David Ainsworth: Even if your trustees aren't paid, you still need to spend money on them

25 May 2016 Voices

David Ainsworth

If you want good governance, you have to invest in support for the board, says David Ainsworth.

Critical newspaper reports about charities and the resulting discussions about trustees is a reminder that the buck always stops with the unpaid volunteers of the board, and that – fairly or otherwise – trustees are expected to know and approve all the myriad things which are done in their name.

Which presents a dilemma. How do trustees make sure they have sufficient information, when they are only involved on a part-time basis?

In the most recent edition of Governance & Leadership magazine, I asked a number of governance experts what their answer to this quandary was.

The responses I got back were remarkably similar: boards need the right support. And one of the main suggestions seems to be that this support should come from a full-time paid secretariat.

Just because trustees are volunteers, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have staff, who can ensure the board have the knowledge they need at their fingertips.

This isn’t to say that paid staff – or any of the other good practices proposed in this issue – will ever be foolproof. I’m learning that good governance is a little like Buddhism, in that the path to enlightenment is different for everyone, and comes only from trial and error. Because it depends entirely on the circumstances, you can’t make a road map.

It’s worth remembering, as our conference Trustee Exchange heard last month, that our great financial institutions employed scores of compliance and governance professionals, and failed regardless, because no one listened to them. In the end, trustees can possess all the information in the world and the organisation can still fail, because no one is using it.

The other main answer put forward was that board support comes not just in the form of paid staff, but resources - the right training for boards, the right systems to channel information to them, and the right technology to record it.

This idea is likely to be greeted with reluctance in some corners, perhaps because charities hate spending money on anything which is not directly targeted at the frontline.

But a failure to spend on governance is a false economy – as are so many other decisions charities take in order to up the percentage of frontline spend, such as not investing sufficiently in IT or HR.

Good governance is largely about ensuring disasters don’t happen. And disasters cost a lot more than a charity secretary.

This blog is a modified version of a leader article which originally appeared in Governance and Leadership magazine.

 

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