https://www.communitydirectors.com.au/icda/tools/?articleId=3422
Modern governance and community groups
In this help sheet, the term ‘Committee of Management’ (COM) is used but it is intended to apply to
whatever governance structure your group has, such as a Board.
Governance is about how your group is run – the structures and systems and understandings that
enable you to make the right decisions and set the right course. It’s not the same thing as
management – what the Committee of Management (COM) does is governance; what the CEO does
is management, although the two functions can overlap to some extent at the upper levels. (And in
some smaller or newer groups without paid staff, the governing body may in fact be responsible for
both. Still, you need to know the difference.)
Governance isn’t your actual policies, either, or your mission or your direction; it’s how your
organisation decides what that mission and that direction and those policies are.
There’s no one perfect organisational solution, and a community group can do very well under a
number of possible structures of governance. What you’re looking for is a structure that can
combine:
Responsiveness
Everybody who has an interest in a decision, and everybody who has information about the topic,
should be able to be heard; if possible, everybody who has an opinion on the subject should be
listened to.
Decisiveness
After everyone has been heard a decision has to be made, and that decision must be implemented
wholeheartedly across the organisation.
Ease of use
As far as possible the system should be transparent, flexible, and straightforward. It should be
possible to see immediately who’s responsible for what, and how that responsibility relates to the
whole mission and to other sectors of the organisation.
Approaches to governance
Inspirational
Community groups have always prided themselves on a style of governance that is (at least when
compared to large commercial enterprises) informal, consultative, and relationship-oriented. The
task of a leader in this system is to nurture a vision of what could be, and then inspire people to
participate in its implementation.
Administrative
Bureaucracies have traditionally focussed on rigid procedural systems that exhaustively document
every passage of paper through a hierarchy of decision-makers until a final judgement is made. The
task of a leader in this system is to ensure that there is no leakage of laxity into the office and that all
safeguards are strictly enforced.
Not-for-Profit
One of these approaches is more accountable, one is more entrepreneurial, but both have their
virtues. Modern community group governance must seek to combine both, projecting a vision and
ensuring that all accountability safeguards are in place.
The Committee of Management (COM)
The Committee of Management (COM) is at the head of the group’s structure of governance. The
COM of an incorporated association has total authority, under the law, until some of that authority
is parcelled up and given away (delegated) to others.
Final decisions on important issues must always pass by the COM. It is up to the COM to create the
other organisational structures that will make it possible to carry out the mission.
The COM must:

Choosing the Chief Executive Officer and monitoring their performance. Governance is not
necessarily about doing: it is about ensuring things are done. The COM must be definite about its
performance expectations, must assign these expectations clearly, and must check to see that these
expectations are being met.