Noses In, Fingers Out
A short map of board governance and boundary keeping; lessons learned the slow way
We spent twenty-seven minutes on a one-time fifteen-hundred-dollar benefit for three staff members, a small question that swelled to fill the room because small questions do that if you let them. I asked whether we were in the right conversation for the board, which is governance-speak for: “please tell me if I am over my skis, or whether this was better handled as a policy somewhere else.” The air eased a little, chairs settled, someone circled a note. It might have been the right call; walking to the car I wondered if I had called it a minute too soon, my batting average on perfect timing remains safely hypothetical. Looking back all these years later, I realize that was the first time I felt the job in public, the thin line between being useful as a board member and being in the way.
Over time these nonprofit board roles began to look less like a series of important pronouncements and more like boundary work. Staying curious, keeping noses in and fingers out, turning live issues into policies when they belong in the room rather than on a to-do list. What follows are a few moments when I missed the line and a few when I caught it, and the small tests I reach for now, provisional as they are.
My apprenticeship started years earlier in a Harlem cafeteria where I tutored after work, with wobbling tables, two cups of apple juice warming between me and my assigned middle schooler, fractions that blurred into nonsense from repetition. I stacked chairs, chased markers, stayed late because someone needed to lock up, said yes to the small roles that never make a brochure. Most nights I was thirty percent tutor, seventy percent furniture mover, one hundred percent sticky with apple juice. One evening the program director handed me a packet the thickness of a paperback and a seat at the junior board. No ceremony; just read this and show up. In my early twenties I expected board decisions to live in speeches. Slowly I began to suspect they ride on the questions that get asked and the ones that do not.
In Boston at Wondermore where I eventually became Vice Chair and then Board Chair, I started to see boundary errors in public, including my own. I once let a swag-giveaway debate hijack a meeting because it felt urgent; we burned forty minutes deciding nothing the staff could not decide faster, then ran out of clock for the strategic item that actually needed us. I drove home with the sour sense of having been present and unhelpful. After that we tried a simple experiment: if an item was operational and we could not shape it into a policy within a minute or two, we parked it, named an owner, set a date, moved on. It did not fix everything; a few times we parked too much and had to circle back. I suspect it helped more than it hurt.
Boundary work also meant saying no to distractions, even when the dollars glittered. We declined a shiny program that promised a flattering announcement and restricted income; it would have nudged us a few degrees off what we do well and soaked staff time we did not have. The announcement would have been photogenic and my ego wanted desperately to say yes. Saying no cooled enthusiasm and cost us a report we would have enjoyed writing; we kept the more important thing we needed, which was attention for the core job the organization exists to do. On paper that sequence looks neat and tidy; in the room we were feeling our way through the dark.
Only later did I find cleaner names for what these rooms had been teaching me. An HBR conversation with Ellen Zane gave me a phrase for something I had been fumbling toward, “noses in, fingers out”, and left me with a better question than the slogan: what counts as a finger, and who decides, and when; I keep checking to see if mine are showing. People talked about quarterly meetings where acronyms stampede and the usefulness of a naïve question asked once. None of it was new, only more legible for having been said aloud, and stamped with the HBR brand.
Nonprofit time slips quickly on the calendar. In September the year looks orderly, a retreat here, a fundraiser there, packets you can read on a train. Then a filing slides past a deadline, a key staffer gives notice, the lease comes due. When that season hit us and the packets doubled, what seemed to help was not volume but plainer talk and tighter asks. Shorter memos that led to decisions, the criteria, the owner, the date, and what would count as “done”. Then we tried to stick to it. The discipline read as warmth to the staff because it respected their time and decision-making authority, which is another way of saying we were learning to respect our own.
Different rooms, same boundary. Most days now I sit in for-profit boardrooms where the acronyms change and the units of consequence seem larger, but the rules feel familiar. I try to come in read-in enough to ask plain questions. I try not to solve operational puzzles from the bleachers. I try to respect the people who carry the bag every day and try to avoid grandstanding. On good days those habits are enough and the room feels inviting; on other days you miss and try again.
If there is a lesson here, it is provisional. Informal roles can turn out to be small apprenticeships, and sometimes they lead you into rooms, and sometimes, once you are there, they hand you responsibility you did not expect. I keep a few simple checks that seem to help, like the quick test for whether an issue belongs in policy or in operations; they fail often enough that I do not mistake them for rules. I have tried to laminate them. Mostly I try to notice which question might move the work an inch and ask that one first.
Somewhere there is still a cafeteria where a kid is chewing a pencil and a volunteer is trying to be helpful for an hour before catching a train. I do not want to romanticize it; I want to admit that those hours teach you how to carry chairs, then packets, then the weight of a vote without theatrics. I am still learning what counts as a finger, usually after I have pointed with it.