Governance Partnership — What is it?

Governance Partnership — what is it?

Nonprofit governance literature increasingly is using the term partnership to describe the relationships between the board of directors, the board chair, and the chief executive.

• Board Source recently published a monograph entitled The Source which listed the constructive partnership as the first of twelve characteristics of an exceptional board of directors. They found that the effectiveness of the board and chief executive are interdependent.
• The Center for Healthcare Governance describes the partnership between the board and chief executive as critical to the well-being of the organization.
• A longitudinal study of the British Health Service published in the Journal of Management Studies found that the relationship between the board chair and the chief executive as being central to nonprofit governance.
• The Iowa Principles and Practices for Charitable Nonprofit Excellence describe the relationship between the board chair and the chief executive as the intersection of governance.

It is the relationship between the board chair and the chief executive that is core to effective governance. This relationship as it is constructed and nurtured between two key organizational leaders is, what I call, the governance partnership.