a PTDP are as follows: (1) identify strategic priorities; (2) brainstorm questions; (3) categorize the questions; (4) identify what resources you might have to answer your questions; (5) organize your findings; (6) find opportunities to share what you’ve learned; (7) keep adding questions; (8) make decisions based on your findings; and (9) set up a system of accountability.
- Institutions that do not utilize a PTDP for trustee development may be neglecting their trustees and discouraging the board from executing meaningful work. An effective PTDP keeps trustees engaged in their work and ensures trustees are prepared to be a significant contributors to their institutions inside and outside of the boardroom.
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