Last month Non-Profit Quarterly addressed a timely topic I found extremely interesting: In a time when so many non-profits are being formed, but haven’t grown to the point of having a staff, how do you separate the governance and operational roles of a board?

If the organization has any ambitions of growing to the point where it will have a staff, making that separation early on will help avoid having the staff feel second guessed on everything by a board that has a hard time relinquishing those decisions.

As the author, Mitch Dorger, notes, it is easy to focus on operational decisions because the results are more visible and immediate than that of longer term governance decisions. So even if the organization never intends to have a staff, it is easy for the board to get bogged down in operational discussions.

Dorger admits he wasn’t quite sure how a board only organization could effectively keep that separation so he posed the question to an online forum. There were five basic responses he received including, having distinct governance and operational committees and even distinct boards.

Another “specific suggestion was that the vice president, treasurer, and secretary would oversee operational matters while the president and any remaining directors would focus their attention on governance issues. (Of course, all officers would participate in all governance discussions.)”

I liked this one because it actively utilized and made relevant the vice president role.

The final suggestion advocated an examination of the “whole nature of board committees” and abandon the “traditional committees that boards use and reorganizing into three new committees: operations oversight, organizational development, and organizational future.” Another rather intriguing idea.