Clear is kind: setting expectations board members can meet

A trustee finds out in their second year that the board has a giving expectation. Not from a document — from a sideways comment at the gala, something about “board participation being at eighty percent,” followed by a glance they weren’t supposed to catch. They’d have given happily if anyone had asked. Now they’re doing math in their head at a party, wondering who’s been keeping score, and for how long.

Nobody meant any harm. Someone just decided, somewhere along the way, that saying it plainly would feel like pressure — and that not saying it was the kind option.

Brené Brown has a line for this in Dare to Lead: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” She’s writing about hard conversations at work, but the sentence was built for volunteer boards, where the instinct to soften every expectation runs deepest. We’re not paying these people, the reasoning goes, so how can we ask things of them?

Here’s the problem with that reasoning: you’re already asking. Every board has expectations. The only question is whether they’re written down or discovered.

Unstated expectations become resentments — in both directions

An expectation nobody states doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and turns into a quiet ledger.

The board keeps its side: one trustee never joined a committee. Another skims the packet, when they read it at all. A third hasn’t given. None of it gets said, because saying it would require admitting nobody ever asked. So it comes out as coolness, as a name quietly skipped when officer nominations come around, as an exit interview that never happens.

The trustee keeps a ledger too, and theirs is just as fair: nobody told me committee service was assumed. Nobody said the packet takes two hours. I showed up to everything I was invited to, and somehow I’m behind. A board member who fails an expectation nobody stated wasn’t failing. They were set up to fail — and on some level they know it, which is why these situations curdle instead of resolving.

Vagueness feels gentler in the moment. It defers every uncomfortable sentence. But it defers them to the worst possible venue: month fourteen, sideways, with a score already kept.

Write the one-pager

The fix costs one page. Not a handbook, not a policy binder — one page, titled something honest like “What we ask of trustees,” reviewed by the board and handed to every member, not just new ones. It covers five things:

Meetings. How many per year, how long, and what attendance the board actually expects — stated as a number, because “regular attendance” means five different things to five different people.

Preparation. That the packet arrives a week out and trustees are expected to have read it. Say roughly how long it takes. This is the most commonly violated expectation on any board, and almost the only one that has never once been written down.

Committee service. Whether every trustee serves on one, and how assignments happen. If committee work is where the real hours are — it usually is — say so here, with an honest estimate.

Giving, if any. Whatever your board’s actual expectation is — a personally meaningful gift, a specific minimum, give-or-get, or nothing at all — put it in writing. “Nothing at all” belongs on the page too; it spares people the math at the gala.

The term. How long it runs, whether it renews, and how renewal gets decided — so nobody has to wonder in year three whether staying on is assumed, offered, or earned.

If you’re recruiting, this same clarity belongs in the ask itself, before the yes — the honest ask is its own discipline. This page is for the people already in the room, most of whom said yes to a vaguer version and have been improvising ever since.

The annual re-commitment conversation

A one-pager states the expectations once. A short annual conversation keeps them true.

Once a year — many boards pair it with committee assignments — the chair sits down with each trustee for twenty minutes and walks through the page. Not a performance review. Two questions, both genuine: does this commitment still fit your life? and is there anything on this page you’d change?

Most of these conversations are short and warm. A few surface exactly what you’d want surfaced: a job change that makes Tuesday meetings impossible, a trustee who’d rather move committees, someone quietly relieved to be asked whether this is still their season. Every one of those is cheaper to hear in a scheduled conversation than to infer from six months of drift.

The re-commitment matters because a yes given once, years ago, to a different version of the job, isn’t really consent anymore. Asking again — actually asking, with “no” as an acceptable answer — is how the yes stays real.

When the year changes shape, say so

Expectations drift, and the honest move is to announce the drift instead of letting people discover it.

The capital campaign year is the classic case. The board that signed up for six meetings and a committee is about to be asked for donor introductions, extra sessions, and a stretch gift — and everyone leading the campaign knows it months before the trustees do. Say it early and say it specifically: this year the campaign means more asks — here’s what that looks like. Two extra meetings, likely in the fall. Each trustee asked for five introductions. A request for a campaign gift above your usual giving, sized to your situation. Then give people room to respond honestly, including the trustee for whom this is the wrong year.

A board that hears the change announced can rise to it. A board that discovers it one surprise at a time just feels the job growing under their feet — which is how good trustees start eyeing the door.

The kindness is the clarity

It will always feel gentler to leave things vague. It is always kinder not to. One page, one honest conversation a year, and a plain announcement when the year changes shape — that’s the whole practice. The trustees who can meet the expectations will finally know they’re meeting them. And the ones who can’t will get what vagueness never offers: the chance to say so out loud, while it’s still a conversation and not a ledger.