Board Self-Assessment is a method for analyzing and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of governance. The board can make use of it to take a look at its own performance and assess its own effectiveness. This will lead to better governance.
Developing an effective board assessment process requires planning and time as well as board member engagement. The first step is determining the scope of the assessment. This could be the whole board, committees or individual directors. A good plan will identify the evaluation method. Common methods include surveys, interviews or discussion groups that are facilitated. Once the scope and methodology for evaluation are established, it’s time to design and distributing questionnaires.
Some boards opt to conduct the assessment in-house, while others hire an outside consultant. A third party consultant will to ensure a thorough and impartial analysis, which is essential for those who do not have the time or resources necessary to do the evaluation yourself.
While it is essential for board members’ evaluation their own performance, it’s equally important for nonprofit boards to look at the group as board meeting software an entire. It is easy for nonprofit boards and their evaluation facilitators to get bogged down in assessing the individual’s responses and not pay attention to the board as a whole.
A successful self-assessment will help boards understand their expectations of each other, discover gaps in board composition, align board expertise with organizational strategies, address investor concerns about turnover and diversity and increase the effectiveness of their procedures and practices. In a growing number of cases, public companies are publishing the results of their evaluations of their boards in their proxy statements.
