Governance as Leadership

Governance as Leadership

Home
Notes
Posts by Topic
Become a Member
Archive
About

August 2026

The Checklist Instinct Can Mislead.
Good governance is contextual, not generic. The same practices that make one board excellent can make another board complacent. Judge against your…
A Decade of Evidence, One Short List.
A review of governance research distils what separates stronger boards from weaker ones. Five features keep recurring: ten years of research, fifty-five…
Same Name, Same Ground, Different Words.
We share a name with a well-known book on nonprofit governance, not by design. Here’s what the book actually argues, and why the overlap makes more…
Trust on a Deadline.
Board chairs rarely stay long. Here’s how the chair-CEO partnership gets built fast, stays clear on authority, and shows up together where it counts.
Inclusion and Effectiveness Move Together.
Most boards still don’t reflect their community, and recruitment rarely aligns with their stated values. CEOs say diversity matters for governance. But…
Nobody Wrote Down Who Decides What.
Most board-CEO friction is not about personality. It is decisions nobody ever assigned in writing. Settle on who decides what in a written agreement…
Impact Requires More.
We spend most of our attention inside our own walls — budgets, policies, staffing, programs. All of that matters. But you can still fall short if you…

July 2026

One Page, One Ask.
You have sat through the this meeting before: a stack of reports, one reads like a sales pitch, another buries the ask. You end up discussing the…
Good at the Gradable Work, Absent on the Rest?
Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling — and a lot of boards are standing on the floor, congratulating themselves. CEOs say they don’t have board…
Delegation, Not Abdication: My Case for Using AI.
When did I last read something and wonder whether a person had actually written it? More often than I’d like to admit — and that’s exactly why I don’t…
The Evidence Is In: Leadership Is the Work.
Six Studies, One Uncomfortable Message. Your board can pass every audit, file every form on time, and still be quietly failing at the work that matters…
 • Ken Haycock
© 2026 Ken Haycock · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture