Presidents – Tips & Opportunities
- Model mentoring, be a mentor, encourage a mentoring process with/for all members.
- Join or build president coffees/groups in your area and/or at every CASB gathering.
- Lead from a solid personal and team understanding of your role as leader, facilitator, and spokesperson.
- Work to be encouraging, supportive, and healthily challenging with each member of the governing team.
- Engage each member whenever your observations detect/suspect a drift from the team’s framework/norms of excellence.
- Constantly assess for potential challenges to team effectiveness, momentum, or reputation.
- Regularly revisit and hone your personal expression of team core values and behavior norms. Arrive at each meeting with a specific commitment.
- Model learning. Become a student of effectiveness (governing, administrator/teacher, learning, change, engagement, and advocacy).
- Regularly ask fellow members: “How am I doing?”
- Admit mistakes.
- Build peer-to-peer support with one or two board presidents from like-sized, similarly-challenged districts.
- Constantly emphasize intentional listening to understand.
- Lead through policy.
- Ensure meetings are aligned to the board effectiveness framework.
- Honor citizen comments with a “listening ear” and a response that honors values of deliberation and delegation. Ensure the team has an effective policy for public comments at a meeting, then work the plan.
- Emphasize eye contact, courtesy, and gratitude toward any presenter.
- Seek and encourage each member’s wisdom/voice.
- Plan to sustain your modeling of mature leadership in action.
For training requests, please contact CASB at [email protected]
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