Mastering Ethical Leadership and Strategic Governance with Dr. Kurt Senske

Unlock the secrets to ethical leadership and effective governance with Dr. Kurt Senke, a luminary in the non-profit world and a beacon of wisdom in organizational leadership. Our enlightening conversation with Dr. Senske is a treasure trove of transformative lessons, mentorship tales, and the profound integration of personal values into professional life. From navigating the corridors of law and politics to the sacred halls of academia, Dr. Senske's journey is not just a story—it's a roadmap for anyone aspiring to lead with integrity and impact.

Dive into the often-misunderstood realm of non-profit and congregational governance alongside Dr. Senske, as he dissects the myriad challenges boards face today. Discover how diversity in skills and age within leadership can revolutionize the way organizations operate. With a wealth of anecdotes and research findings, our discussion reveals how to tailor governance structures to stay mission-focused amidst technological advances and societal changes. And, when the pandemic has upended traditional norms, learn why adaptability is your greatest ally in steering your board through uncharted waters.

The episode reaches a crescendo discussing the pivotal role of mission refocusing and succession planning in organizational longevity. Dr. Senske walks us through the metamorphosis of Lutheran Social Services of the South into 'Upbring,' showcasing how strategic realignment can amplify an organization's core mission. As we dissect the nuances of training future leaders and preparing for leadership transitions, listeners gain invaluable insights for cultivating stability and foresight in their institutions. Join us for a masterclass in leadership that promises to equip you with the tools to govern with foresight and grace.

Transcript

Keith Haney: 1:00

My guest today is Dr Kurt Sinski. He is the founder and principal of CEO Board Services, a consulting firm that specializes in working with mission-oriented organizational leaders and boards around issues of governance, strategy, organizational structure, succession planning, coaching and mergers and acquisitions. For 23 years, dr Sinski has served as Chief Executive Officer of Upbring, formerly Lutheran Social Services of South, a multi-faceted, multi-state social agency with an annual operating budget of over $100 million and 1,000 employees. It has been responsible for more than quadrupling the size of the agency and steering a once-troubled agency back to financial strength. During his tenure, the organization eliminated indebtedness of $60 million and currently enjoyed the endowment of over $40 million.

Keith Haney: 1:56

Dr. Senske completed his graduate work at Gordy University, exas, and Valparaiso Gor Dr University in Indiana, majoring in accounting, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration. He holds a Juris Doctorate Degree from the University of Illinois College of Law and a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from Schiller International University in Paris, france, with a PhD in Government from University of Texas, austin. He is the author of five books the CEO and the Board, the Art of Non-Profit Governance as a Competitive Advantage. Wine in the World, word Savior and Serve the Calling Live a Life of Significance, executive Values, a Christian Approach to Organizational Leadership and Personal Values God's Game Plan for Life. He's a gifted public speaker. He also has a guest columnist with a variety of issues for newspapers and magazines, as well as regular commentator on television, podcasts and radio.

Keith Haney: 2:58

He and his wife, lori, live in Austin, texas, and their proud parents of their daughter, sydney and Sonna Lakoti, welcome Dr Sinski to the podcast. Kurt, it's good to have you on the podcast. I'm looking forward to this conversation, but I'd like to get my guest have an opening question. What's the best piece of advice you ever received?

Kurt Senske: 3:17

Keith. What's interesting, I think, about my background is that every single person for generations was either a church worker or a farmer. I knew I had absolutely no talent to be in a farmer, but I also didn't want to be a church worker, and I was at Valparaiso University at the time. We were at church, I was home on a break, my father was talking to another member of the church and he was jokingly telling them yeah, my son wants to be a lawyer.

Kurt Senske: 3:47

And the comment that the person replied I'll never forget. He said well, you know, I think the world needs an ethical attorney more than it needs another church worker. And I've always remembered that comment, because it's the understanding that each of our vocations, each of our lives matter, and there is not necessarily a ranking of one better than the other. It's how we use our unique God-given gifts as a part of our own vocation. And so that was the piece of advice. Now, God has a funny sense of humor, right? Because for the past 25 years I've been a church worker, but at the time I didn't quite know it.

Keith Haney: 4:29

That's great. I love that. That's great advice to have someone kind of remind you that we do need. Every profession matters and everything that we do has a God-given vocation attached to it. So, yeah, knowing that you have a special, unique place in the world and God can still use you is just kind of a nice reminder for all of us that, no matter what we're doing in life, god can use us where he's placed us to be a blessing.

Kurt Senske: 4:53

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And so I tried to remember that, as I was an attorney and then I worked in politics and sometimes it's hard to keep your face strong when you're working in politics I bet it's always a great reminder to me that my vocation was important, no matter what Exactly?

Keith Haney: 5:10

I'm curious, Kurt, as you think about your life, who are some people who serve to inspire you and maybe even meant to you along the way?

Kurt Senske: 5:17

You know, keith, and I tend to think of my life in chapters, maybe so when I practice law. There is this, an attorney, who is maybe four years older than me, who, no matter how busy he was, he would take the time to mentor me, to answer any question. I had to make sure that I was successful in my own role. He didn't need to do that, but he just took me under his wing. His name was DJ Sartorio. I'm just absolutely loved and respected that individual.

Kurt Senske: 5:43

I then got into politics, and among the people that I worked for was Governor Mike de Cacus, especially when he ran for president, and what I really respected about the governor is that he taught me how you can be an ethical politician and also be a good family man and be a politician, because both of those were pretty rare then and probably even more rare today, and so I found that fascinating.

Kurt Senske: 6:13

I took a kind of a detour and worked at Concordia University in Texas for a few years and had a couple of mentors there Larry Meisner, les Bear and what they taught me is how to integrate my faith into all aspects of my life.

Kurt Senske: 6:28

So work, life, home, community, congregation, and then, as I became CEO and served as CEO for a couple of decades. I always formed a kitchen cabinet, and so people like John Nunes and Paul Miles and my wife were people that I knew I could go to and have that confidential conversation about things that maybe I didn't want other people to know because I needed good advice, and in many ways they became my kitchen cabinet. And obviously, my wife along the way. She has such a strong faith, a former Baptist girl growing up who can pray with the best of them and witness with the best of them. We can all learn a lot from her as well. And then, finally, obviously, my parents, who taught me what it was like to have a great marriage, what it was like to live a life of service as church workers, as teachers, as executives, as administrators. All of those are the building blocks that resulted in someone like myself then taking that mantle and going on with the next generation.

Keith Haney: 7:38

I love that and you've shared a little bit about your personal journey. I'm curious on this journey, what lessons did you learn to help you write a specialist new book on governance? Because I served on many different boards and I've discovered that governance is an issue not just on boards but in churches too. That can be either a blessing or it can be the thing that ignites a firework storm in a building full of firework. So you know, kind of tell us how your journey helps you kind of pour into this particular aspect of the church.

Kurt Senske: 8:12

Yes, so it's interesting. Almost every book I write, I have some experience in it, but I'm also understanding internally that I don't quite have it right, and so I want to build on my experience but also learn on the lessons that are in the research and other people's experience and maybe provide then other people with a blueprint of how to do it even better. And that was the same with this book. The CEO and the Board and you know, having served on 13 different boards of directors, having been a CEO, now being a consultant, what I realized is that there is indeed a lot of frustration out there. Right Board members want to make a difference, but they don't quite know how.

Kurt Senske: 8:52

Ceos get frustrated, pastors get frustrated because they want their board to be a partner with them in ministry, but oftentimes that feels like a hindrance, and so the question becomes how do you build your unique governance model for your church or for your nonprofit organization, for your school? That's exactly right for your particular situation, because every organization, every church, has its own unique culture, its own unique history, its own unique challenges and opportunities, and my experience has taught me, and the research has demonstrated, that you need to have, you need to create a governance model that, yes, fits the mandates of all the different laws the duty of care, the duty of obligation, the duty of you know fulfilling what you're supposed to do. But after that create the structure that makes the most sense for your organization and in the book I talk about what the research says is most important and then also provide a scorecard of how do you know whether or not you're actually being successful.

Keith Haney: 10:01

I love that, and the thing I've discovered about so many boards I've served on is you're right, the structure is very important, especially to fit your particular organization. We love to find a generic constitution and board policies and just adapt and just change the name on it, and then we wonder why it doesn't work.

Kurt Senske: 10:22

Yes, no, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, what's interesting to me, too, is if Peter Drucker actually talks about how there's one thing that all boards have in common they do not function. And he's talking about for-profit boards, he's talking about nonprofit boards. I think John Carver talks about how boards tend to be an incompetent group of competent people, and so there is this frustration, and what I've also found is it's actually gotten maybe magnified in the past five years Now.

Kurt Senske: 10:51

Covid helped speed this process up, but it actually began prior to COVID, where, whether you're a congregation, whether you're a nonprofit organization, the world has gotten just so much more complex, and it's requiring a different board, it's requiring a different governance structure, and so I think gone are the days where you can assemble 12 well-meaning people to serve on your board of directors, but you really need to take a step back and say, all right, what are the skill sets that I need on this board? What are the different generations that I might need on this board? What type of diversity makes most sense for our organization? And with the increasing challenges of technology, of maybe a lack of less donations coming in, with increased competition, with the difficulty in retaining and recruiting staff, it's more important than ever to not only find the right board members, but then to create that structure and the culture where you're looking forward at least a half of the time to talk about the future, to talk about the strategy, to talk about what are maybe the elephants in the room.

Keith Haney: 11:59

Knowing my research, I went in with a hypothesis of what I thought I was going to find, to only find that there were some surprises. So what was probably the greatest surprise you discovered in your research? That was like an aha moment for you.

Kurt Senske: 12:16

Yeah, you know, I think, Keith, there are a couple of them. One is I intently wrote this book for non-profit organizations. So private university schools, your typical non-profit organization. What I found after the fact is how this is also so relatable and works for congregations as well. The governance issues in congregations are, in many ways, no difference than the governance challenges and opportunities in non-profit organizations and universities.

Kurt Senske: 12:51

Congregations are increasingly becoming a pretty complex organization, especially those that maybe have a school attached to it or a preschool, and so after the fact, I realized that what makes sense for non-profit organizations actually also makes complete sense for churches as well, and so I'm starting to expand that message, because what I'm finding is that congregations are struggling and looking for resources as well, because they want to do the governance piece right, but they don't necessarily always quite know how to do it.

Kurt Senske: 13:25

The other thing I found is that almost every organization, no matter if those that are doing well or those might be struggling, has, in many ways, what I call their own elephant in the room. It may be increased competition. It may be, if you're a school, a charter school that's opened down the street. If you're a congregation, it may be changing demographics within your neighborhood. If you're a university, it may be different competition among your peers, but what surprised me is oftentimes the unwillingness to at least even identify the elephant and then have the courage to wrestle with whatever that elephant is, in that trust-filled, blame-free environment where you're all sitting around the table leadership and board members as partners to figure out how do we get past that?

Keith Haney: 14:20

That's a good observation, because I've worked with a lot with congregations and I've seen several different governance issues. One of my favorite is the Constitution was written in 1872 and we haven't changed it since and we can't figure out why it's not working. It was designed for a church that had 40 people on the boards and committees and we're down to church of 40 and we can't make the governance system work.

Kurt Senske: 14:47

Yes, yes, here's what's interesting, keith I started talking about. The challenges tend to be in two different buckets One is plumbing and the other is what I call people being. A great example is what you just brought up, where your bylaws or your articles or your Constitution may have made sense for 30, 40 years ago or 100 years ago, but they no longer make sense today. To me, that's a plumbing issue. Or if you have a board meeting and your board agenda is always looking backwards, you're reviewing your financial statements, you're talking about your successes in the past quarter or past year, but you're not looking forward. To me, that's a plumbing issue. There's also what I would call a people issue, and one example of that would be do you have the right people sitting around the table?

Kurt Senske: 15:34

For example, I worked with a congregation here in Texas and what the new pastor did is what? He came to the church. He found that every member of the board was a third or fourth generation family member of that congregation. What he also found was that the needs of the long-term members of the congregation are often completely different than a member who just joined, maybe a couple of years ago. He created a little bit of excitement by adding people who hadn't been with the church for more than a generation. But from his perspective he really had to have that perspective sitting around the table to really understand what his parishioners need from him and the church to fulfill their needs.

Keith Haney: 16:22

I love that. I've also seen where people have changed governance to give more control to the pastor and less control to the people. I've walked in congregations where they were used to having input and all of a sudden, maybe going to move into a policy-based governance system, has now, I would say, disenfranchised the members. There's grumbling because there's a lack of communication. I've done several self-studies where the same issue kept coming up. The same people make all the decisions in the church and we're not included. What do you do when it's a situation where you run into that?

Kurt Senske: 17:03

Yes, it's really interesting, keith, because sometimes a pastor doesn't want to be in charge. Sometimes the pastor comes in and says, yes, I need to be the quote CEO of this congregation. From a governance perspective, I think the initial conversation that has to occur is what is the most appropriate model for one this congregation but also two, for the talents, the skill sets and the desires of the pastor. It takes that trust-filled room and conversation to occur. David Peter from the St Louis Seminary has written an outstanding book on the different models of governance for congregations. I think the first step is to figure out what the right model is. The second step is all right. What's so unique about our congregation? Let's have this honest conversation about how should we adapt our governance model to fit the new needs of this congregation.

Kurt Senske: 18:08

Also, I would strongly encourage every congregation to embark on a conversation about getting that clarity of strategy what is your role, what is the mission of our congregation? It may be shepherding, it may be evangelizing, it may be both, it may be also school, but really having that clarity, also understanding that the world is changing so fast that you're probably not going to be able to plan more than several years out. But whether the two or three things you really want to accomplish in those next three years. And then, what is that one thing you need to accomplish and want to accomplish in the next 12 months to keep that momentum going? Because I tell congregations, I tell nonprofit organizations, from a messaging and a marketing perspective, you're not necessarily competing against other churches, you're competing for the time and interest of your parishioners, against the Nikes and the McDonald's and the Amazons of the world. Your message is better be as clear as that in terms of who you are and what you're about and what you want to accomplish as a congregation Love that. And as a nonprofit organization or a university.

Keith Haney: 19:17

One thing I know a lot of organizations struggle with, especially churches, is what I call mission drift. And how do you set your structure up? And one of the things you talk about in your bio was how you helped organizations rediscover their mission. And I think so often structure can hinder our mission focus, can make us go mission to drift. Because we focus so much on the structure, on the things you talked about before, we talk about the past. We keep going rehashing things that haven't worked before we're frustrated. So how do you avoid the mission drift and have the structure of the organization drive mission versus let mission drift away?

Kurt Senske: 20:00

Yeah, that's a great question and I'll use an example of how. At one point I probably had gotten it wrong, but then we in some ways we took a hard look at what our organization is to get it right. So, as CEO of Lutheran Social Services of the South, we had a mission that said we will provide help, healing and hope to the children, the elderly and the poor in the name of Jesus Christ, and it was a great message. We had elderly services, we had children's services, we had services for the poor, food pantries, et cetera. But the problem with that broad of a mission is one it was really difficult for us to say no and we got spread too thin and we realized we couldn't be all things to all people. So I actually had a mid-level millennial staff person come to my office one day and said can I talk to you? I said absolutely. And so he came in and he says you know what I don't like our mission. And I said why? He says it doesn't mean anything to me and I said well, what do you want to do? And he says what I really want to do, because we're so good in children's services, is to break the cycle of child abuse. I'm tired of seeing children being abused, and so we thought, wow, I thought this is really interesting conversation we're having, and so I shared this with our other members of our leadership team and we then shared that conversation with our board of directors and what we found is that, yes, we're really good at providing children's services. We're getting tired of always serving those who've been abused. How do we actually stop the abuse?

Kurt Senske: 21:33

We made some hard. The elephant in the room was that we didn't have enough resources to continue to provide retirement communities with the competition in the for-profit world. So, as a result of a number of strategic conversations, it allowed us to make some really difficult decisions to sell retirement communities to other good providers so that the mission continues but we no longer have the debt. It allowed us to change our brand to upbringing, because in Texas, I think, only 2% of the population are Lutheran, and if we truly wanted to break the cycle of child abuse, we needed to invite everybody to join us in this mission. It also allowed us to create an advocacy program.

Kurt Senske: 22:14

It also allowed us to create a research partnership with several universities, including the University of Texas, and we also took a deep dive into the research and if you really want to break the cycle of child abuse, not only do you have to have good social service programs, you have to have good educational programs, and so it allowed us the opportunity to create charter schools, faith-based schools, head Start programs, understanding that we needed to meld and combine both social service programs and educational programs in order to really make a dent in the child abuse. None of that could have happened if we hadn't had these hard, honest conversations about what are we really good at, what can be best, how can we best serve the communities in which we serve, and what is our unique niche and what do we need to give up in order to do that. It was a long journey, but it was also a worthwhile journey, and we were able to do this because we had complete trust in the room, understanding that the only thing we wanted to do was to be more impactful in our organization.

Keith Haney: 23:26

I love that your book has questions for organizations to kind of go through and ask themselves kind of in a setting of discovering some of those competitive advantages or your blind spots. So if you were trying to work with an organization that was dealing with some of those blind spots you just mentioned, what are some good questions that they could ask themselves about Just what you talked about, how do we get back to what our strength is? Our mission is that we are better than anybody else at yeah, yeah.

Kurt Senske: 23:57

And what's interesting, Keith, is that from my perspective, in my experience, it's really difficult for boards and leadership teams to confront the blind spots, and I think partly because you're doing this day in and day out and sometimes you don't actually take, you don't actually realize what your blind spots are.

Kurt Senske: 24:16

And so what I've recommended is that it can be as simple as let's start with talking about what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses, what are our opportunities, what are our threats, and it allows then maybe even bringing in a facilitator so the leadership can be full participants to then highlight what may be their blind spots that need to be addressed.

Kurt Senske: 24:44

So, for example, I was sitting in on a two-day board meeting as a facilitator observer, and it was clear that they had really challenging financial situation, and what was fascinating to me is the first seven hours of their board meeting nobody brought that up, and finally I couldn't stand anymore. So I brought it up in a nice way and said you know, I've seen your financial statements, I've seen your balance sheet. Before we talk about all the things we wanna do in the future, let's talk about how we're gonna wrestle with our financial situation and what we can do strategically maybe to improve this over the both the short term and the long term. And so in some ways it's just as much of a willingness to confront those elephants and to have those conversations and to not ignore them, because I think so often our congregations and our nonprofit organizations tend to ignore them because it's not gonna bother you in the next year, but it may in the next few years.

Keith Haney: 25:46

Right. So if you're a CEO, you listen to this podcast and go and I really need to do something. I want to read this book. How would you recommend a CEO on a board process your book if they're going to look at the CEO on the board?

Kurt Senske: 26:00

Yeah, yeah, so I think there is value in having a common language, and so what's interesting about board of directors especially in the nonprofit roles and in world and also congregational world is that many board members come to service with absolutely no board experience, and so they don't know what to do. They're well-meaning people who want to do the right things, but they really don't know what to do. And so there have been other books that have been published that you'll spread around and read, but oftentimes, as you probably know, keith, governance books can be so boring it's hard to get through them and you don't quite understand what the authors are saying. So my whole goal of this was to think about that new board member and to think about what a CEO or the organization leader needs from their board, and to create really short chapters so that they can read them together and to have that common language and understand that one size does not fit all. And so I'm not here to sell books, but I do think that there is a benefit to having that common language, and so I would suggest I would start with that Now. It's also there's at the end of the book a scorecard that talks about how do you know whether or not your organization has a successful governance model and that it is in fact a competitive or missional advantage.

Kurt Senske: 27:23

And so you look about, you know, you ask yourselves the questions do you have that healthy, trusting relationship with the CEO or with the pastor? Do you have a pastor or CEO who's comfortable sharing everything with the board and vice versa? Do you have this shared focus of looking strategically into the future during your meeting time and do you have that clarity of mission where you understand what your mission is and also what are the two or three things you need to accomplish in the next few years in order to succeed that in that mission? I also the research is also very clear that proactive succession planning is very important. It's a little bit hard in a congregation, but that doesn't mean you can't talk about it and to start preparing and to have those conversations. I think that's really important and you know, at the end of the day, does the pastor, does the leader feel supported by the board and does the board feel supported by the leader? If you answer all of those questions in the positive, you're off to a pretty good start and you're in the right direction. And then you know you talk about all right. Every organization has that elephant in the room. What's ours? What can we do better? What do we need to change? How is the external environment changing our internal world? And to have those forward-looking conversations on a quarterly, on a regular basis, as opposed to maybe once every couple of years.

Keith Haney: 28:51

What I love about the succession conversation is I've been on boards where it's on the agenda, where he says we need to talk about succession and that's where it ends. You know, we just say in the future we should talk about this, but we never actually talk about it as a board. So I was like, well, are we gonna cover it at some point?

Kurt Senske: 29:11

Well and the best practice that I've seen a board that I served on. We had hired a new CEO and absolutely loved her. She was a great CEO, but what we told her is we're gonna have this conversation about succession planning from the very first month you are part of the organization because we don't want you to be afraid that you know five years and now, when we bring it up all of a sudden we want you to leave. We don't want you to leave, but you may get hit by a bus. You may get an offer you can't refuse. We as a board have an obligation to do this, and I think congregations have that exact same obligation as well.

Keith Haney: 29:50

So let's stick there a little bit. So how do you bring up that conversation? How do you prepare a succession plan? Because, like I said, I've heard us talk about it on boards I've served on and I'll hear the CEO's like well, you know, I'm in good health, I don't plan on retiring anytime soon, so we'll address that down the road. So we never get to it because we keep pretending that it's never going to happen. So how do you? What's some best practices for how you do something other than just talk about it?

Kurt Senske: 30:19

Yeah.

Kurt Senske: 30:19

So I think one best practice would be and this may not make sense for the smallest of organizations, but for every other organization in church it does is I think we have an obligation for those, the leadership underneath the pastor or underneath the CEO, to continue to train them and to continue to develop their skill sets, and part of succession planning is to continue to develop skill sets at every level of the organization, even if that individual may not ever want to be a pastor or a CEO.

Kurt Senske: 30:48

And so I think that's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is yeah, we know you don't think you're going to leave in five years, but things happen, and so we need to be prepared and we need to have at a minimum that name in the envelope if you are to suddenly get sick and unable to serve, or who temporarily can take your place, and who are people we might want to look at to recruit that might be a good fit going forward. It's obviously never the leaders' sole decision, but oftentimes they're in a position where they have more names and more understanding of who might be a good replacement than others, and so I would begin with that conversation, and it also then, can lead to conversations about what are we doing right as a board? How can we better serve you as a leader? Do we need to have a conversation about maybe taking a sabbatical to help you in terms of your renewal process? How can we best support each other and I think that's part of the succession planning conversation as well.

Keith Haney: 31:55

Because I've seen a lot of large organizations that did not do that. I've seen large churches where the spounding pastor stepped down and the succession didn't work and you went through it three others before they found the next person, because that did not go well and it was not planned properly.

Kurt Senske: 32:20

And it's one of the most important things you can do. So as CEO. One way to judge, I think, my success is are they performing even better after I left than when I was there? Right, and so I think as a leader, as a board, you actually have that obligation to ensure that you're going to have good people to replace you when that time does come for you to leave Now. It doesn't always work, but I've also seen. You know, my old home congregation in St Louis Webster Gardens did an outstanding job of transitioning from a retiring pastor to their associate pastor to senior, and everybody was on board. I worked with a congregation in Texas. They did the exact same thing. There are ways to do it. It's not always easy, especially in the congregational world, but what drives me crazy is so, kate, I was working with a non-private organization at head over a thousand employees and the CEO was convinced that there was not one person in that organization who could ultimately replace him.

Kurt Senske: 33:24

Now, if there's not one in those a thousand people, you're probably hiring the wrong people or you're not training them right and develop them as skill users. There's got to be one.

Keith Haney: 33:35

So, kurt, this is a fascinating conversation. I could dive into every part of your book. But what are you most excited about today, as you look at the landscape of the non-profit world and kind of with the response you're getting from your book, what are you most excited about?

Kurt Senske: 33:54

Well, yeah, it's a great question. So, on a personal level, what I'm excited about is this ability to help organizations enhance their governance practice and to help them understand that there is a direct tie between governance and strategy and strategy and success, and so if their goal is to have a missional impact within their community, it needs to really start at the governance level, and then we can quickly move to strategy and then we can quickly measure success and impact on community. To me, this has been really rewarding in that one of the goals that I made a year and a half ago, when this book was about to come out, is how are we going to measure success with respect to this research? And the goal in my mind was to have an impact, either directly or indirectly, on a thousand organizations, and so it's a little bit difficult to measure, but we're measuring it, and so we're tracking who's using the book as a board. We're tracking who its congregations are using it. We're tracking how many people ask us to come and to speak to their boards of directors, and the neat thing is, after about 15 months, we're at about 600.

Kurt Senske: 35:12

And so it feels like we're making an impact in the area in which we think that I think I have an expertise in, and so that's what excites me, that's what gets me up in the morning, that's what big conversations with people like you so much fun, because we're spreading that word, that this matters, because I think the downside to governance is you can get by with bad governance in the short term and it's probably not going to hurt much, but in the long term the research shows it will, and so it's getting that recognition among the CEOs and the pastors and the leadership team and the boards that this really does matter if you're intent on having long term succession, mission or success. I love that.

Keith Haney: 35:57

So, Kurt, I love that. I guess this question what do you want your legacy to be?

Kurt Senske: 36:04

You know part of me. Keith doesn't like that question because it makes it about me, right.

Keith Haney: 36:10

And I don't like that.

Kurt Senske: 36:12

But so if I were to die tomorrow, what I would hope people were to say is that we trusted him, that he had integrity, that he was a good father, that he was a good husband and that the organizations that he, either you know, had a full-time or a part-time role with are stronger today, as a result of his involvement, than they would have been without him. I think that would be what I would hope people would say about me when I'm gone.

Keith Haney: 36:49

I like that Something. I haven't asked you that I should have asked you.

Kurt Senske: 36:54

Wow, you know what I see. Yes, one of the things that I didn't talk about, in terms of what the research says, that is so important in boards of directors of any organization, of any congregation, is, in addition to having appropriate diversity for your own organization and congregation, and that's going to mean different things to different people right In your own church. You're going to have members of your church and that's going to limit, maybe, your diversity. However, you can still have diversity in terms of generation. You can still have diversity in terms of various different skill sets, et cetera.

Kurt Senske: 37:38

What the research is more and more clear about whether you're talking about a board member or about a leader or about a pastor is just as important, if not more important than skill sets is emotional intelligence, emotional maturity.

Kurt Senske: 37:52

The question becomes when you're recruiting board members, when you're recruiting that next pastor, that next leader is how are you going to determine whether or not this individual has an emotional intelligence, emotional maturity that is so important today in terms of leadership? It's something that I think we haven't quite realized, but the corn fairies of Spencer Stewart's, the big search firms for executives these days, are saying that this is actually more important than any skill set or experience or wherever you went to colleges. This is what you have to look and test. To do that, you may want to take them out to dinner or to lunch to see them in various different settings, to ask about maybe their experience in other boards, because I've seen one or two board members poison an entire board. One or two leaders poison an entire organization. It's not because they didn't have the skills, it's because they just didn't have that emotional intelligence.

Keith Haney: 38:47

That's a good point. I've seen that too. It's hard to correct a bad hire. It's also hard to correct the wrong appointment or approval of a board member.

Kurt Senske: 38:59

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. What's interesting to me is almost all of us think we have emotional intelligence, but the research actually shows that only about 35% of us do. It really is important to flesh that out.

Keith Haney: 39:14

Yeah, definitely, Kurt. Where can people find your book the CEO on the board, the art of nonprofit governance as a competitive advantage, and connect with you on social media?

Kurt Senske: 39:25

Yeah, thank you for asking. The book's available on amazoncom and cphorg. Both of those are great places to go Connect with me on social media. I do most of my professional stuff on LinkedIn, Kurt Sensky. Also. If you want to know a little bit about my private life and personal life, feel free to connect me on Facebook as well. Those are the two that I primarily use, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Keith Haney: 39:52

Well, kurt. Thanks so much, it was a great conversation. Just talking about this is such a critical part, because nonprofits typically are designed to make an impact in the world. When they don't function well or the board hinders the mission of it, it diminishes the impact it can have. Whether that's a church or a nonprofit, you found it with a mission and a goal to make the world a better place. Having a governance that helps you do that and accomplish that effectively is so critical. Thank you for taking the time to do the research and to write this and share your insights with the world.

Kurt Senske: 40:31

Keith, it's my pleasure. That is why we exist. Right is to make that impact, that mission impact in our communities and fulfill our calling. Thank you for having me.

Keith Haney: 40:42

Thank you so much, Kurt. Have a blessed new year.

Kurt Senske: 40:44

Likewise you too, keith. Blessings on your ministry.