How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment

Board Self-Assessment offers a means for analyzing and discussing governance strengths and weakness. The board can use it to step back and honestly assess its own effectiveness. This will result in better governance.

Time, planning, and the involvement of board members are essential to develop an effective board evaluation process. The first step in determining the scope is to determine the audience for the assessment. It could be the entire board, committees or individual directors. A good plan will specify the evaluation method. Interviews, surveys or facilitated discussions are all common methods. Once the scope and evaluation method are determined, it is time to begin designing and disseminating questionnaires.

Some boards choose to conduct the evaluation in-house while others employ an outside consultant. A third party consultant will to ensure a thorough and impartial analysis, which is essential if you don’t have the time or resources to conduct the assessment on your own.

It is important that board members evaluate themselves. However it is equally important that nonprofit boards pay attention to the entire group. It is easy for nonprofit boards and their evaluation facilitators to get caught up in assessing the individual’s responses and not take the time to evaluate the board as a whole.

A successful self-assessment is able to help boards better understand their expectations of each other, identify gaps in board composition and align expertise of board members with the organization’s strategy and address investor concerns regarding diversity sites novalauncherprime.pro/corporate-communications-policy-importance/ and turnover, and improve the effectiveness of their procedures and practices. In their proxy statements, public companies report the outcomes of their board’s evaluations.