If your members work in a profession that requires them to view things critically or to seek out irregularities to be successful—as many medical, legal, financial, and construction careers do—they need to understand that the skills they have cultivated are not necessarily well suited for their association's boardroom. Bringing a flaw-finding mindset to the board is rarely productive. A whole board made up of fault-finders is a recipe for going nowhere.

A board that takes a positive approach in its thoughts and actions is immeasurably more effective and more enjoyable than one that gets bogged down in petty criticism.

Association executives have a responsibility to teach board members how to be good officers and directors. CEOs need to help board members understand the difference between the skills they are comfortable employing in their work and the skills their association needs them to employ. And CEOs need to help them develop the latter.

Consider this example: During a board meeting a few weeks after an association's annual convention, the officers and directors—all physicians with an advanced specialty as diagnosticians—reviewed the conference. In the eyes of staff members, the meeting had been a tremendous success: Attendance goals were exceeded by 20 percent, the financial outcome significantly surpassed profit goals, and in the postconference electronic survey, attendees highly rated the content, social activities, and overall value of the meeting.

While every board needs to be alert to the association's shortcomings or missed opportunities, its members need to see what's going right just as clearly as they see what's wrong.

The executive director and conference manager expected the board to be pleased—and maybe even to express some kudos to staff. Instead, the board spent more than an hour dissecting everything that went wrong. At one reception the lines at the bars were too long; one of the general session speakers had trouble with his PowerPoint presentation; there was too much socializing during the awards banquet. On and on it went until the executive director was slumped in her chair. The residual high energy generated by a great conference had entirely evaporated.

"What would it be like," she wondered, "to have a board that appreciates all the effort that goes into pulling off a successful conference for 750 people?"

Seeing What's Wrong

While every board needs to be alert to the association's shortcomings or missed opportunities, its members also need to be constructive and encouraging. They need to see what's going right just as clearly as they see what's wrong. They need to understand that their role as directors, unlike their day job, is not to find fault wherever possible but to find opportunities and create a positive culture for members and staff.

If your board includes members who cannot remove their critical hat when they enter the boardroom, you need to help them shift their thinking to best serve the organization.

The place to nip this behavior in the bud is at the outset of board service—even before a member is elected to the board. The leadership development or nominating committee should communicate this expectation to potential candidates, saying, "We're looking for visionaries and big-picture thinkers, leaders who can step beyond the habits of their profession and inspire a constructive view of a positive future."

That message needs to be repeated during the annual board orientation. (You do conduct an annual orientation, don't you?) During the orientation, you—or better yet, your board chair—can convey the message clearly: "You're not here to micromanage or nitpick. Your job is to help us achieve our vision for the future. That requires an open and expansive attitude."

Orientation is great, but a once-a-year reminder isn't sufficient. You also need to design a board agenda that continually reminds your board what's important and what they should be paying attention to.

Are You Talking About the Right Things?

Think about what your board is focusing its attention on and what you spend your time talking about. Could you be talking about the wrong things? It's an easy trap to fall into, not because board members are contrary, but because their professional comfort levels are often in a micro, rather than macro, world view. People tend to revert to where they feel secure. Board members who spend their professional lives scrutinizing X-rays, documents, or ledgers for the minutest deviation from the norm frequently stray from big-picture strategic discussions to wrangle over operational details, where they feel more comfortable.

It's great if you have an elected leader who "gets it" and can share the responsibility of orienting the board, one who reminds his or her colleagues, "We have entrusted our professional staff to make these decisions so we can focus strategically on the needs of our members and the future of our profession. Let's move on."

But sometimes it takes an outsider—a consultant or external authority—to come in and say bluntly, "The skills that make you good [doctors, lawyers, accountants, building inspectors] are not necessarily the same skills that will make you good board members. If you keep getting bogged down on minutiae or on unproductive criticism, you need to readjust your settings."

As cowboy philosopher Will Rogers used to say, "Every once in a while, take out your brain and stomp on it—it gets all caked up." Good advice for all of us.