Considering personal experiences of serving on Boards, I am confounded about the criteria used to select board members. Are the requirements the same or different for non-profit organizations compared to corporate organizations?
Having served on both kinds, I wonder if it’s about intelligence as in being smart, or about experience and wisdom? A mixture? How is smart defined?
“Smarty pants” was a term I heard in school. If someone popped up with too many right answers they were often bullied. Themes of ‘get smarter’, ‘do it smarter’, ‘only the smart succeed’ were predominant during my 21 years in corporations. (Noting to myself that was a long time ago.) Maybe things are different?
The corporate world seeks intelligence in the form of knowledge and skills. Brain power, mental sharpness, and experience. The ability to vision, communicate and relate is often at the bottom of the list.
The context of observing a local homeowner board meeting brought this to my recent attention. Watching a group of neighbors discussing ways to enhance and solve problems, I noticed that niceness appeared to shape the conversation. There was an edge that seemed to prevent straight talk as an avoidance of conflict or perhaps perceiving a long-term strategy.
Noting to myself that there are major issues that deserve to be addressed, I wondered about how the intellect and the heart of the matters might merge. How might the board sessions evolve to thinking and acting together with insight and foresight? Without taking a long view, it felt that solutions were shortsighted.
The rules of engagement are either unspoken or presented and agreed upon. Seems like a pattern we experience close to home and in the wider realms of problem solving. Endeavoring to stay away from the smarty-pants, jumping in method, but it does ‘smart’ like when I stumped my toe this morning to see wasted resourcefulness.