What are trustee sub-committees for?

I must admit my experience as a trustee of sub-committees is mixed. I have seen some that have tackled issues that the main board neither have the skills nor the capacity to address. But I  have seen others that are a huge waste of time and energy, both for staff and trustees.

My first experience of bad committees was when I was a trustee of the RSPCA over 30 years ago (I am sure it's much better now!!) The sub-committees provided another opportunity for trustees to meddle in the staff’s work, something which also happened on the main board. Worse still, many trustees would have their say on the sub-committee and then have it all over again when the minutes were reported to the main board. What are the problems and how do you avoid useless sub-committees?

I think there are three main problems with sub-committees:

Trustees often have sub-committees due to habit, not based on need. Many charities I have seen have committees because they have always had them. They believe that they are obliged to have them. This is particularly true of areas like ‘audit and risk’ or ‘finance’. The committees get a life of their own. Nobody ever asks whether the committee is really needed.

Committees are time-consuming for staff and for trustees. There is probably a rule of thumb on the number of hours of work for each page of the sub-committee pack. Let’s say it is an hour of work for each page, by staff to prepare and by trustees to read. So a sub-committee with 50 pages of papers is 100 hours of people time. Sometimes that is incredibly useful time, but often it's not. To paraphrase that old adage, ‘half of all my board time is wasted; I just don’t know which half’.

Committees take up board meetings' time and slow down decision-making. The final problem with sub-committees doesn’t end with the sub-committee. The minutes are then reported to the main board, which can mean that an issue is relitigated. The trustees who ground their axes on the sub-committee do so again on the main board discussion. Worse still, an issue gets referred back to the sub-committee, which doesn’t meet again for another 3 months, and so staff and trustee time is taken up, and decision-making is slowed down.

Six issues to look at about subcommittees

1. Be clear about what success looks like for a sub-committee. How do you know if a committee is useful? For me, one of the ways is that the Committee makes decisions and isn’t just a talking shop. Another is that it develops and is clear about its agenda and what it is trying to do. If a committee is just a talking shop, what is its value?

2. Be clear about why the committee can’t be role into the main board.  Why can’t the issue of the committee be solely part of the main board discussions?  If it's important enough to have a committee, why isn’t it all discussed at the main board? Or is the problem that some trustees just like the sound of their own voice? Or that the chairing is poor and too time-consuming.

3. Every committee should think about the impact on staff and on trustees. Is all that committee time worth it?  Are staff just covering their arses? Are some trustees loving the feeling of being a sub-committee chair? It's all too easy for committees to generate their own feeling of importance, while doing very little. Approving minutes, matters arising, a few report backs, any other business, and Bob’s your uncle, you have two hours with plenty of froth and little value.

5. Be bold and don’t have committees. Alternative trustee models to sub-committees are always worth looking into. These could be trustee ‘task and finish’ groups (as opposed to committees, which are sometimes more like ‘no task and never finish’ groups. Alternatively, a working party which combines both staff and trustees on equal terms is often a productive route.

6. You don’t have to have a finance committee. What topics the sub-committee covers is worth thinking about carefully. I would bet that if a charity has one committee, it's finance. And then if it has another, it's nominations and remuneration. But charities much less frequently have a committee which looks at services/mission or people. Why is finance so important, and the mission so little?

4. Invite people on committees who aren’t trustees. One good way to add value to a committee is to have people from the outside sit on it. These are typically experts in the area of the work of the committee. This way, a committee can make sure it has additional expertise compared to the main trustee board.

I am not saying that sub-committees are always a waste of space, but I am saying they aren’t always valuable. Every trustee board should regularly review its sub-committees and decide whether they are really useful.