Not so Benign Neglect

Depending upon your age, you will no doubt remember the frenzy caused by the title of a policy written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time was working in the Nixon White House, on loan from Harvard University.  Writing as an advisor on urban affairs, Moynihan proposed a policy of benign neglect to address the racial tensions of 1960.  His thinking was that if we stopped attention and focus on the problem, things would, at best improve in the natural course of progress, or, at worst, at least not deteriorate.

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In a recent conversation with a client, he made reference to the fact that his board practices benign neglect; then, he rephrased it to say it practices “blind and benign stewardship.”  While I don’t like the behavior, I truly like the phraseology, as it speaks volumes.

A few days after that, I was speaking with a radio show producer who asked what I really liked to talk about to reporters.  The answer:  anything about nonprofits.  Naturally, he pushed, so I picked some particulars:  educating reporters who cover nonprofits so they stop making some of the dumb and myth-perpetuating statements they do and helping nonprofit board members understand that the title comes with very real and important responsibilities that they need to execute.

One of the really sad things about addictive behavior is that while everyone around the addict is wringing her/his hands, wanting and wishing and hoping, and sometimes  praying that the addict will come to her/his senses, will get help and right his/her ship, no matter how much everyone else wants, nothing can happen until the addict recognizes and wants the same thing:  help and correction.  And, as the experts tell us so often, that doesn’t happen until the addict hits rock bottom.

So, it seems with board members.  A recent discussion in one of my Master’s classes focused on leadership:  innate or taught, compared to management, what makes for a good leader, and, of course, in today’s world of nonprofits, executive transitions.  One very experienced nonprofit leader herself reflected on the fact that an executive transition means needing the board where, she notes, there is all too frequently a dearth of leaders, to step up.  She goes on to challenge her classmates with the question:  what is being done in each of our organizations to train and nurture that leadership?

I had to laugh!  (That is one of the good things about on-line teaching; you can edit before it is too late!)  One of those laughs that comes from the limbic system of the brain rather than from the belly.  That question has triggered my emotions—all negative.  Benign and blind neglect allow you not to look at what you are doing, not critique what and how you are doing and, absolutely, not to assess the impact of your behavior—or, better put, non-behavior.  Benign neglect frees a person, a group, a society of taking positive action—and the responsibility that comes with action.

And in the science of threes, my third connection to this issue arrived via an email I got from an almost client who was cancelling a board training session coming up within a matter of days.  Hadn’t hit rock bottom, yet.  No, this board wanted to try to figure “it” (read, “what they should be doing”) out all on its own.   First, it said it would interpret and discuss on its own the self-assessment survey that precedes our board training that not one board member had bothered to complete (despite it taking less than 15 minutes and having had weeks to do so).  Second, it said, that if their plan failed and a training were eventually needed, “… whomever would be doing the training, would familiarize us with the docs. we are not aware of.  So, we need to know which docs. we are not familiar with and get to know them.”

Reading this last of the threes seems to have pushed me to rock bottom.  I’m now in therapy to recover from an addiction to the work associated with the notion that nonprofit boards matter and that those serving on these boards have a moral responsibility to understand that job and do it every bit as well as they do/did their day jobs.