Meetings, other than sales meetings with clients can be the bane of any team member’s existence. Open-ended internal meetings without defined times are known to quickly devolve into unproductive periods that do not properly address the issues people care about. This happens for a variety of reasons, but more often than not the problem is exactly what makes your company strong in the first place: Strong characters and personalities.
Managing Strong Boards for Success
Strong characters and personalities are what drive your company to success. But managing these individuals takes skills.
Board meetings are one type of meeting where these management skills are especially needed. Leaders dominate boards, and leaders always have agenda initiatives they personally advocate for.
Many start-up company board meetings are highly unproductive because the early stage startup CEO generally is not an experienced board member, and thus often lacks the experience required to manage a board effectively. Board meetings, if they happen regularly, are often just an event held to satisfy legal requirements. They also get held as an occasion for the management team to meet with lead investors, and provide brief updates, and answer basic questions. Each time this particular form of meeting is held represents an opportunity lost.
Managing Boards for success does not begin and end at the start and end time of a scheduled meeting. Boards are incredibly powerful tools when managed properly. It’s impossible to put all board management skills down in a list for one short post. But it is possible to begin managing better by following some simple tips.
Here’s some suggestions as to how to leverage your board meetings, and make them valuable corporate events.
- Have a set agenda that repeats across all meetings. Have defined time set aside at each meeting to address every area of the business, and to properly discuss issues. Do not presume this means the same amount of time at each meeting. In fact, plan ahead of time for what areas will be the focus of the following meeting, allow the operational team responsible for that area of the business to plan for presenting key information and insights, and also to soliciting insight and support from the board.
- Board members are not just there for meetings; they should be working between meetings on tasks they are assigned to help them company develop. Take advantage of their skills and experience
- Make sure you send a complete financial report and KPI metrics too all your board members at least 72 hours prior to a meeting. If you want to ensure a meeting is productive, do not expect the board to receive the information and provide meaningful feedback simultaneously. Sending the information ahead allows for clarification, and preparation. Last-minute updates will result in knee-jerk responses that do not benefit anyone.
- Most founders and early stage company leaders who have outside boards run afoul of their investors by mismanaging this process. Last minute information means external directors only can have a cursory review of the materials, and unable to provide anywhere near full value.
- To support proper preparation and productivity, schedule calls with your board members between meetings to follow up on questions. Not every question can be answered during a board meeting. In fact, some questions are not immediately relevant, or are hard to answer, because additional information is required. Rather then distract an entire meeting by going down a rabbit-hole with an overly long and detailed response to a question that is not key to the company operation, use the interim calls to handle these properly. There’s a reason that a good chunk of a CEO’s time is spent on board relations. This is not time wasted. The questions are usually extremely pertinent for a reason.
- Also specifically schedule calls with each board member prior to the board meeting, after you send them the updates and before the meeting occurs. Discuss any questions they may have, and ask if they have any topics they want added to the meeting agenda. Knowing what they want to discuss means your executive team is prepared.
- Fix an agenda for the meeting. If the major questions are resolved through the pre-calls, the board meeting can efficiently be focused on the key strategic issues that matter to the company, and which the company needs help with.
- If you manage it correctly, the key issues would be addressed via a presentation to the board on the challenge, and a directed discussion to elicit ideas, challenge assumptions, and confirm support for strategic direction.
Managing Boards for Success
No one likes to waste time. If you do not prepare your board meetings properly, and don’t manage your board effectively between meetings, then your entire team is wasting their time during the meetings.
Manage properly, and board meetings become success events that result in forward momentum, not just an accounting of activity. If your meetings are just accountability events, you have missed the opportunity, and are not managing for success.