What constitutes a “healthy” relationship between the social services board and the social services director?

According to John Carver (Boards That Make a Difference), no single relationship in an organization is as important as that between the board and its chief executive officer. Although a board’s choice of a person to serve as its chief executive officer is extremely important, Carver suggests that the establishment and maintenance of a proper, healthy, and good relationship between the board and its CEO is even more important because good executives can be rendered ineffective as a result of poor relationships with their boards while poor executives are retained because of inadequately structured board-CEO relationships.
Establishing and maintaining the right relationship between a board and its CEO requires defining (a) the board’s job, (b) the executive’s job, and (c) the link between the board and the executive.
A “healthy” relationship between any governing board and the agency’s director requires, first and most importantly, that the board and the director have a clear understanding of their own, proper roles and responsibilities and respect the other’s roles and responsibilities. A social services board must accept both its own responsibility with respect to leadership and governance of the social services department, including its responsibility to provide effective oversight of the agency and the director’s performance, as well as the director’s responsibility for administering the agency, supervising the agency’s employees, achieving the agency goals established by the board within the executive limitations set by the board, and discharging the legal powers, duties, and responsibilities imposed on the director.
Some of the characteristics of a “healthy” relationship between the board and director include—