QUESTION 12: How Can Our Board Self-Evaluation Improve Our Functioning and Our Output?

“The Acid Test of Effective Corporate Governance”

A board member, clearly proud that he had invested 250 hours on board work the previous year, told Ram Charan, “We put in a lot of hard work.”

But Charan, wisely, pushed past the rhetoric and non-measurable metrics—and instead—threw him this zinger: “Let me ask you something. What would you say are the one or two things your board did that really made a difference for the [organization]?”

You guessed it. The board member “…took a long pause and looked up at the ceiling. He seemed lost in thought, like he was struggling to come up with a concrete answer. As I waited for him to respond, I realized that he probably had never thought about his board work in that way.”

QUESTION 12 of 14: How Can Our Board Self-Evaluation Improve Our Functioning and Our Output? Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, by Ram Charan (Order from Amazon)

Board members “should not confuse hard work, as commendable as it is, with meaningful results,” writes Ram Charan. That insight is just on the first of 14 wisdom-packed pages in Chapter 12 on the critical need for boards to conduct self-evaluations.

Charan adds, “The board’s output—the quality of the decisions it makes and actions it takes—is the acid test of effective corporate governance.”

Don’t confuse inputs (meeting frequency, meeting length, etc.) with outputs. Boards should “explicitly state that the central purpose of their board self-evaluation process is to continuously improve their ability to govern effectively.”

Peter Drucker agrees: 

“Self-assessment can and should convert good intentions and knowledge into effective action—not next year but tomorrow morning.”

The Drucker quote is from the robust 30-page resource, “Tool #5: The Board’s Annual Self-Assessment Survey,” in ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board. According to ECFA’s research (see page 32), 31% of board members said YES to this question: “In the last two years, have you had an outside person help your board look in the mirror to do self-assessment for how it could improve?”

Tool #5 gives you multiple options in three major sections:
• Section 1: Do-It-Yourself
• Section 2: Facilitated by a Consultant or Board Coach
• Section 3: Template: “Best Governance Practices” Survey

If you opt for the Do-It-Yourself approach, Tool #5 gives you seven options, including this free assessment from ECFA:

CLICK HERE to complete the NonprofitBoardScore™, a tool developed by ECFA. The online survey will give you instant feedback and allow you to re-take the evaluation over and over (perhaps every six months or at least annually). Email the link to everyone on your board—and encourage each board member to save and print the results for discussion (and action!) at your next board meeting. 

READY FOR CANDOR? If you have a healthy board—competent in Governance 101 practices—and you’re ready for a challenge, ask your Governance Committee (or Executive Committee) to consider peer evaluations at least once a year. Very common in for-profit governance, peer evaluations are very uncommon within nonprofit ministry boards. Read Ram Charan’s suggestions in Chapter 12 first—and then discern if your board is ready to go deeper.

According to the Harvard Business Review article, “What Makes Great Boards Great,” by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, it is the soft side of board governance that distinguishes high quality boards from the rest of the governance rat race. He labels it a “virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candor”—but, he warns, even that can be broken at any point. For your first peer review, perhaps ask a board coach to help you set the guardrails.

To paraphrase Proverbs 9:7, “Teach a wise board member, and he or she will be the wiser; teach a good board member, and he or she will learn more.” 

BOARDROOM DISCUSSION: What do we want to learn from our next board self-evaluation? Ram Charan writes that board members “should not confuse hard work, as commendable as it is, with meaningful results.” What are the one or two things our board has done in the last six months that has really made a difference for the ministry?

CHECK OUT THESE HELPFUL ECFA RESOURCES

• READ: Lesson 1, “Wanted: Lifelong Learners. Would you trust a surgeon who stopped learning?” in Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom. (Click here to read the four-page chapter.) In his color commentary on this lesson, Ralph E. Enlow, Jr., writes, “I find that the fatal combination of passivity and agenda clutter conspires to crowd out efforts to walk the talk of continuous board development.” (Read the blog.)

• TOOL: With 30 pages and more than a dozen self-assessment options, check out “Tool #5: The Board’s Annual Self-Assessment Survey,” in ECFA Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for Your Board. (Read more here.)

Called to Serve: Board Member Self-Measurements

Note: This is No. 16 in a series of blogs featuring wisdom from the 91-page gem by Max De Pree, Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board.

Max De Pree: “How will I know if I am doing a good job?”

I gotta say…“What Does a Trustee Promise?” (pages 53-60) is a powerful summary of a board member’s role and responsibilities. I could milk this chapter for at least five blogs, but I won’t.

Chew on these morsels:
    • “The opportunity to be a member of a non-profit board is a special gift to us as persons seeking to serve and grow.”
   • “Like other forms of leadership, it’s not a position or an honor, but rather a demanding responsibility, a meddling in other people’s lives, and hard work that requires continuous learning.”

So…how should board members discern if they are doing a good job—if they are effective? Max De Pree says “a trustee should work to establish pertinent and compassionate ways to measure what matters.” It might look like this:

#1. Courtesy. Do I prepare for meetings, arrive early for meetings, and pocket my iPhone during meetings?

#2. Commitment. Do I affirm the mission and advocate for it—and do I know, affirm and practice our organization’s core values? (Can I recite them right now?)

#3. Context. De Pree asks, “Who am I in this context?” and “What is my purpose?” and what unique gifts do I bring to this context?

#4. Covenant. De Pree again on covenantal relationships: “It means that we spend reflective time together; that we’re vulnerable to each other; that we can challenge each other in love and deal with conflicts as mature adults.”

#5. Critique. “…evaluation is such a ticklish matter with volunteers that I have come to be a great believer in the need for written reflections as a way of gauging service and contribution.”

Imagine…if twice-a-year, every board member self-assessed their courtesy, commitment, context, and covenant—in writing—to discern if they were doing a good job. Imagine!

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test my thoughts. Point out anything you find in me that makes you sad, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” (Psalm 139:23-24, Living Bible)

BOARD EXERCISE: Before your next meeting, ask board members to read De Pree’s chapter, “What Does a Trustee Promise?” and then write a confidential, self-assessment, “How will I know if I’m doing a good job?” Discuss.

To order from Amazon, click on the title for: Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board, by Max De Pree, (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).

Quick Fix Tools for Board Self-Assessments

At least once a year, the best boards conduct a board member self-assessment exercise. Yet some boards delay the process until they have engineered the perfect assessment tool. Bad idea!

Peter Drucker wrote, “Self-assessment is the first action requirement of leadership: the constant resharpening, constant refocusing, never really being satisfied.”

Jim Collins also chimes in: “To throw your hands up and say, ‘But we cannot measure performance in the social sectors the way you can in a business,’ is simply lack of discipline. All indicators are flawed, whether qualitative or quantitative.” (Read more in his 35-page gem, Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great.)

Whether your self-assessment takes five minutes or 50 minutes—anything is better than nothing. So here are some quick fix tools and ideas:

Five Minutes.  At your next board meeting, ask each board member to rate their annual performance on a scale of one to five (5 = excellent); and share their rating (and why) with a 30-second comment.  (Some do this at every meeting—see the blog, “Fast Feedback Tool” and “We All Need Feedback.”)

Five Tools. Pick one:

1) BoardSource has several options for board self-evaluations and board self-assessments.

2) Ram Charan’s latest book, Boards That Lead: When to Take Charge, When to Partner, and When to Stay Out of the Way, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey and Michael Useem, has excellent questions for board self-evaluation. Customize these questions for your unique use.

3) Use the one-page Self-Assessment in the ECFA 3rd Annual Nonprofit Governance Survey (62 pages) published in 2014 by ECFA. You can download a PDF here.

4) Customize the annual ECFA governance survey for your own use and benchmark your responses against the average responses of other ECFA-accredited organizations. 

5) Adapt the 20 board self-assessment questions from the book, Ten Basic Responsibilities of Nonprofit Boards (Second Edition), by Richard T. Ingram (90 pages, BoardSource, 2008). 

The first title of six in BoardSource’s “Governance Series” delivers the generally agreed-upon list of the 10 roles and responsibilities of nonprofit board members. (Christ-centered boards will likely add one or two more.) The book includes an excellent 20-point self-assessment for board members, with probing questions like:
   • “Are there ways in which your talents and interests can be more fully realized at or between board or committee meetings?”
   • “Have you and the board taken steps to deal with real or apparent conflicts of interest in your board service?”
   • “Which aspect of your service on the board has been the least satisfying and enjoyable?”

Click here for a link to four governance books (including the one above) I reviewed in 2014. Again—the goal is not to create the perfect tool. The goal is to improve our board stewardship of the ministries God has entrusted to our oversight.

God is faithful and He will give you grace and courage as you trust Him. May God bless you in 2015!

QUESTION: How will you inspire your board members to measure and monitor their own effectiveness in 2015?