How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment
The Self-Assessment of Boards is a crucial function of the board that provides a useful platform for discussing and analyzing governance strengths and weaknesses. It’s a method for the board to step back and examine its own effectiveness, which leads to effective governance improvements.
Making a board assessment effective process requires planning, time and participation of board members. The first step is determining the scope of the evaluation. It could encompass the entire board, specific committees and/or directors individually. A well-designed plan will identify the evaluation methodology. Interviews, surveys or facilitated discussion are the most common methodologies. Once the scope of the evaluation and the method used have been decided the next step is to create and distribute questionnaires.
Some boards prefer to conduct the assessment on their own while others employ the help of a third-party consultant. A third-party consultant will help ensure an impartial and thorough analysis, which is vital if you don’t have the time or resources necessary to conduct the test yourself.
It is important that board members assess themselves. However it is equally crucial that nonprofit boards focus on the group. It is easy for nonprofit boards and their evaluation facilitators to get bogged down in evaluating the responses of individual members and not pay attention to the board in its entirety.
A successful self-assessment will help boards clarify their expectations of each other, reveal deficiencies in board composition, align board expertise with organizational strategy, address investor concerns about the diversity of boards and their turnover and also increase the effectiveness of board procedures and practices. In their proxy statements, companies that are public disclose the results of their boards’ evaluations.
