Bad Boards: Surviving Dysfunctional Boards Without Losing Your Job or Sanity
You were hired to lead. Not to manage the board.
If you run a nonprofit, you already know the meeting. The routine staffing decision that becomes a values debate. The board member who emails between meetings about things nobody asked them to watch. The vote that was settled in March and somehow isn't settled anymore.
Governance books describe the board you're supposed to have. Bad Boards is a field guide to the board you're actually managing.
Drawing on more than two decades of leading nonprofit organizations and working directly with their boards, Keri Stokstad names eight patterns behind board dysfunction, what each one looks like in the room, what it quietly costs the organization, and exactly what to say when it surfaces:
The Micromanager, who treats visibility as accountability.
The Absentee, whose name on the roster is the contribution.
The Dominator, who runs the room whether or not they run the meeting.
The False Expert, whose confidence outpaces their relevance.
The Status Seeker, present for the visibility, absent for the work.
The Instigator, for whom no decision is ever quite final.
The Gatekeeper, who decides what the board gets to know.
The Mission Drifter, whose exciting new idea is somebody else's mission.
Every chapter follows the same four moves: the boundary to set, the language to use in the meeting, the structural fix that shrinks the pattern's room to operate, and the mindset shift that lets you respond instead of react. A quick-reference Field Guide condenses the whole book for the moments when you have four seconds, not four chapters.
You'll also find what most governance books skip: what to do when the patterns combine, what to do when the playbook doesn't work, how to tell a difficult board from a broken one, and honest guidance on when leaving is the right move and how to do it well.
This book is for executive directors, senior nonprofit staff, board chairs who want to be part of the solution, and anyone leading through unclear authority and decision-making dysfunction. No theory lectures. No personality tests. Patterns, language, and a way through.
You are not trying to change the person. You are trying to manage the pattern.
Because the work still matters.
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