Life Cycle of Governing Bodies
by Claire Woodhead
The structures and responsibilities of private sector boards of directors have been a focal point of the media in recent years, with such scandals as the collapse of Enron and the conviction of the president of United Way. This emphasis has brought public attention both to the for-profit and the not-for-profit worlds. In response, many governing bodies also have refocused their efforts to align their actions more closely with their mandates.
With responsibilities from policy creation, stewardship, and rate setting to the ethical considerations and values involved in serving the public, the elected bodies of local governments (referred to here as councils) are finding themselves undergoing fundamental changes to meet these often-conflicting demands. For the councils, effective governance requires both accountability and organizational strength to create long-term programs for efficient investment. This twofold need requires all participants in the group to think globally but act locally.
When John Carver produced his ground-breaking work on governance and the role of the board of directors, he clearly defined the decision-making obligation of the board to be focused on the "ends" decisions, which are those that "are always about the changes for persons to be made outside the organization, along with their cost or priority. Ends are about the organization's impact on the world-much like cost-benefit-that justified its existence."1 All other decisions of the organization are considered to be about the means by which these ends are achieved. 
As Carver notes, "Knowledgeable skeptics think boards can never get beyond being spoon fed by their executives and that, because of their nature, boards must remain fundamentally reactive. With good evidence, many people believe that boards will always stumble from rubber-stamping to meddling and back again. They believe the realities of group decision making forever destines boards to be incompetent groups of competent people."2 In order for boards to meet the goals of their creation, they must become ends focused for appropriate actions to take place."
Using Carver's model for board governance, the present author proposes that, before governing bodies can center their attention on their ends decisions3 and on how their local governments affect their client base (citizens), they must go through an evolutionary process that is both evaluative and systemic. While Carver's theory gives us the model of highly functional board behavior, it does not clarify the various evolutionary steps a board must take to become oriented toward the ends in its actions and policies.
This article proposes a five-step process by which an elected council can reorient its activities toward becoming a true governing body that provides the supervision and policies it needs to create and maintain itself as a high-performing team. In the book Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It, written in 1988, Dr. Ichak Adizes argues that both public and private organizations have definite life cycles but that their deaths are not predictable, unlike those of living creatures, which grow and die. An organization's prime of life ("prime") is at the peak of its life cycle.
The stages before prime are characterized by flexibility; the stages after, by control. Prime represents the optimal balance between control and flexibility. Achieving this point of operational prime should be the goal of an evolving board that wishes to maximize its success.
Early Stages of Evolution
At the start of this evolving process, councilmembers must, first, review the roles the local government needs it to perform so that it can collectively produce the required end results. This assessment of the desired level of commitment will lay the foundation on which all other actions are built and will be the starting point for the council's development toward prime (see accompanying diagram).
Based on this first evaluation, the next step will be to decide whether the right people have been assembled and empowered to operate as a high-performing, goal-oriented team. According to David A. Nadler's research, "Eighty-one percent of survey respondents said it's become more difficult to recruit qualified directors; close to 40 percent said their boards lack an effective process for selecting new members."4 With these challenges, the ascent toward prime can be hampered if the right leadership team has not been fashioned.
In stage three of the evolution, the council will focus on clarifying and prioritizing the critical organizational ends and then reset its policies and agenda to reflect this knowledge, as it gains control over how its time and expertise are being used. This route will also afford the flexibility needed to respond to the changing demands of its environment. During this stage, the council should start to assess its normative behaviors and beliefs. The idea is to ensure that there is a strong alignment between the strategic goals of the organization, or its ends, and the team dynamics that will be needed to support these goals. 
Last Stage and Prime of Life
In stage four of the council's development, its focus must turn to its relationship with the manager or key staff members and to the functioning of these critical informational links. This will entail a two-pronged examination, both of the sources of information that are used by staff and of the filtering process that can occur as information is presented to the council. If these systems of information flow are not operating effectively, the council can quickly find itself in an "informational closet," with little light being thrown on the true nature of the organization's needs and even less connection to the realities of the larger industrial climate in which it operates.
In the fifth and final stage of council development, the council is in prime and is focused, as Carver recommends, on the end policies and tasks of governance. Operating in its prime, the group will be results-oriented, with systematic plans that are followed and appropriately implemented.
Further, the locality will still be growing, by expanding its mission to serve its citizens in new ways, or by maximizing its resources in an innovative manner. At prime, the governing team is both flexible and predictable5, and thus it is highly responsive to the rapidly changing world where it operates.
Claire Woodhead (cwoodhead@pirnie.com) is an associate, Red Oak Consulting, a division of Malcolm Pirnie, Inc., White Plains, New York. 
1. John Carver, "Boards That Make a Difference" (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990).
2. A. David Nadler, "Building Better Boards," Harvard Business Review (May 2004), p. 107.
3. Corporate Lifecycles, LLC, Diagnostic workshop reference material (Institute for Organizational Renewal and Development, Los Angeles, CA, 1995).
 
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