What preparing for a board meeting teaches about leadership, stewardship, and asking for help.
I’m writing this in the aftermath of our most recent board meeting — which is the only time I actually sit down to write this kind of piece. Something about the preparation fills me with questions, and something about the meeting itself empties me. By the time it’s over, I’m always surprised by how drained I feel. We had full attendance this time. It went well, I think. And yet.
There’s a version of this work nobody warns you about. I started out building something — a program, a platform, a movement — and for a long time the only judgment that mattered was my own. I decided what was working. I decided what to fix. I answered to the mission, and the mission, mercifully, didn’t ask for minutes or a quorum.
Then you go looking for other people’s money, and something changes. Not gradually — almost overnight. Suddenly there’s a space you have to walk into every ninety days and account for yourself. Suddenly “I believe this is working” isn’t enough; you need to show it. I didn’t understand, when we started building the board, that I wasn’t just adding oversight. I was adding a mirror. And mirrors are not always comfortable things to hang in the house.
I want to be honest about the first feeling: governance felt, at first, like a loss of something. Not control, exactly — more like solitude. The quiet certainty of just knowing what to do next, without having to first explain why.
What I didn’t expect was how quickly that feeling turned into something closer to relief. There’s a particular kind of fatigue that comes from being the only person carrying the full weight of conviction. An echo chamber of one is still an echo chamber. Having people who chose, deliberately, to put their name and their credibility behind this movement — people who are not required to agree with me, and do anyway, for reasons that hold up under their own scrutiny — that turned out to be one of the more reassuring parts of this whole process. Not because they never push back. Because when they don’t, it means something.
But that raises a question I still haven’t fully answered: am I looking for oversight, or am I looking for stewardship? They sound similar. They are not the same posture. Oversight watches the work and checks it against a plan. Stewardship carries the work alongside you, as if some part of it belongs to them too. I think I want the second one. I’m not sure I always know how to ask for it.
I’ve started mentally keeping a list of what a board could actually be for — governance, yes, but also cheerleaders, accountability partners, fundraisers, strategic counsel, a sounding board for the decisions too heavy to make alone. I used to think I needed to pick just one. Now I think the honest answer is that it’s a revolving door, and the discomfort I feel about that is really a discomfort with asking for different things from the same people at different times. Some quarters I need them to interrogate the plan. Some quarters I just need someone to tell me it’s still worth doing.
What I keep circling back to is a more uncomfortable question: which part actually matters more — what happens in the room, or what happens because of the room? The conversation itself can feel substantial. People lean in, ideas get sharpened, someone says the thing you’d been afraid to say out loud about your own plan. But none of that means anything if it doesn’t travel. I’ve had board meetings that felt electric and changed nothing. I’ve had quieter ones that, three weeks later, I could trace directly to a partnership or a hire. I’m still learning to tell, in the moment, which kind I’m in.
Our board has always been virtual — members spread across time zones and continents, which was a planned feature, not a compromise. But it means I’ve never actually been in a room with some of these people, and most don’t leave their cameras on. So I’m conducting governance by voice, occasionally by chat reaction, mostly by the quality of silence. This last meeting, everyone attended. But I found myself doing what I always do — scanning for signals that aren’t there. Did they read the materials in advance? When someone goes quiet, is it because they have nothing to add, or because they’re responding to an email? Is the silence agreement, distraction, or something I said that landed wrong? You can’t always tell the difference between someone who is with you and someone who is simply connected.
And then there’s the arithmetic of it. Ninety days. Is that enough to actually move something, or is it just a recurring point of rediscovery — a moment where everyone remembers why they signed up, before going back to their own demanding lives? I don’t think quarterly contact is, by itself, a relationship. The real engagement — the texts, the quick calls, the “thought of you when I saw this” — has to happen in between. And that’s on me.
This is the part I find hardest to admit: I am the one who has to keep the flame lit. Not the board. Me. If I go quiet between meetings, if I let the quarterly session be the only touchpoint, I can’t then be surprised when their engagement matches mine. The reason board members become surrogates out there in the world — the extra eyes that spot an opportunity, the extra hands that open a door — isn’t because they sat on my board. It’s because I stayed close enough, often enough, that the mission stayed alive in their thinking. That’s not free. It costs time I don’t always feel I have. But I’m starting to believe it’s not optional.
Which brings me to the question I probably needed to ask earliest: how much of what a board does or doesn’t deliver is actually a reflection of how clearly I’ve made the ask? I’ve watched my own asks land soft because I hadn’t fully articulated why they mattered to the larger movement, not just to the immediate task. A vague ask gets a vague response. That’s not a flaw in the board. That’s feedback on the clarity of my leadership.
If there’s one thing about this rhythm I’ve come to genuinely cherish, it’s the forced stillness of preparing for each session. The act of compiling the quarter, assessing it honestly against the plan, writing it down in a way that someone else will read critically — it does something the daily grind never allows. It makes me stop. It makes me tell the truth about the period, not the story I’ve been telling myself in the meantime. Some of the most honest reckoning I do all year happens in the days before a board deck is due, not in the meeting itself.
I still don’t have a clean metric for what a board is worth. I suspect it’s all of it — the guidance, the connections, the funding someone unlocked by vouching for us when we weren’t there — none of it fully separable from how present I’ve been in the gaps between meetings. Maybe that’s the most honest place to leave this — not with an answer, but with the willingness to ask it again.
Chudi K. Obiaya
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