In recent years, I have sat at board tables in two seats: as a consultant facilitating strategic conversations, and as a board member myself. Both seats keep leading me to the same question: what is a board uniquely positioned to contribute that no one else can?
Boards rarely answer that question out loud. But every board answers it in practice, through how it spends its time. An agenda is more than a schedule. It is a statement of what a board believes its contribution to be.
For many organizations, the consent agenda has been a positive step: routine reports, committee updates, and recurring business no longer dominating valuable meeting time. But I have been wondering whether we have focused more on the efficiency it creates than on the opportunity it provides. The purpose of the practice was never simply to shorten meetings but to create space. Are we using that space well or do we simply fill it with another agenda item?
Ronald Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School describes leadership as moving between the dance floor, where leaders are immersed in the work, and the balcony, where patterns emerge and the questions shift from “What do we need to do next?” to “What are we learning?” and “What might we be overlooking?”
One of the greatest gifts a board can offer its executive team is the opportunity to step onto the balcony together. The purpose of the board isn’t to think for leadership. It is to create the conditions where leadership can think farther than it could on its own.
That is why we recruit the board we recruit. We invite people who have led businesses, practiced law, managed financial institutions, and navigated challenges very different from our own, and we ask them to bring those experiences into the conversation, because they see things differently. Their value isn’t found in knowing our organization better. It is found in helping us see it differently.
Yet in mission-driven organizations, the same humility that draws people to our boards can lead them to check their expertise at the door. They came to support the mission, not to second-guess the people living it, and so the banker defers, the attorney holds back, and the room loses the perspective it was assembled to provide. Reverence for the mission is a virtue. Silence in its service, is not.
Here is a question worth sitting with: if every board member around your table brings decades of experience your leadership team doesn’t possess, how much of that expertise actually shapes the conversation before the meeting ends?
Nowhere is that question more urgent than workforce and culture. Across senior living, IDD, and behavioral health, workforce is the defining challenge of our field, and monitoring alone will not solve this problem. Every organization reviews turnover, vacancies, engagement, overtime, and retention. Those measures are indicators, not explanations. They tell us what is happening, rarely why, and seldom what it means for our future. Management can produce the numbers. Making meaning of them is balcony work, and that is where the board matters most.
Instead of only asking how to improve the numbers, what if we stepped onto the balcony together and asked:
- What is our workforce’s daily experience telling us about our readiness for the future?
- What patterns are emerging across issues we discuss separately?
- Where is our culture carrying our strategy, and where is it working against it?
These are not questions to answer before the meeting adjourns. They are questions to return to and they deserve a place in the board’s agenda. This is where board and leadership notice patterns they might otherwise miss.
Going back to that original question, I keep arriving at the same answer. Management faithfully brings the information. Only the board can bring a breadth of perspective and wisdom that elevates the viewpoint. The consent agenda created the space. Our work is to fill it with the right conversation.
By Nikki Rineer, Senior Consultant | AQORD Consulting
Reference: Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press,
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