Transcript: Succession planning for Boards of Trustees
15th October 2012 to 8 March 2013
For this webinar recording (18 min 12 sec):
http://connect.vln.school.nz/p99667139/
1 / Tēnā koutou katoa, nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei whakaaturanga. Welcome to thisTraining Services recording of “Succession Planning”.
This recording is an abbreviated version of the live webinar delivered from 15 – 26 October 2012 and is approximately 25 minutes long.
You can use the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to Pause, Play and Forward the recording.
2 / We’ll start by looking at what we mean by succession planning?
<click> Succession planning is the process of proactively identifying and developing people to fill future vacancies within organisations. Generally, board succession planning is more common for boards that are selected (such as for Crown Companies like state-owned electricity companies, where Board members are appointed rather than elected). However, it’s just as important for boards that are elected, like the Boards of Trustees of kura and schools.
Sound succession planning can actually be more important for elected boards, because if candidates and voters aren’t well-informed, you could end up with a Board that doesn’t have the knowledge and skills necessary to do a good job of governing. So, <click> sound succession planning involves creating two things –
<click> A transparent process, and:
<click> An informed electorate. Your electorate in this context consists of your school community, and is made up of both your candidates and your voters.
Let’s talk about the first one.
3 / The common election date for the upcoming school triennial elections is 30 May 2013. You can see here some of the key dates in the election timeline. All the important dates are included in a resource under development by NZSTA in association with the Ministry of Education, entitled 2013 Election Planner which was sent to your school at the beginning of February.
The most important actions your board has to undertake are to appoint a Returning Officer, and to minute the board election date.
You’ll see that Boards are not legislatively required to appoint a Returning Officer until April 23rd, but the Ministry and NZSTA recommend February 1st as a deadline for appointing this person, so that they have time to prepare for the election, and to attend the training sessions for Returning Officers that are being held in March. So, if your Board has not yet appointed a Returning Officer or minuted the election date, you need to do so as soon as possible.
While the Board is responsible for publicizing the election and recruiting potential trustees, your returning officer will run the board election process, and will ensure that all legal procedures are followed. You’ll see that the activities, in the middle, are the responsibility of the Returning Officer. <click>
Information to assist the Returning Officer with this task is contained in the Returning Officers’ Handbook 2013 - 2016, which was sent to your Returning Officer at the beginning of February. The Election Planner and the Returning Officers’ Handbook can also both be downloaded from the NZSTA website. I’ll provide you with a link at the end of this webinar.
This is a formal, paid position, and boards are advised to enter a formal agreement with the appointed individual. Good practice suggests that the school principal is not the returning officer. Likewise, an individual cannot be both a candidate for election, and the independent returning officer. Training sessions for Returning Officers are being held in December 2012, with a refresher in February.
As a Board, you should also make a time in your next Board meeting to discuss the upcoming election, including outlining the work the Board is responsible for. You may find some of the tools or activities from this webinar useful for that discussion. As part of that discussion, your Board may choose to delegate some of the Board’s work to prepare for the election to an individual trustee, or to a Board committee. The Board should be very clear in documenting which tasks have been delegated to this person or team.
Let’s have a look now at how you can create an informed electorate.
4 / Effective Succession Planning consists of systematic effort to ensure three important components – the three R’s. The first of the three R’s is <click> Readiness. Readiness consists of ensuring that
•  Board documentation is in place and up-to-date to allow the new board membership to effectively govern the school, and:
•  The relevant skills and experiences of effective trustees have been determined and advertised.
So, this aspect of succession planning allows a board to be sure that they’ve got all the relevant information that they need to be able to inform their electorate.
<click> Recruitment is made up of three parts -
•  Firstly, potential trustees with a balance of skills and experiences are identified through a range of activities.
•  Those potential trustees are then given accurate and relevant information as to the role of the board.
•  And parents on the voting roll have also been given appropriate information regarding the voting process and the relevant skills and experiences required of trustees.
Finally, <click> Retention. This involves ensuring that
•  An inclusive, supportive and thorough induction process is planned and implemented, and
•  Ongoing professional development opportunities are made available to support trustees and the board as a whole.
This aspect is crucial for ensuring that elected trustees continue to be supported to learn and grow in their new role.
We’ll now look more closely at the documentation your board needs to get ready.
5 / The 9 questions in this Readiness Checklist are designed to quickly give you an idea of which actions to make a priority and to see what progress your Board is making. You may want to pause the recording now to complete this activity.
For each item click one of the 3 radio buttons, identifying for yourself if this is a new priority; if it is currently in progress, or if this has been completed. If some of these items are still works in progress for your Board, we’ll look now at where you can get more information to help you with these.
6 / For further support on <click> your Board’s definition of governance, how to document your Board’s roles and responsibilities, and your Board’s policies, NZSTA has produced a very useful article entitled What is Governance? <click>
<click> You can also refer to the Ministry of Education’s Effective Governance publication.
<click> For support with your charter, you can contact your local Ministry of Education office and NZSTA can offer assistance with developing a Board code of conduct.
A recent webinar, entitled How Boards Work <click>, outlined the three types of review identified by the Education Review Office:
Strategic Review, which relates mainly to the Charter and includes community expectations, values, vision, and strategic aims
Regular Review, which is cyclical, so it includes what occurs each year, and
Emergent review, which occurs when there are unplanned issues to examine or new initiatives. For example, a change in government policy, or local initiatives. The webinar also contains a sample three-year programme of review.
We’ll look at each of <click> the remaining three items on the list in turn. We’ll talk about the trustee folder and developing an induction plan later, in our retention section. But first, we’ll look at how to develop a list of the required skills and experience for trustees.
7 / There are a number of skills and experiences that are useful for good governance. These can be divided into more general skills or competencies <click>. Some of these competencies include good communication skills, the ability to think analytically, practically, and strategically, and leadership skills.
Some useful competencies are more specific to governance at a school or kura <click>. These include a knowledge of education, the ability to manage people, to manage risk, and legal or financial understanding.
There are also some personal qualities that are important for good governance <click>. These include characteristics such as honesty, courage, integrity, and being motivated to improve, but also practical requirements such as the available time necessary to be a good trustee, and a genuine interest in the school.
As a Board, you need to schedule some time to develop your own list of the relevant skills and experiences that are required for trustees at your school or kura. The lists you see here might be the starting point for this discussion, but you’ll probably find that time spent brainstorming will add further items to this list. These items will depend on the requirements of your school or kura, and on your Board’s definition of governance.
Not every potential trustee needs to have all of the skills and qualities listed, as long as the overall Board has a mix of these skills and qualities.
Many Boards look to recruit potential trustees with previous governance experience. Sometimes this might be experience in governance on the Board of Trustees of another school or kura. At other times, it might be governance elsewhere in the non-profit sector, or in the for-profit sector.
Let’s look more closely at the different skills and experiences a potential trustee may bring to the Board table if their previous governance experience is in the “for-profit” sector.
8 / When people think of boards, many automatically think of boards of directors of for-profit organisations. While good governance has many of the same purposes, principles and practices - regardless of whether the board is governing a for-profit, or non-profit organisation - there are some important differences that we need to keep in mind.
This table is divided into four different aspects of a board’s purpose and composition – mission, measure, leadership, and board membership.
On the right, you can see a set of eight items. If you’d like to have a go at this activity, simply pause the recording and think about where each item should be placed in the table and whether that item applies best to a board of a profit or non-profit organisation.
Next we’ll now go through each of those aspects in more detail.
9 / Firstly, the mission --- Boards in the for-profit sector have increasing value for shareholders as their principal goal, which can be done by growing their market share in the industry for which they supply products or services <click>. Progress towards that goal can be precisely measured and tracked over time using financial performance measures, in addition to measures of their competitors’ financial performance <click>.
In contrast, financial performance is only a part of performance for a non-profit organisation <click>. Or, as another way of putting it, ‘the financial tail must not be allowed to wag the nonprofit dog. However, good financial practices and performance are an important dimension of its mission statement, since poor financial performance can compromise the effectiveness of its primary mission, <click> to deliver services to its stakeholders.
Leadership is also structured differently between profit and non-profit boards, with the CEO - or the principal or tumuaki in the case of schools or kura - working closely with the board chairperson <click>. In some for-profit boards, the CEO is also the board chairperson <click>, although many for-profit organisations have a non-executive chairperson.
The final difference, and possibly the one you’ll relate to the most as you reflect on your term as a trustee, <click> is that there is much more diversity in board membership in non-profit organisations than in for-profit organisations. This not only includes diversity in the individuals who make up the board, but diversity in the roles they take on, and a lot less predictability in the hours they carry out their governance function.
As we move into our Recruitment section, it’s important to keep these differences in mind when you are considering the types of people you want to attract onto the Board of Trustees of your school or kura. Once you have your list of required skills and experiences, the Board is ready to begin the recruitment process.
10 / Your list of skills will help your Board know who you are targeting, and your recruitment process will cover <click> where you’ll find those people and how you might interest them in becoming a trustee – which we’ll talk about shortly.
This is an important time for your Board to think in more detail about its community. We can think of a school as being “owned” by its community, not only current learners & their families and whānau, but members of the wider community in which the school resides.
<click>You should be making sure that your Board is attracting potential trustees who will bring diverse viewpoints, which will allow them to truly represent the different perspectives of different groups of parents and whānau of the school.
<click> Your school or kura may have particular groups of parents and whānau whose viewpoints should be represented on the Board. You should also give some thought to whether the Board represents each of the Ministry’s three priority groups, that is, Māori, Pasifika, and students with special education needs.
It is, however, important to remember that while different groups may be represented on the Board, the Board as a whole is responsible for catering for the educational needs of all students at their school or kura. This means that while one trustee might have more knowledge or experience in a particular area, the aim should be for them to help the rest of the trustees to up-skill in this area.