Lazy Board Syndrome: A Governing Board is a Special Form of a Team

A client board's chairman has become a pretty good friend over the last 2 years or so. He was complaining he was having difficulty getting board members to carry out their agreed tasks between board meetings and be prepared to report or provide the product of the task to the board at the next board meeting. (This is a Policy Governance board.) I told him it might be due to lazy board syndrome. Boards get used to passive governance - years of just showing up and reacting to reports, giving advice and/or critiquing. Then go home. So when the board switches to Policy Governance, they start to have governing responsibilities, and that accountability is a new experience. Using Patrick Lencioni's model of the high performance team (see his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team)  - the board must learn to hold itself accountable in a gracious but firm way.