How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment

Board Self-Assessment provides a platform for analyzing and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of governance. The board can use it to step back and evaluate its own effectiveness. This will result in better governance.

Developing an effective board assessment process requires planning, time and participation of board members. The first step is determining the scope of the assessment. It could be the entire board, specific committees and/or directors individually. A good strategy will determine the method of evaluation. Interviews, surveys or facilitated discussions are all common methodologies. Once the scope and evaluation method are decided, it’s time to design and disseminating questionnaires.

Some boards prefer to conduct the evaluation in-house while others employ the help of a third-party consultant. A third party consultant can ensure a thorough and impartial analysis, which is especially important when your board doesn’t have the time or the resources to conduct the assessment on their own.

While it is crucial for board members’ evaluation their own performance, it is Corporate Communications Policy equally important for nonprofit boards to be focused on the board as in its entirety. It is easy for nonprofit board members and their facilitators to become obsessed with evaluating the individual’s responses and neglect the board as a whole.

A successful self-assessment helps boards clarify their expectations of each other, discover deficiencies in board composition and align the expertise of the board with the organizational strategy, address investor concerns about turnover and diversity and increase the effectiveness of their procedures and practices. Increasingly, public companies are publishing the results of their board’s evaluations in their proxy statements.