I have been looking for a way to measure board effectiveness in arts organizations for most of my career. I started chasing it at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where I became a CEO at thirty-one and inherited a board of 70. At Carolina Performing Arts, I built a governance structure from scratch. At The Mellon Foundation, I spoke with hundreds of CEOs and EDs whose artistic work was extraordinary and whose governance was often failing them. On boards I’ve served, I was sometimes the person who should have spoken up sooner and didn’t.
What I wanted was simple enough to describe: an objective way to know if a board was effective at the actual work of governance. Demographics matter, and so does fundraising, but those are inputs. I wanted proof the board was governing, making sound decisions, protecting leadership capacity, and holding itself accountable to the mission it claims to serve.
I’ve looked everywhere for that tool. It doesn’t exist, not for our sector, and not in the form the sector needs. But I’ve learned enough along the way to recognize effective governance when I encounter it, and I want to start there. Whatever instrument we eventually build has to be rooted in the observable realities of how boards actually function, not what the bylaws say or the org chart shows. What actually happens when the board meets and makes decisions.
Sixteen checks
These are not aspirational questions. They are observable. No survey. No consultant. They’re markers: the more of these your board can hold its own against, the stronger the foundation you’re building on. Where the board falls short, that’s not a verdict. It’s a place to focus.
Can every board member name the single most important issue facing the organization right now?
Does the board understand whether the organization is operating with a structural deficit, and if so, does it have a plan for closing it that doesn’t depend on one-time gifts or unsustainable draws on reserves?
Has the board addressed its problematic members, whether that’s the person who dominates or undermines or the member who has quietly stopped showing up, or is it living with dysfunction it can name but won’t confront?
Does each board meeting have clear goals articulated in advance, and does the board spend its time working toward those goals rather than hearing reports?
Is there a way for board members to raise concerns or ask uncomfortable questions, and does it actually get used?
Has the board made a difficult decision in the past year that required real debate, and can the members who disagreed explain why they ultimately supported it?
Do the board chair and executive director have a working relationship built on clarity about their respective roles, regular communication, and mutual trust, and would both describe it the same way?
Has the board established a clear understanding of where governance ends and management begins, and does it respect that boundary in practice, not just in theory?
Does the board create conditions where the executive director and senior staff can share not just reports but their own concerns and original ideas, without fear, and does the ED have dedicated time to be fully candid without staff in the room?
Does the board conduct a meaningful annual evaluation of the executive director: one that includes honest feedback, professional development goals, and a real conversation about compensation?
Can each board member state why they were asked to join the board, and did they receive a real orientation when they arrived? Not a binder. A structured introduction to the organization, its challenges, and their specific role.
Does the board include representation from the community it serves, beyond token inclusion, and has it defined who that community is?
Is there a regular rhythm of board engagement beyond meetings: attending programming as the public experiences it, committee work, receptions, donor cultivation? And do all members participate in it?
Does the board have a succession plan (for the chair, for the executive director, for key committee leadership), and can every member identify what it is?
Has the board reviewed its bylaws in the past three years, not because a lawyer required it, but because the organization changed and the governance structure needed to reflect that?
Does the board invest in its own development: not just onboarding new members, but deepening the full board’s understanding of the field, the organization’s evolving context, and how the board needs to grow?
If your board can hold its own against most of these, it’s doing something unusual in this sector and worth protecting. That kind of governance doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of deliberate choices by people who take the work seriously.
Where the board falls short, those are places to focus, not failures to catalogue. Most governance problems aren’t dramatic. They’re slow accumulations of things nobody addressed because nobody had a framework for raising them. These questions are meant to provide that framework.
Most boards in the cultural sector would struggle with more of these than they’d like to admit. That’s not unusual. And it’s not an indictment of anyone’s commitment. It’s a reflection of the fact that we’ve never had a shared standard for what effective governance looks like in our world. These sixteen are an attempt to start building one.
You might also be wondering why I haven’t asked whether the board conducts a formal self-evaluation. Board self-evaluations, as currently practiced, are mostly theater. A survey goes out. People check boxes. The results get discussed for twenty minutes at a retreat and filed away. Nothing changes. I’m less interested in whether the board evaluates itself than in whether it can answer the sixteen questions above honestly.
A flashlight, not an X-ray
These checks can tell you where to look. They cannot tell you where the fracture is or how deep it runs. These checks are a flashlight, not an X-ray.
What the sector needs is a real instrument: a Board Effectiveness Index designed for the specific realities of cultural governance. Self-administered and free, built for our world rather than borrowed from another one. Something an organization could use annually to understand whether its governance is improving or declining, and to know where.
I’ve researched every existing tool I can find. BoardSource has been assessing nonprofit boards since 1988, but their instrument is generic across the entire nonprofit sector and can’t capture the tensions that define cultural governance: where artistic authority ends and fiduciary authority begins, how donor influence shapes curatorial independence, who the organization is actually for. In the UK, the Cultural Governance Alliance does focus on cultural organizations but only measures EDI policies and processes, not governance effectiveness overall. Joan Garry’s free assessment evaluates individual board members rather than the board as a system. SMU DataArts measures financial and operating performance beautifully but doesn’t touch governance. The International Finance Corporation has the most rigorous scorecard methodology I’ve found anywhere. Quantitative and benchmarked, with longitudinal tracking. But it was built for publicly traded companies.
Nothing exists, anywhere in the world, that provides a scored, self-administered assessment of governance effectiveness designed for arts and cultural organizations.
The tool I want to build would measure effectiveness at three integrated levels: the board chair, the executive committee, and the full board. Dysfunction at any one level compromises the whole system, and most existing tools only look at one. A chair and ED might have an extraordinary partnership while the full board atrophies into a rubber stamp below them. Or the executive committee makes sharp decisions in a small room while the broader board has no practice thinking together. The three-level architecture is what makes this different. Nobody else is approaching governance assessment this way.
Let’s be honest about the difficulty. Self-assessment bias is the core problem: the boards most in need of evaluation are often the least capable of evaluating themselves accurately. The weighting question is unresolved: if chair effectiveness has disproportionate impact on the whole system, how much more should it count? Contextual variation is real. A board of sixty at a $70M opera company and a board of six at a $700K community-based organization can’t be scored on identical scales without some form of normalization. And there’s the question of whether the tool should produce a single composite score (powerful and impossible to ignore) or a profile that’s more honest but easier to wave away. These are hard methodological questions. Building this properly will require psychometric expertise, pilot testing, and a serious research partnership. It will take time.
I’m not waiting for the perfect instrument to start the conversation. The sixteen checks above are a beginning. In the coming months, I’ll publish a series on what effective governance actually looks like at different organizational scales: the chair, committees, meeting design, succession. Each installment will explore a dimension of the framework the index will eventually measure, grounding it in specific practice rather than abstract principle.
And I want the field’s input. Board chairs, executive directors, funders, researchers. Tell me what I’m getting right and what I’m missing. Write to me at questions@emilkang.com. Push back hard. This tool will be stronger for it.
We have been governing ourselves for decades without any shared way to know whether the governing is getting better or worse. These checks are a start. What comes after them has to be better than what we have now, which is nothing at all.
Emil
Appendix: Why these sixteen questions
The sixteen checks above stand on their own. This appendix is for board chairs, executive directors, and governance committees who want to go deeper into any of them. You don’t need to read all sixteen. Start with the ones that hit closest to home.
1. The single most important issue
One thing. If ten board members give you seven different answers, the board is not aligned around the organization as it actually exists today. They’re each governing a different organization in their heads. Not three priorities. Not a strategic plan overview. One issue. The gap between what your board chair would say and what your newest member would say tells you everything about whether your governance is coherent or scattered.
2. Structural deficit
Boards approve a balanced budget every year. That is not the same as understanding whether the organization’s cost of operating permanently exceeds its reliable revenue. The gap gets covered by a major gift here, a reserve draw there, a deferred maintenance decision that compounds quietly in the background. The budget balances on paper and the board approves it, and nobody has to confront the fact that the underlying economics don’t work. Every board reviews a budget. The harder question is whether the board understands the difference between a budget that balances and an economic model that’s sustainable. If the board can’t describe its organization’s structural position, whether the gap exists and what the plan is for closing it, it’s making decisions without the basic answer: can this organization keep operating in its current form?
3. The problematic member and the disappearing one
Every board has had both. The dominating voice, the person who undermines the ED between meetings, the member who confuses their donation with authority. And then there’s the other kind: the member who gradually disengages, stops preparing for meetings, lets commitments slide. Active dysfunction and passive drift are different problems, but boards handle them the same way, which is to say they don’t. Ask how long a board has tolerated a problematic member and the answer is almost always years. Ask when someone last had a conversation with the member who stopped showing up and you’ll usually get silence. Boards that can name their dysfunction and act on it are governing. When everyone sees the obstacle and nobody will name it, the organization learns to work around it instead. And when a member fades, letting the engaged members carry the extra weight while the roster stays the same size on paper, that’s drift, not governance.
4. Meeting goals and how time is spent
Agendas are easy. Goals are rarer. An agenda is a list of topics. A goal is what you need to walk out having decided or moved forward. “Finance committee update” is an agenda item. “The board needs to decide whether to approve the revised budget” is a goal. One is a schedule. The other tells every person in the room what their job is for the next two hours. And once you have goals, the question becomes whether the time is actually spent pursuing them. If the answer is three staff PowerPoints followed by fifteen minutes of questions, the board has traded one form of passivity for another. Board meetings should be designed for the board to think together, and if most of the talking is done by staff, that isn’t happening.
5. Permission to raise the hard question
At most boards, dissent is technically allowed and culturally impossible. The questions everyone’s thinking: why is the same person chairing the gala for the tenth year, why don’t we ever discuss that program that isn’t working, why did three members miss the last two meetings and nobody said anything. Those questions die in the parking lot after the meeting. They never make it into the room because there’s no mechanism for raising them and no culture that invites it. Governance without a way to surface the unasked question stays on the surface of things. You need more than good intentions. You need a structure that makes honesty possible: a standing agenda item, a chair who actively solicits dissent, an anonymous channel, something. Without it, the difficult conversation happens everywhere except where it can actually change anything.
6. A difficult decision
A board that never disagrees isn’t governing. It’s ratifying. But constant rejection isn’t governance either. It’s obstruction. The real test is whether the board can move through genuine disagreement toward a decision that the full body supports, including the members who argued against it. That requires trust and real process: a culture where dissent doesn’t carry a social cost. If the board can’t point to a single hard call it made together in the past year, it hasn’t been tested. An untested board is running on faith, not evidence.
7. The chair-ED relationship
This is the hinge that everything else turns on. When the chair and ED are aligned, when they communicate regularly, respect each other’s lanes, and share an honest understanding of where the organization stands, the full board benefits from that clarity. When the relationship is strained or confused, it shows up in every conversation the board has. The question asks whether both people would describe the relationship the same way, and that’s the part that matters most. A chair who thinks things are great while the ED is quietly managing around them is not a partnership. What holds these relationships together is a regular rhythm of private conversation: not just agenda review before meetings but real talk about what’s working and what isn’t. When that rhythm doesn’t exist, both people end up guessing about the other’s expectations, and the guessing compounds over time.
8. The governance-management boundary
Micromanaging boards and absent boards are two expressions of the same problem: nobody defined where governance ends and management begins. When a board starts directing staff or approving operational details that belong to the ED, it has crossed into management, and the ED’s authority erodes. An entirely hands-off board, rubber-stamping whatever the ED recommends without interrogating the reasoning, has abdicated governance. Both failures are common and both are avoidable. The boundary isn’t fixed. It shifts depending on organizational size, maturity, and circumstance. A startup organization with a working board will have more overlap than a $30M institution with clear departmental structure. Most boards haven’t thought about where the line is, and they discover the boundary only when someone crosses it and the damage is already done.
9. Staff voice, ED candor, and executive session
This question operates on two levels. The first is about the senior staff who attend board meetings: the development director, the artistic director, the COO. At most organizations, they perform. They say what the ED coached them to say. They don’t share what they actually think because the power dynamic makes it too dangerous. If your senior staff are presenting reports but never sharing their own concerns or ideas, the board is getting a filtered account of how the organization actually works. The second level is about the ED specifically. When an ED spends more energy figuring out how to tell the board something than figuring out how to solve the problem itself, the governance relationship has inverted. If the ED is filtering and softening and staging the delivery of bad news, the board isn’t getting the truth. Is there dedicated time (executive session, a private conversation with the chair) where the ED can talk without performing for staff and without an agenda item dictating the conversation? A board of seven might accomplish this with the chair over coffee. A board of sixty needs executive session built into the calendar. However you do it, if you haven’t built spaces for honesty, both in the room and outside it, the board is governing on whatever version of reality the ED decides is safe to share.
10. ED performance review
The executive director is the only employee the board directly manages. It is the board’s single most important personnel responsibility, and most boards in the cultural sector handle it badly or not at all. The ED either gets a perfunctory thumbs-up at the end of the fiscal year or gets blindsided by concerns nobody raised until they became crises. A meaningful evaluation includes honest feedback on performance and professional development goals, along with a real discussion about compensation. Not just whether to give a raise but whether the compensation reflects the scope of what the ED is being asked to carry. Skip this process and the board has no standing to complain about executive performance, and no mechanism to support the leader it hired. And the ED has no way of knowing whether the board thinks things are going well or whether the silence is just dissatisfaction building.
11. Why you were asked, and how you were welcomed
One of the most common things I hear from board members is, “I’m not sure why they asked me to join.” Nobody told them what they were there to do, because nobody had thought about it that specifically. When a board recruits without intention, it gets a collection of people instead of a functioning body. Every new board member should join knowing exactly what the organization needs from them, and the governance committee should be able to articulate it. But intentional recruitment without intentional onboarding is half a job. The number one complaint board members report across every study is that they never received a real orientation. Not a binder full of financials and bylaws. An actual introduction to the organization’s culture, its strategic challenges, and what success looks like in their role. If someone can’t say why they were recruited and wasn’t properly oriented, they were collected, not prepared.
12. Community representation
One community member on a board of fifteen is a gesture. It lets the board feel good about representation without changing the power dynamic in the room. But before a board can assess whether it represents its community, it has to answer a more basic question: who is the community? The people who buy tickets? The neighbors? The people the mission statement claims to serve but the programming has never reached? Most boards have never had this conversation. They default to a vague sense of geography or audience, without examining who is missing or why. Even boards that take representation seriously often build structures that make it nearly impossible. Meetings during business hours. Giving expectations that exclude people without wealth. Locations that require a car, and no compensation for the time board service demands. These aren’t oversights. They’re filters, and they determine who can serve before anyone’s name reaches a nominations committee. If your community representatives are outnumbered and outranked in every discussion, their perspective gets heard but doesn’t change anything. Real community representation means enough voices to shift a conversation, to challenge assumptions about what the community needs and to hold the organization accountable to the people it claims to serve. If the board listens to its community members and then proceeds with what it was going to do anyway, that’s not representation. It’s consultation dressed up as governance.
13. Rhythm of engagement and knowing the work
A functioning board isn’t a quarterly event. It’s a monthly commitment with different kinds of engagement across the calendar: committee work, attending performances, donor cultivation, receptions, community events. If half your members only appear at board meetings, you don’t have a board of twenty. You have a board of ten with ten names on the letterhead. And there’s a dimension here that matters enormously for cultural organizations: board members need to experience the programming the way the public experiences it. In the audience on a regular night, not the gala or the donor reception. If a board member hasn’t encountered the work in a year, they’re governing an abstraction, making decisions about something they imagine rather than something they’ve witnessed. If the rhythm of engagement doesn’t include the work itself, the board is missing the point of its own existence.
14. Succession planning
Ask who would step in as chair tomorrow and the answer is usually “we’d figure it out.” Ask about ED succession and you’ll get a longer silence. Willing and prepared are not the same thing. Having someone who’d agree to take over is not a plan. Having someone who has been actively developed, someone who understands the organization’s strategic landscape and has been mentored into readiness across the leadership, that’s a plan. The board should be able to articulate, at any given moment, who is next in line for key leadership roles and what is being done to prepare them. When nobody can answer that, the governance is one departure away from crisis. And in a sector where ED tenure averages four to five years, that departure is coming whether the board is ready for it or not.
15. Bylaws as a strategic document
Bylaws contain the structural DNA of governance: term limits, board size, committee structure, meeting frequency, officer roles, quorum requirements. Many boards treat them like something a lawyer wrote for the IRS fifteen years ago. Almost nobody has read them, and fewer still think of them as a document that should change as the organization changes. But bylaws are the single most important strategic document a board has. They determine how power is distributed and how the board renews itself. When bylaws go unexamined, the organization outgrows its own governance architecture and nobody notices until something breaks. If the board hasn’t reviewed its bylaws in three years, it’s operating on assumptions about its own structure that may no longer be true.
16. Board development
Onboarding is the beginning, not the end. Many boards invest in getting new members oriented and then assume the full board will develop on its own. It won’t. The field changes, the organization changes with it, and what constituted good governance five years ago may not be sufficient now. If the board last learned about its community half a decade ago and hasn’t updated that understanding, it’s making decisions with outdated information. Board development can take many forms: guest speakers, site visits, peer learning with other boards, dedicated time at retreats for education rather than just strategy. The mechanism matters less than the commitment. Never investing in the board’s own learning is a bet that what members knew on day one will carry them through every challenge that follows.
Number 12 is a banger 🙌🏾
10 is also important for the reverse too - so the Board actually knows what is going on for the ED and can address succession, vision/goal setting, leadership support & capacity on a regular cadence