About Tim Kurth
Helping Boards Govern with Clarity and Purpose
Tim Kurth has spent much of his professional career helping boards and organizational leaders wrestle with a deceptively simple question:
Who is responsible for what?
When that question is unclear, boards drift into operations, leaders struggle to understand the authority they have been given, accountability becomes inconsistent, and organizations spend energy managing internal confusion rather than advancing their mission.
Tim’s work in governance grew out of helping organizations confront those challenges in the real world.
Over the years, he has worked with boards and leadership teams of churches, schools, ministries, nonprofits, and other mission-driven organizations—helping them clarify roles, establish appropriate authority and accountability, develop governing policies, and create healthier relationships between boards and the leaders they empower.
From Policy Governance to Principles Based Governance
Tim’s approach has been deeply influenced by the pioneering work of John Carver and the Policy Governance model. Through years of applying those concepts with actual boards, however, he became increasingly convinced that organizations needed more than a governance system to adopt.
They needed to understand the principles that make good governance work.
That conviction led to the development of Principles Based Governance—an approach that emphasizes enduring principles of governance while giving organizations the ability to apply those principles appropriately within their own mission, structure, culture, and context.
The objective is not simply better policies or more efficient board meetings.
It is organizational harmony: a governing board confident about its work, leaders empowered to lead, meaningful accountability throughout the organization, and greater organizational energy directed toward accomplishing the mission.
Principles for Good Order
Tim is the author of Principles for Good Order: Creating Organizational Harmony Through Effective Governance, published by Concordia Publishing House.
The book brings together the governance principles Tim has taught and applied with boards and leadership teams and presents them as a practical framework organizations can understand and put to work.
The book is also the foundation of a larger effort: to make excellent governance understandable and accessible to leaders who may never consider themselves governance experts but nevertheless carry the responsibility of governing organizations they care deeply about.
Governance Should Serve the Mission
Tim believes governance is not primarily about meetings, motions, policies, or parliamentary procedure.
Governance is about stewardship.
Boards are entrusted with organizations that exist for a purpose. Their responsibility is to ensure that those organizations accomplish that purpose faithfully, effectively, and sustainably.
Good governance creates the clarity that allows that to happen.
That idea is at the heart of Principles Based Governance—and at the heart of Tim’s work with boards and leaders.
Start a Conversation
If your board is wrestling with unclear roles, governance challenges, organizational friction, or simply wondering whether there is a better way to govern, a conversation is a good place to begin.