We need to stop treating board members like children

By Hannah Fearn, freelance journalist specialising in social affairs

It’s been a frustrating year so far. With the government charging towards its 1.5 million new homes target and a big announcement from the prime minister on new towns, I should have been hammering away at the keyboard. And I’ve been doing my very best, but something has been slowing me down: professional anxiety.

Not mine, you understand (although that’s also been known to rear its ugly head at points) – but yours.

Take this case in point. Back in February I was working on a very straightforward article aimed at housing association board members. It was for a business title and would have a small but very focused audience – a favourable readership keen to learn from the experiences and expertise of others. It should have been incredibly easy to find interviewees to talk about what they had seen in their time serving as a board member, and to discuss the challenges ahead. Irritatingly for me, it wasn’t.

The problem wasn’t a lack of enthusiasm from board members themselves, or even from the press officers I drafted in to help me round them up. They all saw the opportunity presented to be influencers and leaders within the housing sector. The block came from the anxieties of the senior executive teams and the board chairs; they simply said no.

As one frustrated board member put it to me, after being told to decline my interview request: “I’m so annoyed. Why can’t we find good board members? Well, maybe it’s because we treat them like kids.”

He raises a crucial point. Collectively, housing associations have hundreds of current vacancies on their boards, many of which call for expert and specialist skills. They are also struggling to meet their own diversity targets, despite being well aware that representative boards make more effective and robust decisions.

“They are also struggling to meet their own diversity targets, despite being well aware that representative boards make more effective and robust decisions”

According to research by the Housing Diversity Network, less than 5% of board members are disabled and fewer than a quarter of housing associations have tenant members on their board. “A board with a gaping hole in terms of experience will struggle and, in the case of housing associations, the hole is all too often the lived experience of tenants,” it argues.

Under its current president, Elly Hoult, the Chartered Institute of Housing has promised a focus on professionalism and is celebrating the talents of the sector’s dedicated workforce. Boards also boast high skill levels and, even better, the impressive dedication of a voluntarism too. Yet these talented individuals are being muzzled because of a sense of panic about how organisations are perceived in public. Any moment in the spotlight is seen as a threat of exposure rather than a chance to dazzle and shine.

Given the disproportionate critical focus on the housing sector at the moment, I understand these anxieties; they aren’t inexplicable or entirely unfounded. But they also obliterate the possibility of redemption.

If you don’t talk about your good work – and there’s a mountain of it – nobody else is going to. And if you handle your board members like yet another risk to be managed, those vacancies will remain empty. After all, which expert willing to volunteer their time and knowledge then, in return, actually enjoys being treated like a toddler whose enthusiasm puts them in constant danger of running face-first into a concrete wall?