Trustees have a vital role in ensuring that charities are well governed, financially responsible and focused on delivering their charitable purpose.
They bring experience, perspective and independent challenge. They make important decisions about strategy, risk and accountability. And, particularly in smaller charities, they often give considerable amounts of their time and expertise.
But sometimes, with the best of intentions, trustees become involved in decisions that should sit with the people responsible for running the organisation.
What begins as an offer to help can gradually become a pattern of intervention. Trustees start directing staff, questioning routine operational decisions or becoming involved in matters that should be managed by the chief executive and their team.
The boundary between governance and management becomes blurred.
And when that happens, even well-intentioned involvement can make an organisation less effective.
Governance and management are different responsibilities
At its simplest, governance is about ensuring that an organisation is doing the right things, while management is about organising the people and resources needed to deliver them.
Trustees are collectively responsible for the charity’s overall direction, stewardship and accountability. They should ensure that there is a clear strategy, appropriate financial oversight, effective risk management and a strong commitment to the organisation’s charitable purpose.
Where a charity has a chief executive and staff team, operational responsibility will normally be delegated to them within an agreed framework.
That means trustees should be asking questions such as:
- Are we making progress against our strategic priorities?
- Are our resources being used responsibly?
- Do we understand the principal risks facing the organisation?
- Are we achieving the impact we set out to deliver?
- Does the leadership team have the capacity and support it needs?
These are governance questions.
By contrast, decisions about how individual projects are delivered, how staff organise their work or which supplier to use for a routine purchase will usually be management matters, subject to agreed budgets, policies and delegated authority.
The distinction isn’t always perfectly clear, but understanding it is essential.
Why trustees sometimes cross the line
Trustees rarely become too involved because they want to undermine the organisation.
More often, their involvement comes from genuine commitment.
They care about the charity’s success, no doubt have valuable professional expertise and might see a problem and instinctively want to solve it.
In smaller charities, trustees may also have been closely involved in establishing the organisation or keeping it running during difficult periods.
That history can make stepping back particularly challenging.
Financial pressures can create similar tensions. When income is uncertain or performance is disappointing, trustees may feel that closer involvement is the safest response.
Sometimes the issue is simply that roles and responsibilities have never been properly defined.
If the board, chair and chief executive don’t share a clear understanding of where decisions sit, boundaries can shift gradually without anyone consciously deciding that they should.
The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of goodwill.
It’s that goodwill, without clear boundaries, can create confusion rather than support.
When oversight becomes interference
There is an important difference between asking challenging questions and directing operational activity.
A trustee asking why a fundraising programme is underperforming is exercising legitimate oversight.
A trustee instructing a fundraiser to change their approach, without going through the chief executive or relevant manager, is stepping into management.
Similarly, trustees should expect assurance that staff recruitment is fair, effective and aligned with organisational needs.
But becoming involved in routine recruitment decisions or giving instructions to individual employees may undermine the people responsible for those processes.
These situations can appear relatively minor in isolation.
But over time, they can create competing lines of authority.
Staff may become unsure whose instructions to follow. Managers can find their decisions questioned or overturned. Chief executives may feel accountable for results without having the authority to manage the organisation effectively.
This is particularly damaging when individual trustees act independently rather than through decisions agreed by the board.
A trustee’s professional expertise may be valuable, but that doesn’t automatically give them authority to direct staff.
The impact on the chief executive
The relationship between the board and chief executive is one of the most important in a charity.
It needs to be built on trust, clarity, accountability and constructive challenge.
Trustees should expect the chief executive to deliver against agreed objectives, manage resources responsibly and provide honest information about performance and risk.
Equally, the chief executive needs sufficient authority to lead.
When trustees become involved in routine decisions, that balance can be disrupted.
The chief executive may spend increasing amounts of time responding to individual trustee requests, explaining operational choices or navigating conflicting expectations.
Decision-making becomes slower. Accountability becomes less clear.
And the leadership team can become reluctant to take initiative if they believe their decisions will routinely be revisited by the board.
Strong governance doesn’t mean trustees making every important decision themselves.
It means establishing clear expectations, delegating appropriately and holding people accountable for the responsibilities they’ve been given.
The risks of an overly operational board
When trustees become absorbed in day-to-day activity, something else often happens.
The board spends less time on the matters that only it can properly address.
Strategic direction, long-term sustainability, organisational risk, leadership succession and the quality of governance itself can receive less attention.
Board meetings become dominated by operational updates rather than meaningful discussion.
Trustees may know a great deal about individual projects but have insufficient time to consider whether the organisation’s overall approach remains appropriate.
This is one of the less obvious costs of excessive operational involvement.
A board that spends too much time managing the present may fail to prepare the organisation for the future.
But trustees shouldn’t be too distant either
The answer isn’t for trustees to withdraw from the organisation or accept everything they’re told without question.
Good governance requires curiosity, scrutiny and a willingness to challenge.
Trustees must understand enough about the charity’s work to make informed decisions and discharge their legal duties.
They should be prepared to ask difficult questions, particularly when financial performance, safeguarding, compliance or organisational culture raises concerns.
There may also be circumstances where trustees need to become more directly involved.
In a small volunteer-led charity, trustees may carry out operational tasks themselves. During a serious crisis, a leadership vacancy or a period of significant organisational change, the board may temporarily need to take a more active role.
The important point is that this involvement should be deliberate, proportionate and clearly understood.
Where trustees take on operational responsibilities, those responsibilities should be distinguished from their collective governance role, with appropriate safeguards and accountability.
The objective isn’t to create an artificial separation between trustees and the organisation.
It’s to ensure that everyone understands who is responsible for what.
Getting the balance right
Healthy governance depends on more than a written scheme of delegation, although that is an important starting point.
Boards and leadership teams need a shared understanding of their respective roles and a willingness to discuss boundaries openly.
There are several practical steps that can help.
Agree clear delegated authority. Establish which decisions are reserved for the board and which can be made by the chief executive and staff. Review these arrangements as the organisation grows or changes.
Make reporting purposeful. Board reports should provide the information trustees need to assess performance, risk and strategic progress, rather than overwhelming them with operational detail.
Clarify the chair’s role. The chair should help maintain a constructive relationship between the board and chief executive, including managing requests or interventions from individual trustees.
Use trustee expertise appropriately. Trustees may offer valuable professional advice, but support should be agreed and coordinated rather than creating informal reporting lines into staff teams.
Create space for strategic discussion. Board agendas should give sufficient attention to long-term priorities, organisational effectiveness and emerging challenges.
Review board effectiveness. Periodic governance reviews can help identify where boundaries have become unclear and whether trustees are spending their time on the right things.
Perhaps most importantly, trustees and senior leaders need to be able to raise concerns about how they work together without those conversations becoming personal or defensive.
The best boards know when to step back
Effective trustees don’t demonstrate their value by involving themselves in every decision.
They demonstrate it through sound judgement, appropriate challenge, clear accountability and a commitment to the charity’s long-term success.
That sometimes means asking difficult questions.
Sometimes it means offering expertise or additional support.
And sometimes it means recognising that a decision properly belongs to the chief executive or management team.
For charity leaders, the challenge is equally important. They need to provide trustees with meaningful information, welcome appropriate scrutiny and be clear about where operational authority sits.
Neither governance nor management works particularly well without trust.
The strongest charities aren’t those where trustees are involved in everything. They’re those where trustees and leaders understand their responsibilities, respect each other’s roles and work together in the interests of the organisation’s mission.
Is your board focused on the right things?
At Scenius Consulting & Coaching, we help charities and purpose-led organisations strengthen governance, clarify responsibilities and develop effective working relationships between trustees and senior leaders.
Book a conversation to discuss how we could support your organisation.