By Beth Ellen Holimon, CEO, The Hive Collective
A board we work with had spent nearly a year developing their organizational values. They brought in staff, surveyed community members, designed a beautiful graphic, and hung it in the lobby. Six months later, the executive director called us. The board was stuck in a recurring conflict about resource allocation — and no one had mentioned the values once.
This is one of the most common patterns we see in governance work. Values get named. They rarely get operationalized.
The board had a version of what many mission-driven organizations have: aspirational values and no mechanism for making them useful in actual decisions. They weren’t a bad board. They were an undertooled one.
When we came in, we didn’t start by talking about the conflict. We started by asking a different question: How do your values actually show up in how you govern?
Over the next few months, we worked with this board to close what we call the values-governance gap — the distance between values as language and values as operational guidance. Here is what that looked like in practice.
First, we started not with the values themselves but with behavior. We asked the board to brainstorm: What actions do we take? What do we do in this room, in our decisions, in how we treat each other and the communities we serve? We filled the wall with concrete, observable behaviors — some aspirational, some painfully honest. The board discovered their values by first naming what they actually did and wanted to do. This sequence matters. It grounds values in reality rather than aspiration, and it produces language that board members recognize as their own because it came from their own experience.
Second, with values now named in language the board had generated themselves, we helped them close the gap between name and practice. For each value, the board identified two or three specific governance behaviors that would embody it going forward. What we will do in meetings. How we will make decisions. What we will say when we disagree. The board stayed in the discomfort of specificity rather than retreating into the comfort of abstraction and it really brought them together.
A wonderful tool that the board embraced was quick values check at the close of every agenda item that involved a significant decision. Just one question: How does this choice reflect or tension with our values? It takes ninety seconds.
After using a number of tools like this, the board addressed the resource allocation conflict. The conversation had a different quality and board members were referring back to specific values language. The disagreement was still real, but it was now grounded in something shared.
Conflict in a boardroom without a values framework leads to decisions being made by the loudest voices in the room. Values give difficult conversations something to stand on.
This is the kind of work The Hive Collective does alongside boards — not consulting at them, but facilitating with them. We believe that values only fulfill their promise when they are structurally embedded in how a board operates. If your board has done the work of naming values and is now wondering why they aren’t changing anything, we’d welcome that conversation.
You can learn more about both governance support options at hivecollective.net, or reach me directly at bethellen@hivecollective.net.
