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50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit — Challenge 26: Difficulties Policing the Board
I've asked hundreds of executive directors the same question over the years: "What happens when a board member stops showing up?"
The answers are remarkably consistent. There's a long pause. Then something like: "We talk about it among ourselves. Sometimes the board chair makes a phone call. Usually we just wait for their term to end."
And when the board member in question is also a major donor, or a well-connected community leader, or the founder's college roommate? The answer gets even quieter. "We work around them."
That phrase — "we work around them" — tells you everything about the accountability gap on most nonprofit boards.
My book calls this "difficulties policing the board," and that phrasing was deliberate. "Policing" is the word that surfaces when you ask nonprofit leaders what they need. They want the power to enforce commitments, address chronic absenteeism, and remove board members who are doing damage.
The reason they don't have that power is structural. Board members are volunteers. There is no paycheck to withhold, no performance review to deliver, no promotion to deny. The financial lever that makes accountability relatively straightforward in an employment relationship simply doesn't exist.
But the problem runs deeper than the absence of a lever. Nonprofits hesitate to confront underperforming board members for reasons that have nothing to do with bylaws.
That board member who hasn't attended a meeting in six months? She may be the organization's largest individual donor. The one who derails every strategic conversation with his pet issue? He sits on the county commission and has referred three grants your way. The one who openly undermines the ED's authority? She's been on the board since the founding and knows the community better than anyone on staff.
Every experienced ED has a version of this story. Most have multiple versions on their current boards. And the calculus is always the same: the cost of confrontation feels higher than the cost of tolerance. So the organization works around the problem. Slowly. For years. Until the damage is baked into the culture.
The damage from unaccountable board members compounds in ways that aren't always visible to the board itself.
It erodes the authority of every other board member. When one person skips meetings without consequence, the implicit message to the rest of the board is that attendance is optional. When one person ignores agreed-upon boundaries between governance and management, the boundaries themselves weaken. Standards are set by what you tolerate, not by what you write in a handbook.
It burns out your executive director. Working around a difficult board member is exhausting. The ED spends political capital managing personalities instead of managing the organization. In a sector with notoriously high executive turnover, adding unnecessary governance friction to an already demanding role is a cost the organization can't afford.
It poisons the board's ability to recruit. Good candidates talk to people who've served. If the word in your community is that your board tolerates a bully, or that half the members don't do the work, your best prospects will find somewhere else to volunteer their time. The board that can't hold itself accountable becomes the board that can't attract new talent.
Here is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this challenge: if you're asking how to police your board, you're asking the wrong question.
Policing implies enforcement after the fact — catching violations and imposing consequences. It's reactive. It requires confrontation. And as we've established, confrontation with volunteer board members is exactly what most nonprofits will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid.
The organizations that handle board accountability well don't do it through policing. They do it through structure. They build accountability into the governance architecture so that expectations are clear before anyone has a chance to fail them — and so that consequences feel procedural rather than personal.
This is the difference between a highway with guardrails and a highway where you post a trooper every quarter mile. Both are trying to keep people safe. Only one of them actually works at scale.
To be clear: these structures don't eliminate accountability. They make it procedural instead of personal — which is the only kind that reliably works with volunteers.
Term limits with teeth. According to BoardSource, 95 percent of nonprofit boards define board terms — but only 54 percent have actual term limits. That gap matters.
Term limits are the single most effective structural tool for board accountability, precisely because they avoid the confrontation problem entirely. A board member whose term is up doesn't need to be fired, confronted, or managed out. They rotate off.
The most common structure — two consecutive three-year terms — gives every board member six years of potential service, which is generous, while guaranteeing regular renewal. If your board doesn't have term limits, this is the first structural change to make.
A board agreement that people actually sign. Not a generic description of fiduciary duties. A specific, plain-language document that says: here is what we expect of you.
You will attend at least 75 percent of board meetings. You will make a personally meaningful financial contribution each year. You will complete your committee assignments. You will maintain confidentiality. You will support the organization publicly even when you disagree privately.
And here is what happens if you don't: the board chair will have a conversation with you, and if the pattern continues, the board will ask for your resignation.
This document gets signed before someone joins the board — not after a problem surfaces. The conversation is easy at the point of invitation. It is nearly impossible once someone is already seated.
Annual board self-assessment. BoardSource's research shows that boards conducting self-assessments report greater impact on organizational performance than those that don't — 79 percent versus 58 percent. Some of that gap is probably selection bias — boards that bother to self-assess are likely already more engaged. But the gap is large enough to suggest the practice itself reinforces the behavior.
The assessment matters less than the habit it creates: a regular, structured moment where the board evaluates its own performance as a group. This normalizes accountability as a governance practice rather than a crisis response.
When the board routinely asks "how are we doing?" it becomes much easier to address the specific question of "how is this particular member doing?"
Public attendance records. Public company boards disclose individual director attendance in their annual proxy statements. Shareholders can see who showed up and who didn't. Most nonprofit boards treat attendance as private information, which means there is zero external pressure around it.
You don't need to publish attendance to the world, but recording it formally in board minutes — and reviewing attendance patterns during the annual self-assessment — creates a structural expectation that showing up matters.
The board member who has missed four of the last six meetings will see that fact reflected back. That is often enough.
If your board doesn't have a written board member agreement, draft one. It doesn't have to be long — one page is fine. State the expectations clearly: attendance, financial commitment, committee work, confidentiality, public support. Include a sentence about what happens when expectations aren't met.
Then bring it to your board chair and ask one question: would you be comfortable handing this to every prospective board member before they say yes?
If the answer is no, find out why. The discomfort will tell you exactly where your accountability gaps are.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the 50 challenges outlined in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Subscribe to Nonprofit Good News Premium for implementation tools and deeper analysis.