New Board Chair—New College President: Recipe for a Successful Working Relationship

By Alecia A. DeCoudreaux
Trusteeship, January/February 2008

Being asked to serve as the chair of the board of one’s alma mater is certainly an extraordinary honor. Stepping into the role can be a most daunting task, however.

Even under the best of circumstances, there is much to learn in order to serve as an effective leader of the board. The task becomes even more challenging when the new chairmanship coincides—as it did in my case—with the selection of the college’s new president. Both the chair and the president must simultaneously engage in learning and educating.

In my case, it was helpful that I served on the search committee that found H. Kim Bottomly, the 13th president of Wellesley College. Through the search process, I was able to learn a lot about her, but given her newness to Wellesley and the fact that we were each novices in our roles, it seemed important to accelerate the process of getting to know one another and of learning how best to work together for the benefit of the college.

I found three things were critical to quickly developing a strong and effective working relationship: designating regular meeting times, taking advantage of available resources and training, and turning to our predecessors for advice.

Given the full schedule associated with my “day job” and the hectic pace of the president’s work, we decided early on that weekly teleconferences would be an important tool. While we committed to being available to each other whenever necessary, we thought it best to have a regularly scheduled time to connect.

This gives us the opportunity to stay on top of issues and gives us time to talk about whatever we might want to address without worrying about whether we are disturbing the other. We cancel the calls if neither of us has anything to discuss—but this has been rare given all that is taking place in higher education.

In addition to regular telephone calls and meetings, after the first five months of our working relationship, President Bottomly and I attended AGB’s Institute for Board Chairs and Presidents. The conference afforded us the opportunity to spend time getting to know one another better and thinking about our needs and our expectations of each other, as well as what we wanted to accomplish together on behalf of the college. We were able to align our thinking about our governance and management roles and where and how the two roles would intersect. We were also able to learn best practices from other conference attendees, as most of them were either experienced board chairs or seasoned presidents.

Finally, it has been extremely helpful that the president and I succeeded two extraordinary leaders of the board and the college, each of whom retired but continued to make themselves available to provide advice and counsel as needed along the way. (Their first piece of advice was to attend the AGB Institute!)

They were particularly helpful as we got started in our roles—providing background information on issues the college was facing, giving us tips on how to orient ourselves and each other to our roles, and offering ideas about presidential assessment or committee structures. They have been available to us ever since as we have had questions about how best to manage a particular issue.

After almost a year of working together, the efforts that the president and I made to get to know one another and to develop a solid working relationship have been beneficial to us both and to the college. We are able to discuss all matters openly, bounce ideas off each other (as opposed to only presenting final thoughts), learn from each other, disagree respectfully, and help each other anticipate, and then effectively and efficiently meet the needs of the board and the college.

Such a relationship—critical to the ability of any board chair and president—is especially vital to those of us learning both how to meet our institutions’ internal needs and how to effectively address high-profile public challenges on issues such as affordability and endowment spending.

Alecia A. DeCoudreaux is vice president and general counsel of Lilly USA in addition to chairing the Wellesley College board of trustees.