Job evaluations. A very effective practice for Board members is to assess the quality of your Board’s operations. Many times, Board members don’t know what they don’t know about their own Board. Board evaluations are required in many for-profit industries. These Board members know that it is critical to periodically conduct brief, actionable assessments of their Board’s operations and then act on the results of those assessments throughout the year.
Evaluations do not need to take a long time, many times even 15 minutes a year for each Board member to complete a short questionnaire, followed by half an hour to analyze the results and plan a strategy for improvement.
Some boards may feel they don’t need evaluations. I would suggest that these boards complete the free board assessment tool offered by BoardWalk Consulting. This evaluation must also be completed in a confidential manner. If your board of directors scores less than an eight on any of the five criteria, then it may be time for an assessment to find and correct deficiencies in your operations.
Before embarking on the exercise to assess your directory, make sure everyone is on board with this exercise and the first question to ask yourself is, what are we assessing? There are different evaluations that can be completed, such as the effectiveness of the board or individual board members. The individual performance of board members should never be evaluated until everyone has been educated about their role within the board. It can be demoralizing to be evaluated on criteria you didn’t know were your responsibility. We will focus this article on the effectiveness of the board as a whole.
Here are some sample questions to help assess your board’s performance. Ask your board members to complete the survey and then summarize the responses. Tell your board members that the survey needs to be completed quickly and honestly, don’t overthink the answers.
Some points to consider before implementing the evaluation.
1. Make sure your questionnaire is relevant to your corporation and the items you want to measure. Your board members will lose interest in answering irrelevant questions.
2. For evaluations to work, everyone must be open and honest. The only way to achieve this is to ensure confidentiality in the questionnaire. Have an independent third party prepare summaries.
3. Do not try to be too exhaustive in your evaluation.
Commit to act on the results of your survey. These assessment tools provide an excellent picture of a board’s strengths and weaknesses. His power is from. If there is no follow through on these exercises then they are simply a waste of time and energy for your volunteers.
– The board has a complete and common understanding of the roles and responsibilities of members, management and staff within the corporation.
– The board receives regular reports on finances/budgets, outputs/program performance, and other important matters.
– The board communicates effectively to the community.
– Board meetings facilitate focus and progress on important issues.
– Each member of the board feels involved and interested in the work of the board.
– The directors receive regular training and information on their responsibilities.
– New board members are oriented, including an operating manual for the board, the Declaration of companies, the Articles of Association and the Law, as well as their roles and responsibilities as board members.
– The organization of the board is documented with a description of the responsibilities of the board and the board committee.
– That the organization has at least the minimum number of members on the Board of Directors required by its statutes or the Law.
– The board has a process to handle urgent matters between meetings.
– The board of directors has an annual calendar of meetings.
– Meetings have written agendas and materials related to major decisions are provided to the board prior to the meeting.
– Conflicts between directors do not interfere with the functioning of the Board of Directors.
– Our financial monitoring and control systems allow us to quickly identify errors and protect us from most criminal activities.
– I am proud to be Director of this corporation.
Responses should be simply categorized as “Agree or Disagree”, compiled and summarized. I like to see summaries in bar chart format.
These summaries for each question can be used to determine if there is a problem in a particular area and can also help prioritize areas to focus on improvement.
Condominium Corporations would do well to take note of board practices in highly effective companies. While the industries may be different, the need for an effective decision-making structure is the same.