The board of directors should be able to comprehend their responsibilities, recognize and evaluate risks, and develop a culture that encourages value creation. To do that boards must be efficient. Yet, too many are evaluated only in the past, when something has gone wrong.
The most effective boards website link don’t concentrate on reports and compliance and instead work with management to maintain performance and determine the future. To do so they are reviewing their governance structures and processes. To achieve this, they are conducting rigorous evaluations to determine their current levels of effectiveness.
These evaluations typically reveal an array of issues and obstacles, ranging from easily addressed operational complaints about meeting length and agenda structure to more difficult issues such as the effectiveness of the board’s role in strategic decision-making as well as gaps in knowledge or competencies, and executive and director succession planning. The evaluations are usually an amalgamation of self-evaluations made by individual directors and the entire board, as well as third party facilitation.
When it is conducted by the board, or by independent consultants hired to provide neutral perspective and expertise, the most effective evaluations are holistic, looking at all dimensions of a winning structure for the board, process, and people. They also include one on one interviews with directors to elicit specific, sensitive, and candid feedback which may not be captured by questionnaires. Additionally, they take the form of practical recommendations that all directors agree to implement within a reasonable period of time.