Jewish Communal Leadership: A Board Chair’s Perspective
Alan Solow
Alan Solow is an experienced communal board leader, having served as the Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations and the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
It usually happens over a meal hosted by the chair of the Nominating Committee. The current board chair and the head professional at the nonprofit agency in the Jewish communal world are often present as well. They pop the question: Would you be willing to serve as chair of the board?
The initial reaction, at least for me, has always been to be flattered. But once my head clears from the delusions of grandeur, I begin to ask myself critical questions that help me imagine what my leadership would look like, should I decide to say yes. Why me? Why now? What specific ideas and objectives do I have that I think are achievable during my expected term of office? Can I depend on the support of my fellow board members to endorse the direction in which I want to move the organization? Are the chief professional and I on the same page regarding this direction? Does that matter? In short: how much and what sort of change do I think is needed? Can I make it happen?
There is always some doubt at the beginning. Will I succeed or will I instead embarrass myself? What will happen if I am wrong?
It is the rare, and probably overly self-assured, leader who does not have such concerns. Fortunately, there is much wisdom in the Jewish tradition that is useful in confronting these questions. Take for example, our most storied hero. God calling upon Moses to lead his People out of the land of Egypt appeared to be an enticing offer from a very good source. Yet, Moses looked for excuses as to why he was not the right choice. He openly worried that he would not be accepted by the people, despite being God’s choice. Even when he was reassured by God, Moses complained that he was “not a man of words.” Yet, God insisted, and Moses emerged as the key individual to lead the Jewish people from slavery to freedom.
Moses teaches us that when acting in a leadership position, it is important to remember that the measure of excellence is not perfection. For example, he lost his temper at the sight of the Golden Calf and demolished the original tablets brought down from Sinai. Later, he defied God’s order and struck the rock that God had told him to tap, arousing God’s anger. Yet, notwithstanding these moments, Moses succeeded gloriously.
If your favorite hero is not Moses, perhaps it is David. Could there be a more successful-yet-flawed hero? The slayer of Goliath and the uniter of kingdoms was also a philanderer who sent the husband of the woman he desired to the front to die. Though I hope that the imperfections of today’s leaders do not rise to this level, we all have flaws. In David’s case, the good outweighed the bad, as he solidified the future of his people with a combination of strength and creative intellect, the former demonstrated through military success and the latter reflected in his authorship of many Psalms.
Since first becoming a Jewish communal board member in 1979, I have learned that if you are passionate about the work of your agency, you can maximize your ability to do good by undertaking a position of leadership. On six different occasions, each with a different agency, I have elected to take on the challenge and agreed to serve as board chair or president. Each experience has presented a different set of issues and obstacles, but in each instance, the key has been to ask the right questions at the outset and then to revisit them constantly throughout my term of service.
In this short essay, I am looking back and thinking through what has and has not worked well. Not every situation is the same, and the type of leadership required has varied from agency to agency, and sometimes even from month to month. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there are some universal principles that, when thoughtfully applied, maximize the chance of success both for the lay leader and the agency. Below, I identify what I consider to be the key elements, based on the lessons from my experience.
First things first. Honesty requires recognizing that there is a price to be paid. Ask yourself: Do I care enough about this organization to make the investment of time and other sacrifices, often including a substantial financial commitment that my colleagues determine constitutes a meaningful investment given my circumstances, to make the commitment and say yes? One rule I have always applied to my Jewish communal leadership is that, as board chair, I must treat my responsibility to the agency as equal to or greater than my obligations to my professional colleagues in my own business. I also must recognize that acceptance of this responsibility is a significant imposition on the family whose support I have been blessed with for over 50 years. But I would argue that the benefits to my business partners and to my family outweigh any burden. The friendships I’ve made, the communal, civic, and personal relationships I’ve developed, and the lessons I’ve learned have all enriched my life and the lives of those around me.
There are only so many hours in a day, and board leadership often requires an intensive investment of time to accomplish what you want during your term. This means that you must have a clear vision of the direction in which you want to move the organization, and you must also believe that your leadership can make a difference in achieving these goals. Moses had the advantage of a God who told him what to do and where to go with considerable precision. In this day and age, we have to figure it out for ourselves. The first board chair position I held was for an agency in which I had been a very active participant in an extensive future planning process. This was in the early 1980s, and the thrust of our conclusions was that we needed to invest more in early childhood Jewish education—a significant move for an agency that had previously focused primarily on camping services. As a father with young children, this revised mission resonated with me, and I was determined to take on a leadership position to make the needed change happen.
In several other instances, I knew that a change in professional leadership was on the horizon. There is no more important role a lay leader can play than selecting the right CEO for an agency. I have not always been as successful as I would have liked in matching organizational needs with the new hire’s talents, but the opportunity is critical. There is no reason to take on leadership responsibility unless you have something you want to achieve. I have seen board chairs who take on the job for the expected glory with little understanding of the direction in which they wish to lead. In each instance, the agency has suffered. Don’t take on the job without clear objectives.
On the other hand, you can’t accomplish anything if your fellow board members or the agency’s senior staff do not support your vision. This support is not necessary on day one, but if you don’t have it, you do need a strategy to build it and a reasonable expectation that you can succeed. Having the buy-in of your professional and lay colleagues also matters because service as board chair typically lasts two to four years. This is rarely enough time to make lasting change. That means you will need to influence the culture of the organization so that it continues to move in the direction you desire. You must have successors lined up to further implement your plan of action, and you must have the support of staff, including the CEO, who will be the ones following through on key elements of your program. Would we consider Moses a success in retrospect had Joshua not been ready to accept the mantle and carry through with the mission?
To build the required consensus, the initial thing you must do is listen. This is very hard for most leaders, including me. At the very moment you have been asked to lead, and when you are ready to say yes because you know what you want to accomplish, you must stop and take into account the views of others, some of whom might have been contenders for the job you have been awarded. The failure to reach out and hear from others, or to test out the direction in which you want to move, at least preliminarily, is likely to be fatal. Perhaps even more importantly, if you listen with an open mind and with care, you are likely to discover how you can best develop, refine, and frame your ideas to obtain wide acceptance. You might, in many instances, find it wise to modify your objectives, or at least to change how you describe and promote them. Along the way, you will gain valuable allies who will be critical helpers in your journey as board chair.
As these guidelines already suggest, your ideas should not be static. Your vision at the outset might need to change based on new circumstances or it might be influenced by the ideas of others and the problems they identify. As the principal leader, it is still ultimately your responsibility to set the agenda for the agency during your term, so you still do have the final say. Not getting too far out ahead of your board will save you lots of headaches, though it might mean achieving your goals more incrementally rather than with the dramatic flourish that you originally envisioned. Our tendency as leaders is to want to be transformative, but most of the agencies we are asked to lead have traditions and embedded cultures that must be respected on the road to progress. With active listening and understanding, you can take this into account and enhance the likelihood of success.
Furthermore, over the course of several years of responsibility, the facts and circumstances faced by the organization often change due to events beyond your control. During my chairmanship of the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, the Great Recession arrived unexpectedly. It changed our financial situation and forced us to reassess our priorities. In certain respects, we doubled down on some of the directions in which I had hoped to move, while with others, this change resulted in some retrenchment or an outright change in direction. Moses probably thought the path from Egypt to the Promised Land would be straight. It was not to be, for reasons he could not have anticipated.
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Changes in financial circumstances are not only the cause for reassessment and adjustment. Local and world events have an impact. The emergence of COVID-19 is an obvious example, but it need not be so dramatic. I had the privilege of serving as the chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations for two-and-a-half years. The Conference had the responsibility of representing the consensus position of the organized American Jewish Community to the executive branch of the American government and the broader world on behalf of its fifty-plus members. In one of my first weeks on the job, Israel went to war with Hamas in Operation Cast Lead. I faced issues that I had not anticipated (at least not immediately) and needed to educate myself on policy nuances during a change of American presidential administrations. I was ready to lead because I knew to listen, and I was able to assess the pulse of the Conference members and then develop positions that reflected our consensus view. The way I went about doing that reflected my own style of leadership and set a standard for how I attempted to lead going forward. What I learned most of all is that the challenges of leadership are rarely stable. Because we live in a dynamic world, you must articulate the general direction in which you want to lead and then be ready to apply your vision to unfolding circumstances without excessive rigidity. This might sound vague and even trite, but it is the job that needs to be done.
Undirected searching for a solution when faced with a problem does not lead to successful adaptation, and meandering is not leadership. Even as circumstances change, you still must be governed by the overriding reasons behind why you decided to take the job. For me, at the Conference, I had made clear during the interview process that my goal was to make sure every member legitimately believed that their viewpoint would be considered in formulating our final policy positions. That would hold even if they did not agree with the ultimate conclusion I articulated on behalf of the organization. I wanted to make certain the members of the Conference believed I would make a good faith effort to hear them, and that even as facts and circumstances evolved on that and other issues in the future, they would have the opportunity to contribute again and again. And they also had to have confidence that, in an organization whose key governing principle was to act by consensus, I would listen closely enough that we could all be certain our organizational statements reflected a widely shared (although not necessarily unanimous) viewpoint and not merely what I preferred.
Many of our communal organizations operate on the need for consensus, whether formally required by rule or merely demanded by tradition and the need for maintaining widespread communal support. I sat on the board of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago for some 25 years, and, while we took votes from time to time, it was always important to me to remember that we represented a diverse community. As board members, we were expected to lead while maintaining a broad base of support for the organization and without unnecessarily alienating any constituency. This required respect for our history and attention to the importance of continuity.
I would venture that deciding when and how to declare that a consensus has been reached is one of the most difficult challenges of leadership. There is no single way to go about this task. In some instances, a consensus naturally emerges, and all one needs to do is identify it and then articulate it accurately. This method of reaching consensus requires listening. Asking the right questions and sharing ideas you have heard contributes to this process, as does keeping other key leaders informed about what you see emerging during the course of discussions. Transparency about the direction you are heading in is important to the process. Any other approach threatens to destroy trust in your leadership—a result that is certain to derail your declaration of consensus right then or at another point in your leadership.
In other instances, though the community or other influential parties expect the agency to develop a policy or position, no obvious consensus emerges. This is where the fun begins for someone with imagination and a desire to make the organization effective. Here, the leader has the responsibility to identify various elements of consensus and then undertake the task of developing a position around which board members will rally. Once again, the key tasks are to solicit a variety of points of view, to ask good questions, and then to vet ideas to see whether you are on the right track. There is no more satisfying exercise of leadership than helping your organization find its own way to break through what seems like an intractable area of internal difference by forging a common understanding of how to proceed.
This sort of challenge does not happen merely in times of crisis. Working to determine consensus is necessary in almost every effort to create change and to bring one’s vision as a leader to reality. We can see this in discussions inside agencies around long-term planning, where numerous agendas are often proposed at the outset. The person who can figure out how best to improve the organization, something that usually requires change, is the one who emerges as someone who commands respect. The same is true when selecting new professional leaders, where the most important step is determining what you see as the future direction in which the organization needs to move and then identifying the leadership qualities that will be required to get there. Once you become convinced that you know what you are looking for, it is time to bring others involved in the search over to your point of view so that when hired, the new executive will commence with a strong base of support.
The entire notion of needing to build consensus stems from the fact that you are a leader, not a dictator. Few if any people who have something to contribute will want to serve on a board where the chair does not value their contributions. Furthermore, leadership of a representative organization must satisfy the needs of the larger community. These needs and the best way to address them can rarely, if ever, be ascertained by the leader alone. This is why Moses insisted to God at the outset of his journey that he be accompanied by an empowered Aaron, and why God later instructed Moses to assemble a group to assist him. He “chose men of accomplishment from among all Israel and appointed them heads of the people, leaders of thousands, leaders of hundreds, leaders of fifties, and leaders of ten” (Ex. 18:21). No communal leader can succeed without support, both close and broad.
Implicit in this entire discussion is the importance of the relationship between lay leadership (represented by the board chair) and professional leadership (the CEO). This is a difficult fact for many board chairs, who are accustomed to running their own businesses and having subordinates carry out their orders. Board chairs are in place to lead the board, which has ultimate governance and fiduciary responsibilities. This should be accomplished by setting policies for the professional staff to implement. The board must hold staff, through the CEO, accountable for adhering to board directives. Supervising the activities of agency employees is the job of the CEO. If the board intervenes, the CEO cannot be held responsible for operations, as they will not be in control.
Such a division of responsibility makes things seem simple, but they are not. I have had zero successful lay leadership experiences when the CEO and the board chair failed to find a way to work closely together. The CEO has considerable institutional and practical power that directly impacts the success of the board chair. If the CEO is unwilling to adopt the vision of the board chair, they can both directly and indirectly undercut the very goals that motivated the board chair to take the job. In most instances, the CEO’s tenure will outlast that of the board chair. And so, if the board chair has a vision that involves change, the CEO can look to longtime allies within the organization (both volunteers and employees) for support to slow things down or even block the path to progress. This is frustrating for the board chair, and it is also debilitating to the organization because it causes confusion for everyone involved.
I believe there is nothing more important for a board chair to do than to develop an excellent working relationship with the professional leader. This is wise not only for self-preservation, but also because the CEO and other senior staff members have spent many years working on the challenges you are facing and likely have well-thought-out opinions of their own. The board chair is not always the smartest, or wisest, person in the room. I have benefited deeply from the relationships I have formed with every CEO with whom I have worked. These professionals have devoted their life’s work to the cause I am leading, and they have a lot to share. I learn from them. I confer with them. I break bread and travel with them. I laugh with them often. I treasure these relationships. This too grows out of the first principle of leadership: being a good listener.
The board chair and the CEO do not need to agree on every initiative or decision—but a high level of mutual respect between them is especially important when they are not in initial agreement. In such cases, the job of the board chair is similar to that of finding consensus on the board. Listen carefully and build on agreement where it exists, and when it does not, work on identifying common ground that can make forward motion possible, even if it may not be wholly satisfying to either party. Forcing change without the support of professional leadership is not a recipe for success.
Here again, transparency between the CEO and the board chair is imperative. Lack of trust is a disaster, and I use that word advisedly. Nobody wants to be surprised or to feel that someone is working behind their back. This sort of behavior undermines attempts to resolve disagreements and creates uncertainty in every subsequent discussion. I have encountered widely different leadership philosophies and attitudes among the professional executives alongside whom I have served. I have had disagreements with each of them—no exceptions. And I also worked productively with every one of them. I learned from them, and they helped me to be successful. They were indispensable partners. Often, I deferred to their judgment when they thought I was moving too quickly or in the wrong direction. At other times, they returned the favor and deferred to my judgment. In the few instances where we agreed to disagree, when it was a matter of organizational policy, I made clear to my professional colleague that the decision fell within the ambit of my responsibility. In each such instance, they deferred to me. One should use this authority sparingly, so as not to appear or be overly certain of one’s own expertise or to disrupt agency operations—but one of the rules of the road that a great professional understands is that they work for the board.
This all begs the question: Is there something special required of those who take on the lay leadership of a Jewish communal agency? What is distinctly Jewish about Jewish leadership? I have alluded to several lessons from our history to reinforce my points, but I believe that the responsibility not just to lead but to lead Jewishly is more than being able to identify support from ancient teachings when convenient. It requires that you act with respect for your colleagues and with humility. Being asked to take on a communal leadership role is highly gratifying, and the initial reaction is to ride high in the saddle. If you have self-awareness, however, you quickly learn that many of the people you will work with are knowledgeable, caring, intelligent, and very skilled. Although they are eager to respect the newly appointed leader, they do not want to be bossed around. Other board members are volunteers, and their service deserves to be honored. Thus, it is best to catch your breath, be reflective, and understand that regardless of how certain you are about the direction you want to move and the impact you want to bring, you cannot achieve success without the active participation of others. This is essential. The stories I cited earlier about the humility of Moses and his need to find others to assist him do not appear in Exodus by accident.
Leadership sometimes requires courage, and ultimately transparency. You cannot hide who you are. The best leaders do not deceive; they stand up clearly for their vison and beliefs at critical moments. Esther emerges to announce who she is to save her community. Joseph reveals himself to his family at the most critical of moments. There were opportunities to hide and avoid responsibility, but the impactful leader steps forward.
So much of the Tanakh and the Talmud communicate seemingly mundane lessons about how human beings are required to treat one another: what to do if we cause an accident or how to leave a corner of field for those in need. The fundamental lesson here is that those we encounter are to be treated fairly and with dignity. This applies to fellow board members, but it is especially true for how we treat the agency’s staff, including the CEO, who often feel vulnerable when a new board chair takes the reins. I aim to behave like this when I am acting in the world at large, but I am especially conscious of this obligation when I am leading a Jewish agency.
Having and demonstrating empathy is mandatory when dealing with difficult decisions. Board members are hurt when the policy for which they advocate is not adopted. Recognizing the value of what they proposed, and how it influenced your thinking even if not adopted in full, is essential to encouraging further engagement. At times, terminations of staff are required for economic or other reasons. Understanding how this disrupts the life of another human being is obligatory for a Jewish leader.
Without being overly prescriptive, the critical question to ask yourself frequently as a leader is whether your behavior represents what should be expected of someone who is leading a Jewish organization. It is not enough to just “get stuff done.” You need to do it morally and ethically, consistent with your understanding of Jewish values. To do otherwise damages your organization and your ability to lead.
One final point on leadership. When your term as chair concludes, it is time to step aside and give space for your successor to lead. Assuming you have been an active and respected leader, your ongoing presence risks limiting the initiatives and directions of the new chair. I rarely attend board meetings when my term is over, although I am always available to consult with any of my successors and the CEO. I will also take on special assignments where the influence of a past leader would be helpful to the current team. Stepping away is not easy, but it is the fair and right thing to do.
The lessons from ancient times concerning leadership should not let us think we possess quite the same power to change the direction of the world. We don’t have the privilege of a personal dialogue with God. But we don’t need to have such assurance. Instead, we must accept that we are in a leadership role to move the ball forward, without expecting that all our goals will be achieved. Moses, after all, never entered the Promised Land. As Pirkei Avot teaches us, our job is not to realize the dream or finish the job, but instead to apply all our passion and vision to bringing our goal closer.
When you say yes after the question is asked, your obligation is to recognize all the challenges, both those that relate to your inner doubts and those imposed from the outside, and to make every effort to be the type of leader you would want to follow. As Hillel said, “What is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor.” Or, “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” When you answer that last question in the affirmative, it is no longer a query. You have answered the call, and the time is now.
