How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment

Board Self-Assessment is a method to analyze and discuss governance strengths and weakness. It’s a way for the board to step back and evaluate its own effectiveness, which in turn leads to effective governance improvements.

Planning, time and engagement of board members are essential image source novalauncherprime.pro/availability-with-board-meeting-software-reviews/ to develop an effective board evaluation process. The first step is determining the scope of the evaluation. This could be the whole board, specific committees and/or individual directors. A good plan will specify the evaluation method. Surveys, interviews or facilitated discussions are all common methods. Once the scope and evaluation method are decided, it’s time to start designing and distribution of questionnaires.

Some boards choose to conduct the evaluation on their own while others engage an outside consultant. A third party consultant can help to ensure a thorough and impartial analysis, which is important if you don’t have the time or resources to conduct the assessment on your own.

While it is important for board members’ evaluation themselves, it is equally important for nonprofit boards to be focused on the board as in its entirety. It is easy for nonprofit boards and their evaluation facilitators to get caught up in assessing the individual’s responses and forget to look at the board as a whole.

A successful self-assessment will help boards clarify their expectations of each other, uncover deficiencies in board composition, align board expertise with the organization’s strategy and address concerns of investors about diversity and turnover, and improve the effectiveness of their procedures and practices. Increasingly, public companies are releasing the outcomes of their board’s assessments in their proxy statements.