Q:

“I have been involved with boards from three different small nonprofits which serve people who are experiencing significant loss and grief. The boards of these organizations are populated by people with lived experience. One issue I have noticed across all three organizations is that personal feelings can cloud people's judgment as a board member, making it really hard to navigate conflict, and especially difficult to uphold governance. When the organization is where the memory of your wife lost to cancer lives, or it's the only ‘silver lining’ of navigating a stillborn birth, decisions are extremely personal. Are there resources out there to navigate this, particularly around governance and decision-making? How do we balance board member passion and fiduciary duty? I want there to be a helpful tool or conflict management strategy for this, but I can't seem to find it!”

A:

Why Governance Best Practices Fall Short

When we go looking for governance ‘best practices’, what we often find is advice that is built on the assumption that board directors are purely rational, dispassionate actors. And we know that’s simply not true, since board directors are human beings, and humans are very messy, emotional beings. It’s not uncommon for there to be a tension between an individual board director’s personal motivations and what could be considered to be the best interests of the organization. This tension can be more pronounced in situations where there is a strong personal or emotional connection to the organization’s work, and I imagine that a connection forged by grief is particularly strong. 

There’s nothing inherently problematic about this - show me a system where human behaviour isn’t motivated by complex emotions! The problem is that the governance ‘best practices’ that we rely on ignore this human element, which sets many boards up for struggle. So we talk about fiduciary duty like it’s a shirt you wear to board meetings, but we ignore the body underneath it. 

You can put legal definitions on a powerpoint slide, but how is that going to influence any individual’s behaviour in the face of deep-seated, and often unacknowledged, emotional motivations that every individual brings to their board service? Without teasing this out, we can easily end up in grey areas and tricky situations where it becomes difficult to clarify when individual motivations may start to compromise an organization’s governance. 

Designing Governance for Humans

The alternative is to design governance in a way that creates space for actual human beings to do systems-level work in a collaborative way. Conventional governance advice tends to focus primarily on processes - use this template, follow this checklist, write this policy kind of stuff. Processes matter! So much! But process, in and of itself, is not enough. In my practice, I have developed what I call the 3P framework: People, Power, Process. When we look at these three dimensions together, we are better equipped to design governance approaches that actually work to advance an organization’s core purpose. 

The 3P Framework: People, Power, Process 

• People: Governance is carried out by human beings in specific roles. Every individual brings their own backgrounds, experiences, motivations, personalities, values etc., to the table. And when individuals interact, we are in the space of interpersonal dynamics. We always have to think about what’s happening at the individual level for people involved in governance, and remember that these people have full lives outside of the organization.
• Power: Governance is decision-making, which means that it is a space of power. There are two main types of power that we want to think about here - social and positional. Social power is the influence a person has based on their relationships, reputation, or social identity (such as race, gender, or class). Positional power is the authority that comes from a person’s formal role or title, such as ‘Board Director’, ‘Chair’ or ‘Executive Director’. It’s important to be intentional about how power is distributed in governance, and to ensure that all power is balanced with accountability mechanisms.
• Process: This is the infrastructure that supports the ‘doing’ work of governance, things like structures that guide decision-making, policies, agendas, facilitation norms, voting methods, etc. Process can be formal or informal (so much of it is informal!), and ideally, it should serve to enable governance in a way that advances core purpose, rather than constrain it.

Applying the 3P Framework to Emotionally Invested Boards

We can take a question like: ‘How can we ensure that board directors with strong emotional motivations can meet their legal obligations to the organization?’ and break it down for greater clarity through the lens of the 3P framework:

• People: How do we make space for the complex emotional realities of our board directors?
• Power: How do we ensure our board directors are acting in the best interests of the organization, rather than personal motivations? 
• Process: What kind of infrastructure would enable this?

A few suggestions come to mind. The first is to bring a trauma-informed lens to your governance, which will help create an environment that is sensitive to the deep emotional weight that board directors may be carrying. The second is to build a culture of responsible, reflective leadership that is backed up by meaningful accountability mechanisms. And a formally structured board decision-making lens is the process that will help support this.

People: Bringing a Trauma-Informed Lens to Board Work

It makes a lot of sense to practice trauma-informed leadership in an organization that works in grief-adjacent spaces. But this approach can be beneficial in any nonprofit space, and it doesn’t hurt that the core tenets of a trauma-informed lens (a sense of safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and equity) align nicely with principles of strong governance. Engaging board directors in training related to trauma-informed leadership would be a good start, and I recommend using this lens for the development of policies and design of processes, including board decision-making. There are many resources out there relating to trauma-informed approaches, but I haven’t found much that relates to nonprofit boards specifically. Here’s an article that focuses on implementing trauma-informed care in organizations, and this article offers some concrete steps for applying a trauma-informed approach in the workplace (big thanks to Sahar Vermezyari for sharing).

Power: Build a Culture of Responsible, Reflective Leadership

‘Responsible’ leadership expects board directors to understand and manage their power appropriately. ‘Reflective’ leadership invites individual directors to learn and grow throughout their experience. Building a culture of responsible, reflective leadership means that the board as a whole works to create the space for both responsibility and reflection, rather than expecting every individual to figure it out on their own. 

This starts with structured learning and development opportunities. All board directors should be equipped with an understanding of their legal obligations, and the effective use and limits of their positional power. Considerations related to social power tend to fall into the reflective side of things, by creating opportunities for individuals to consider how their own social privilege and positioning, conduct, communication, biases and assumptions show up in their leadership. 

A culture-building approach allows individuals to hold themselves accountable, and ensures that the board as a whole can hold itself (and all individuals) accountable as well. Integrating these principles into your board orientation and development activities, as well as regular meetings, will help support this kind of leadership culture, leveraging the infrastructure mentioned below.

Process: Using a Board Decision-Making Lens 

A structured decision-making lens is a great way to ensure deeper engagement and more transparent decision-making at the board table. Imagine that every board director has a one-page document that they must work through before casting a vote, either as a personal reflection exercise, as part of a board discussion, or a bit of both. 

Taking the time to articulate the most important decision-making considerations, and compiling them into a checklist, can be a helpful way to bring some more intention and structure to board votes. The document can be customized to your organization and could include a series of prompts such as: 

• What personal biases or motivations am I bringing into this decision?
• Has this decision-making process demonstrated a ‘duty of care’? How will we know if the outcome demonstrates our ‘duty of loyalty’? 
• Have we considered diverse perspectives in coming to this decision, including the voices of those most impacted?
• Does this decision reflect our organizational values?

The specific decision-making lens that a board would apply to their work will look different from organization to organization. This is a tool that will likely change and evolve, and will never be fully exhaustive. But with the right prompts, you may be able to bring more attention to the ways that individual directors’ personal motivations are showing up in the process, opening up the opportunity for self-reflection or discussion in this area. This is a proactive, trauma-informed approach that supports board directors to demonstrate responsible, reflective leadership in their role. 

When Governance Is Designed for Real People

Governance is complex, leadership is challenging, and humans are imperfect. So what we need is to find approaches that support board directors to understand and fulfil their roles effectively and ethically, while creating space for all the ways that our own emotions, motivations and experiences shape our behaviour. Bringing a trauma-informed approach to governance is one way to do this, paired with enabling infrastructure and a culture of responsible, reflective leadership that builds shared accountability across the board. But in a circumstance where one director’s personal motivations are interfering with their role, remember that the board only acts as a whole, so the onus to uphold governance standards - and hold individual directors accountable for failing to meet those standards - falls to the remaining directors.

Big Takeaways

• Design governance for humans: Effective governance recognizes that board members are real people with lived experience, emotions, and personal motivations—and governance systems must be designed to work with that reality, not pretend it doesn’t exist.
  
  
• Use a People–Power–Process lens: Strong governance looks at who is involved, how power operates, and which formal and informal processes shape decision-making, understanding that these three dimensions interact and must be intentionally designed together.
  
  
• Apply trauma-informed approaches: Trauma-informed governance creates conditions of safety, trust, collaboration, and accountability, helping boards navigate conflict, emotion, and power in ways that strengthen fiduciary practice rather than undermine it.