The second in a series of articles on “High-Impact” Governance

Prepared for the Colorado Association of School Executives

USING COMMITTEES AS GOVERNANCE ENGINES

By Doug Eadie

MAYBE NOT SEXY, BUT

If you asked 100 public school superintendents around the country to name their top-five concerns in the area of governance, how to make good use of board standing committees wouldn’t appear on many lists. Board structure just isn’t a very sexy subject, especially in the company of such juicy topics as your school board’s role in strategic planning or in evaluating superintendent performance. However, you’d be well advised to take committees very seriously in developing your board’s leadership capacity. In my experience over the past 20 years, high-impact school boards – the ones that really do make a difference in their school districts – invariably rely on well-designed standing committees that do the lion’s share of the detailed governing work of the board.

Standing committees enable a board to divide the labor of governing into “chewable chunks,” thereby ensuring that complex issues get the detailed attention they deserve and that they can’t possibly get in full board meetings. They also produce three other very important benefits. First, committees build board members’ satisfaction, making them happy campers who are far easier to work with, primarily because committee work builds in-depth knowledge and expertise in the work of governing. Second, committee meetings provide an opportunity for intensive board-superintendent-senior administrator interaction, strengthening mutual understanding and respect and building a critical human bond that can come in handy during times of stress. And third,

committee work builds feelings of ownership among board members, and ownership is at the heart of board member commitment and accountability.

WELL-DESIGNED COMMITTEES

So committees can produce powerful benefits for your school district, but only if they are well-designed. Experience has taught that committees can be effective governing engines when:

  • They correspond to a few broad governing functions (such as planning and performance monitoring) that cut across your whole school system, rather than being “silos” that are merely an extension of your district’s administrative structure (e.g., the old fashioned finance, personnel, and buildings and grounds committees) or programs (e.g., instruction; curriculum development; athletics);
  • Every board member serves on one and only one standing committee (with the exception of committee chairs, who often serve on the executive or governance committee).
  • And a member of the executive team is designated by the superintendent to serve as chief staff to each committee.

A MODEL STRUCTURE

Two broadly constituted committees have proved to be indispensable “governing

engines” in my experience: planning (often called planning and development) and performance monitoring (often called performance oversight or management oversight). Your board’s planning committee would be responsible for assisting the board in dealing with a wide variety of planning decisions and “products” – everything from updating your district’s values and vision statement to adopting the annual operational plan and budget. Your board’s performance monitoring committee would be responsible for assisting the board in assessing on an ongoing basis how well your district is performing financially, educationally, and administratively. You can easily see that these two committees satisfy the horizontal discipline criterion: planning covers all planning that your school system does; performance monitoring monitors all activities going on in your school system.

Virtually all boards have an executive committee, consisting of board officers and/or the chairs of the other standing committees. The problem with the traditional executive committee is that it is often treated as a mini-board, which basically screens all information going to the full board, thereby more often than not alienating other board members, who feel less important and out-of-the-loop. Many boards in recent years have turned their executive committee (frequently called the “governance” committee these days) into a committee on board operations, rather than a mini-board, whose primary responsibility is to make sure that the board is functioning smoothly as a governing body.

THE COMMITTEE ROLE IN PROCESS DESIGN

The most effective standing committees that I have observed over the years take very seriously their process design responsibility, in addition to carrying out their governing work. For example, representing the full board, your planning committee can work closely with the superintendent and chief planning officer in annually taking a close look at the design of the strategic and operational planning process of your district from the board’s perspective, identifying practical enhancements that will strengthen the board’s participation in making planning decisions. The planning committee might fine-tune the agenda of the annual strategic planning retreat to make it a more effective forum for the identification of strategic issues. Or the performance monitoring committee might reach agreement with the superintendent on enhancements to the educational performance reports that will promote stronger board understanding of district performance.

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About the Author

Doug Eadie is founder and CEO of Doug Eadie & Company, based in Palm Harbor, Florida. During the past 20 years, Doug has helped nearly 500 public and nonprofit organizations, including many school districts, to strengthen the governing capacity of their boards and to build board-CEO partnerships that are positive, productive and enduring. He is the author of 16 books, including Eight Keys to an Extraordinary Board-Superintendent Partnership and The Board-Savvy Superintendent (co-authored with Paul Houston, AASA’s CEO). NSBA and Scarecrow Education will publish Doug’s 17th book in fall 2004, tentatively titled Five Habits of High-Impact School Boards. You can learn more about Doug Eadie & Company at and you can contact Doug directly at or toll-free at 800-209-7652.

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