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Does your association’s bylaws or board policies lay out the desired qualities of effective board members?

At the Project Management Institute (PMI), the board of directors recently approved a “Board Future Profile” to describe the expected characteristics of future board members. A task force of current and former board members, reporting to the PMI Governance Committee, prepared the recommendations on board candidate criteria, which are now included in the PMI Rules of the Board, as follows:

a) “An appreciation of the value of the profession served by PMI.
b) The visionary strategic thinking capability to be able to understand the interests of diverse stakeholders, to assess the impacts of environmental and marketplace trends, and then to translate those interests and impacts into strategy.
c) The ability to operate effectively in global environments.
d) The experience of assisting in transformational change driven by strategic issues in a similarly-sized or larger organization.
e) The willingness and experience to serve others.
f) The experience and appreciation of working in a collaborative, collegial, respectful, and productive way with people having diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
g) The experience of performing governing duties to meet legal and regulatory requirements inherent in the fiduciary oversight role of a board.
h) The ability to use, in an appropriate manner, a network of contacts for the purpose of serving as an advocate for PMI and the profession.
i) The willingness and ability to be an ambassador for PMI and the profession served by PMI.” *

A complete description of these candidate criteria can be viewed in Section 6.0.3 of the “Rules of the Board” at http://www.pmi.org/PDF/Rules%20of%20the%20Board.pdf.

While the language of these characteristics may be more thoughtful and comprehensive than most qualifications for board members, I wouldn’t recommend that you simply adopt or adapt them. The source of power of PMI’s nine characteristics derives from at least two important processes:

• The deliberate and thoughtful way in which the entire PMI board of directors engaged in crafting, exploring, revising, and approving these characteristics provided the intellectual capital and buy-in that are essential to this kind of governance initiative.

• The way in which future nominating committees enlist these characteristics to screen board candidates.

The PMI board also clarified that it expects the total composition of the board to be reflective of the diversity existing in the global project management marketplace in respect to gender, culture, geographic location, and stakeholder groups.

In years to come, the governance committee will be tasked with an annual assessment of how well the existing board members possess these characteristics and how well diversity is reflected within the composition of the board, and it may recommend that the board provide additional guidance to the nominationg committee in any year.

Any association that wants its board to consist of leaders who are fully capable of leading the organization into the future could do well to follow the lead of PMI by crafting and adopting a similar set of characteristics that apply to its specific needs.

(*Project Management Institute, PMI® Rules of the Board, Project Management Institute, Inc., 2008. Copyright and all rights reserved. Materials from this publication have been reproduced with permission of PMI.)