1 Board Culture Begins at Home

Cultural Consciousness: Groups Tend Toward Comfort, Unless . . .

We use conscious in everyday speech. Upon waking in the morning, we might say, “I’m not conscious until I have my first cup of coffee.” We would be talking about a fuzzy state in which we were noticing surroundings, being aware and not aware. In an emergency room, we might hear “Is he conscious? Breathing? What are his vital signs?” Consciousness and breathing in this context help a clinician to assess condition. We speak about consciousness in this familiar way, not in any specialized academically mysterious way. Being awake and aware is not the enemy of health, but a vital indicator of it.

But the “culturally conscious” part? Admittedly, seldom does the average person modify words with culturally in everyday conversation, at least in the way we do with conscious. To understand what we mean by culturally conscious, picture this scene:

You enter the ballroom of the annual fundraiser, heartily greeting friends and business associates as you make your way to the head table. You are the honored guest, being celebrated for your agency’s heroic work. The meal begins—a seamless ballet of unfurling napkins, wordless staff, steaming plates and the polite banter of strangers who will be asked to dig deep for the cause. Mercifully, at least for the introverts, a master of ceremonies takes the stage. As chairs turn and coffee cups are topped off, she invites you to the podium. You start up the stairs. She slows as she hands over the microphone, whispering, “You’ve got spinach in your teeth.”

In that exact instant you realize a full-blown standing ovation has begun and every eye is trained on you. No time for a mirror. You step to the podium. Your lips begin to part but, Spinach!—your internal 911 dispatcher hits the alert button. Internal red lights flash and sirens blare. Like a once-sleeping firefighter stepping into bedside-ready boots, your body’s stress control system goes to work: muscles tense, breath deepens, hands grip podium, prefrontal cortex searches for just the right next-step script. This all unfolds in less time than it takes to say “Good evening, friends.” You painstakingly enunciate the first words on your index cards. You stammer and hesitate as your body strategizes with its strapped resources to figure out how it is going to smile and not smile while speaking for the next 25 minutes. You are conscious.

Ever had a spinach-in-the-teeth day like this? We have—too many times to count. That’s consciousness. It is the mental attention or concentration we exert. So what’s the culture part of the “culturally conscious board”? And what does that have to do with the spinach-grinning speaker in the scene above? Culture is your way of being and doing life together. It is the symbols, the unspoken codes of conduct, as well as the written ones. Culture is the way, our way, the right way. No board needs a spinach-in-the-teeth day through their way of doing life together. The threat of cancel-culture-like reactions can seriously compound the ethical calculations boards make when deliberating. No board needs the embarrassment that comes with collectively missing what hides in plain sight. Quite the opposite, we wish every board would or could be spared this, but decisions matter.

We state a basic assumption in the Introduction—boards make decisions. As a board member, you stand with your organization in the gap between the world as it is and the world as it can be if your mission succeeds. In other words, the best of board work results in transformation. For this reason, a culturally conscious board explicitly considers culture—that of the board, its stakeholders and the wider society in which it serves—as a shaping influence in its deliberations toward intended impact. It intentionally seeks to be aware of its own culture, while also acknowledging its own cultural blindfolds. To be culturally conscious is fundamental to a board’s integrity. It is fundamental to its fiduciary purpose of mission fulfillment.

We make a secondary assumption. You would prefer to make decisions in a diligent, generous and circumspect manner. You want to work smarter, not harder. For this reason, when board members receive their board meeting package late, or with just a few hours to review complicated documents due for a vote that same day, that simple practice impacts the decision quality of that team. If your board consists of 10 members and 4 or 5 are consistently absent, those behaviors impact the decision outcomes of that board. If your board provides nurses abroad but does not have nurse insights represented at the boardroom table, then the impact of your decisions is affected during a crisis because it lacks integrity.

No board would stomach even the hint of an allegation that it lacked integrity in its decision-making. Assuming integrity is related only to honesty, a board so accused would begin to gladly invite accountability and transparency. “Come, look through all our books, our minutes, our conflict-of-interest agreements—look everywhere and you will find no evidence of wrongdoing, no breach of integrity,” your board would protest. And rightfully so, if integrity pertained only to honesty. But integrity has a wider semantic range, and this range is important to the work we do in defining culture’s role in board decision-making. Integrity also means completeness, coherence and wholeness. A brand-new tire with a pinhole lacks a kind of integrity that is not theoretical. We know the practical implications. Knowing whether the tires you rely on have small holes in them or not is a case of whether you are conscious of the tire’s integrity or not.

We think of consciousness as a heightened focus provoked by our surroundings and experiences, enabling us to predict and participate with integrity in the world around us. It may be involuntary and passive in response to a stimulus, such as smelling coffee upon waking. Or it might be the kind of mental exertion we use if typing a text while running hurriedly through an airport to catch a soon-departing flight. In this sense, consciousness means paying attention—it exerts focus so as to not miss things, to capture everything essential, to keep everything that pertains together. A decision has integrity only if all the factors that matter to its success are duly considered.

When decisions are made on behalf of others, naturally, their definition of success overrides yours. Catching yourself in the act of presumption is extremely difficult when acting alone. However, no mission exists in a social vacuum. Every mission is suspended in a web of stakeholder relationships. If you invite these connections into your capacity-deepening process, you will not only evade the ethnocentric know-it-all spirituality that made uncomfortable classics out of Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer’s The Ugly American, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, but you will position yourself and your organization for a dialogue between equals out of which sustainability, reciprocity and lasting impact may emerge.

The culturally conscious board decides in consultation with its stakeholders, especially those with the smallest amount of power to exert their own will and resources. It is conscious of the role that culture—the cohesion system of any membership group—plays in the survival and sustainability of that group. Culture is active in at least three senses in this working definition. In this description of consciousness, culture is a provocateur of why a matter may get heightened focus, perhaps explaining how different groups might have differing lenses and scales for what ought to provoke attention and participation. Culture plays a sense-making role enabling or disenabling how we interface with the world, through construction, conduct and communication, those things we make, how we act and with whom. Culture is the internally imposed arbiter between what we say we are doing and what we are actually doing.

A culturally conscious board is interested in how culture shapes the services it delivers and how its governance meets the cultural requirements of various stakeholders in its fulfillment process. When cultural difference calls for a culture shift to better ensure that mission intent is kept, the culturally conscious board makes that shift. The culturally conscious board revises its assumptions, processes, policies and procedures as it learns more and more about the implications of its policy reach with the people who care about the organization’s ability to act with integrity and partnership with them. Such a board, upon learning that a cultural difference has emerged that impacts its ability to serve, initiates consultation by explicitly asking for help from its own members to access (and assess!) their own experience with that difference, or it widens its consultation circle to include coaches and cultural mentors.

Your board is subject to the social laws that shape all working groups. Like natural laws, when you perceive them, respect them or even work with them, these laws reward. Disregard these physical laws, in some cases for even an instant, and the natural world claps back quite insistently and unforgivingly in assigning consequences, some of which may be irreversible. Pull together a chair, treasurer and secretary and a charter and bylaws, then register and pay fees with your secretary of state, and boom, you have a board, an organization—on paper. Beyond this foundational legal structuring phase, what a board becomes will follow the patterns of what most all groups become, a comfort zone. That is what we do as humans. Norms are good. But norms also have a way of rocking us to sleep, dulling us into spectators, requiring little of our critical faculties. Culture is happy to provide a bed. It is likely to resemble your boardroom table.

You Have a Culture . . . You Have Manners

While the principles of The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact may apply to any board, it is our intention to address those on whom many of us around the planet have staked some of our deepest humanitarian hopes—the transformation sector. We are burdened most for you. We think you and your boards matter.

And so we sat down at a table together and raised some questions: Why are we—Jennifer and Russell—writing this? A conversation unfolded about our experiences in diverse decision-making settings and how these shaped the roads we took and did not take. We recounted the culturally rich family legacies shaping our identities, the gritty and foolhardy service projects, the prejudices that confused and humiliated us in some of the unlikeliest of places on Earth. We asked, What do we have to give, to whom? On whose behalf do we write? We noticed common lessons entrusted to us by thousands who may never set foot out of their cities and villages, but whose faces and predicaments we pledged to remember in solidarity. We took time to listen to each other’s stories.

As we hinted in the Preface, our roots are in community development and capacity building, at home and abroad. We have been nonprofit entrepreneurs multiple times over. Having both enjoyed higher education careers as leadership educators, we continue to encourage and be inspired by the social impact efforts of thousands of leaders we were privileged to serve. We have started, served, consulted and coached boards. Both career adult educators of leadership, we happened upon a shared assumption and sobered realization about how leaders are formed and fortified: Leaders are welcomed to the table. But how many are not yet invited, whose voices are needed to better serve the missions that transform communities?

Think about your own leadership journey. Think about how you were formed, validated and told “you belong at the leadership table.” Do you remember someone inviting you, telling you, in so many words, that you just might have what it takes to be a leader? Was it at a Sunday afternoon dinner, when your grandpa said, “I’d like you to have something I’ve saved for you—it’s my old briefcase . . . you’ll need it someday”? Did a high school coach call you over during practice and say, “Watch your temper. These kids look up to you. You keep losing it, you’ll lose their respect and we all lose”? That was a call to take your seat. And if you are going to be at the leadership table, where decisions are made, your mindset matters.

Cultural Home: How Culture Forms

Russ was a professor for a significant season of his life. In a course called Leadership in a Multicultural Society, he required learners to write a “my cultural journey” paper, a project that allowed each to revisit critical cross-cultural turning points in their cultural identity development. One paper sticks out in his mind. It’s the story of Kevin. His opening line is still arresting to this day: “I don’t have a culture. I guess American is my culture. I’m just a white guy from Kansas. I wish I had a culture.”5 Russ recalls hot tears of compassion involuntarily brimming his eyelids as he absorbed these vulnerable words.

Just was pregnant with street-level implications for the people this leader would one day serve. Can you imagine an intercultural encounter—usually requiring at least two cultures to tango—in which only one of the parties is conscious of having a culture, only one is aware they have and have always had a cultural identity? Of course, as a person of color, Russ is quite cognizant of being the recipient of a cultural story. By recipient he means recipient of a gift or an invitation. With all the social mirrors, how could someone miss the gift of their own cultural identity?

Being born into a Black family in America, at a time when his own civil rights were not protected by law, he would know the contours of what W. E. B. Dubois meant by every Black man, at some time in his life, will have to reckon with the crisis of being Black.6 For Russ, it was not a matter of whether he had a cultural story, but what this consciousness required of him.

Receiving our social location, in all its richness and complexity, is akin to receiving any gift. One is grateful. One stewards and does not squander. One is not too proud, after all it was received. One permits no acts of shame from others, after all it was a gift. If you ask Russ where this generous perspective comes from, he will smile, thinking fondly of his late father, Ralph, a tall, handsome U.S. Marine Corps master sergeant who exuded a calm, nurturing presence at home and a serious bent to fidelity and duty to society. He will share tender stories of his mid-90s mother, Mildred, a dynamite 4' 11" West Virginia coal miner’s daughter, whose watchwords were self-respect, self-sufficiency and self-giving to others. As a military family, they lived in a lot of places, traveled lots. She would marshal them before a road trip with “Now each of you pack and carry your own bags.” She insisted each of her children “stand up tall, stand up for what’s right and stand up for those who can’t do so themselves.” His parents modeled an appreciation for their own story and for that of others on equal terms. More importantly, they emphasized the kind of person each child was obliged to become. To add an urgency to integrity-keeping, his dad would remind them: “It’s later than you think.”

Russ became a conscious steward of his ethnicity and cultural identity. When at varied leadership tables, he expects himself and others to be cognizant and conversant in their own cultural story as stewards, neither too proud nor ever ashamed. He commends this posture of grateful humility as foundational to a culturally conscious leader and board. From this starting place, we not only claim our seats, but we enroll in a culture learning journey so we know what to do with them once there.

Cultural Superiority: We All Begin in a Cultural Home

On the back stairs of the Jukanovich house are family photographs that go back five generations on each side, with each frame telling a different story. There’s one of the great-great-grandfather, a Polish immigrant, who was shot in the back and killed during a mining strike known as the Hazleton Massacre; the great-grandmother from Paris who gave away her inheritance to marry a WWI soldier who was actually a philandering eccentric inventor; the grandmother who performed an opera recital in Carnegie Hall once but never fully realized her dreams; the Montenegrin immigrant who returned to his homeland to fight against the armies of Austria-Hungary; the German great-grandfather who ruled his domain with an iron fist; the mother inflicted with polio at the age of seventeen—story after story.

Jennifer’s daughter asked her once why they even have these photos on display if there are so many sad stories. Pointing to the last few and more recent photographs, Jennifer shared, in this teachable moment: “The successes and the challenges have formed our family over generations. They make us, for good and bad, who we are. And now, we have the chance to write a new story.” You see, the Jukanovich children, today, represent the rest of the family story. Their own birth cultures, through adoption from their homelands of China and Rwanda, beautify and deepen the story, through both heartache and hope. Yet, when forming their new family, Dano and Jennifer were faced with questions from a few relatives: “Why not try other methods first before adoption?” “So, there’ll be a yellow daughter?” “Africa?! That means he’ll be black? What’s wrong with kids from here?” Blood mattered. And while blood is red, the color of skin mattered more to a few. Fortunately, most of the family was welcoming, but words of a few matter and hurt.

We all have a story, and applying the standard of one’s cultural group as the choice that’s superior to those of others is very common and natural. It’s often called ethnocentrism, a preference for “your mama’s bread” over that of other membership groups. When it is unmentionable, when it’s off the table, then that biased preference can find its way into a dozen seemingly unrelated expressions or microaggressions, such as a raised eyebrow at a colleague’s idea, a “no” vote in which you insist on things being done your way or the highway. At least until that guest or stranger becomes the one whose way differs from yours.

Cultural Inferiority: Mistakenly Leaving Home Behind

If ethnocentrism distorts our relationships by its over-identification with self, its opposite is just as destructive. Consider the Jukanovich family wall again. If in seeking to honor her children’s cultures, Jennifer removes all references to the European ancestry that shapes her, seeking to leave it behind, she is not being true to her cultural formation. In fact, to remove those references is to nurture fiction. In Russ’s recollection of a student who had abdicated the gift of cultural identity, he stewards his comparative experience with cultural identity as an empathic bridge. Leveraging his own cultural consciousness as a warrant to speak up (a consciousness wrought by keeping a grounded dignity amid society’s fickle political interest games with his ethnic and racial demographic standing), he can relate to the learner’s self-limiting belief—as a receiver of his social membership, and not from the power position that the learner should think otherwise, simply because of his authority as a professor.

Just as Jennifer encouraged her daughter, Russ fostered curiosity in a fellow learner as to whether cultural vacancy is even possible. Being culturally neutral is a convenient cop-out tactic that leaves well-defended comfort zones unperturbed. It leaves relevant participants off the guest list for the corporate work party that has to build and nurture a culture in which we all can flourish. Each is part of a story, and stories touch, conflict, converge and move on. But no one is a cultural bystander. Everyone has a cultural home.

So the boardroom table, a table set in particular cultural spaces with members hailing each from their own rich cultural homes, can become what Romanita Hairston calls “an island of sanctuary” for you, and maybe you alone if none on your board will go with you, to experiment with the beauty, dignity and responsibility that comes with stewarding a seat at a boardroom table.

Cultural Humility: A Learning Path for Board Members

While we direct our attention to boards in The Culturally Conscious Board, we invite you to test our assumptions with other deliberative bodies you may be a part of, such as councils, committees and working groups. It is extremely difficult to come into consciousness in isolation. There is that moment of truth all humans experience when we receive the gift of seeing ourselves as others might see us. We realize not only do we have bread we prefer, our mama’s bread, but we see they have mamas and breads they love too. And we can both stand with ourselves fully clothed in our rich cultural wardrobe, and also simultaneously appreciate that they, too, are richly garbed in their cultural finest.

In the thickness of socially constructed barriers that frustrate and divide, a narrowing occurs where each, equal in the dignity of their shared humanity, experiences a little more room. Empathy renders a service: we uphold appreciative mirrors for one another. In humility, we are conscious of our own vulnerability to spinach-grin moments. We cultivate tables safe enough to say to each other, “Hey, you might want to take a glance in the mirror before getting up on stage.”

The social impact sector is run through with idealistic change agents of every stripe, but unless some things get said, some decisions will be processed as sorely anemic. Many rely on you and your vision of a better world. You must get this, or who else will? So, we want to help. We want to encourage your important work as agents of transformation at the boardroom table. So, whether you:

are a fumbling, eagle-eyed start-up,

said yes but are unsure where to start,

will ever get the chance to attend a board training event,

are a seasoned board member suddenly in the hot seat,

wonder if you are doing any good by sitting in late-night meetings, bickering over a dollar,

are tired of constantly being the guest in a story that doesn’t appreciate yours,

we say, this book is written for you.