Did you know that a bee spends its entire life producing….get this…1/12 of a teaspoon of honey? I learned that this Thanksgiving from friends who invited us to harvest honey from their beehives. Being one who hates bees, I went into it with some trepidation but am so grateful for the experience. But what does this have to do with building a culturally conscious board? Here are my takeaways:
12 is my magic number for quality decision-making. I’m a big believer in a board size being around 8-12 members. Studies have shown 5-8 to be ideal for effective group decision-making, but to ensure that you have the right mix of professional expertise, and diversity of opinions, while also protecting board members from burnout, I believe 12 is an ideal number. Once you move beyond twelve it becomes very challenging to truly listen to every voice. If we’re honest, many times we have a large board for purely fundraising purposes. It seems to me there could be other advisory councils or committees that would meet that need. But for a healthy board culture, you need to ensure that every board member is bringing their best self to the table.
When every bee does its part, the result is pure sweetness. We ended up harvesting 3 ½ gallons of pure organic honey in three hours. That is 2,688 teaspoons of honey, which means it required 32,256 bees. To keep going with the metaphor, there are approximately 2 million nonprofits in the United States alone. Those two million nonprofits have boards and those boards consist of individual members doing their part to contribute to the common good. While harvesting, we found two trays that had rows of dead bees encased in the cells. I don’t know how this happened, but the result was that we lost a lot of potentially good honey. Such a waste. When board members are thriving and individual members are bringing their best selves to the table, and when you have the board members you need to serve the mission, then the result is a true harvest of goodness.
Structure Matters. My role was to scrape off the caps that the bees put on top of each cell in the hive without removing the structure of the cell. Sure, they could easily be replaced by future bees, but keeping the structure improves the chances of the next year’s harvest. When our boards are culturally conscious, we sometimes have to remove our blindfolds, our caps, but that doesn’t mean we throw it all away. Policies, Bylaws, and Missions matter. Sometimes they need to have the dross removed to make for a healthier board culture and we have to be willing to scrape away the old in order to ensure a healthy future.
Culture Matters. The honey we harvested tastes like the surrounding flora and fauna. And we could see in the tray, based on the color of the honey, what was pollinated in the summer and fall. The nectar differs in each season, resulting in a different color and flavor. And so what the bees pollinate directly impacts the honey’s flavor. If there are blueberry plants nearby, it will taste like blueberry. Crabapple orchard? Then, yes, it will taste like crabapples. Same with our boards. Russell West and I say that a culturally conscious board considers the culture of its board, its stakeholders and that of the wider society in which it serves as a shaping influence in its deliberation toward intended impact. It is aware of its own culture, while acknowledging its blindfolds. The culture in which our nonprofit operates will affect our decision-making or, if we’re blind to it, and don’t have representation, then we will not be as effective in that community. This is why we encourage people to share not only their organization’s origin stories, but to also understand the stories that led each board member to serve. What is the flavor of your board?
I realize you probably never thought of bees and boards in the same sentence, but nature has a lot of lessons it can teach us when we’re conscious of them.
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