Being the Board – Top Tips for Peak Board Member Performance
Published on by Jenny Houck in Client Accounting & Advisory
For any organization, the Board of Trustees or Board of Directors ultimately calls the shots. Public relations, hiring executives, and deciding growth areas all fall to this group of professionals. But to serve on a board is a huge time commitment that can unbalance your priorities, especially when the position is unpaid.
You joined the board to make a difference for a good cause. So how can you stay on track with your professional and personal goals while also advancing the mission of the organization? Let’s dive into the top tips for thriving as a board member.
Fine-tune your time management
As a board member, your responsibilities could range from resource management to deciding your organization’s strategy. While the process of hiring, managing, and compensating the CEO might seem to have the greatest impact on day-to-day operations, the full list of the board’s duties may include:
- Financial review and management
- Establishing and maintaining governance policies and financial controls
- Ensuring transparent and ethical business conduct
- Refining your organization’s strategy for a sustainable future
- Developing strategies to fulfill the organization’s mission
- Monitoring progress against goals
- Ensuring adequate resource acquisition and distribution
To ensure all these duties are carried out, your board should divvy up responsibilities so no one member is overloaded with tasks. A best practice is reserving 10-15 minutes at the end of each board meeting to go over action items and delegate tasks to each board member. Keep in mind each other’s strengths and weaknesses, ongoing board responsibilities, and any personal challenges they may currently be facing when dividing up tasks.
After the meeting ends, take some time to plan your assigned tasks or assessments into your work/life schedule, prioritizing them based on impact on the board and allowing sufficient focus time for each. Depending on the time of year, you may have to get creative about fitting in board responsibilities on top of the busy season or kids’ extracurricular activities. The sooner you plan, the easier and less stressful it is to complete your board duties before the next meeting.
Keep meetings on track
Since your board likely only meets periodically, when the group gets together, it can be tempting for board members to get caught up in sharing personal anecdotes or unrelated rabbit trails that can lead the meeting away from the initial agenda. Being able to tactfully redirect everyone back to your main objective can help keep the meeting on track and ensure that needed discussions are accomplished.
Knowing the different personalities on your board can help you decide how to return the meeting to its agenda. For example, more emotional decision-makers may share a personal experience that leads the conversation away from what directly affects the organization. One way to handle this is to acknowledge their aside and relate it back to what started the side conversation. This keeps them from feeling like you’re shutting them down, while returning to the main purpose of the meeting.
It never hurts to acknowledge the importance of our experiences and point out there’s a chance to share related stories and build interpersonal relationships with other board members when the meeting ends.
Ask thought-provoking questions
The more you can get done during the meeting through group idea-sharing and problem-solving, the less falls to individuals when you leave the boardroom. Asking well-thought-out questions during the meeting can help clarify your responsibilities and find new areas where the board could improve.
Not only will good open-ended questions fuel new ideas, but they will also help identify any potential inefficiencies or less effective strategies being deployed. Questioning “what’s always been done” often eliminates extraneous process steps and saves everyone time and energy – benefitting the organization and board members alike.
Collaborate with your colleagues
Ensuring everyone is doing their part can relieve a lot of the time and effort burden on other board members. When tasks are delegated equitably between all board members, no one has to worry about something being overlooked or taking on more than they can reasonably complete. If there’s a clear head of the board, they should send out a reminder of action items along with the agenda before the next meeting. If your board is more casually organized, you could benefit from some form of accountability system, whether that be establishing mentor/mentee teams to support newer board members, using an online project management solution like Trello or Planner, or automating reminder emails to go out a few days before the meeting.
Inevitably, the time will come when a fellow board member struggles to complete their assignment, due to a variety of outside circumstances. Remember the strength of a board comes from the entire group’s commitment to the organization’s mission. When these situations occur, encourage your colleagues to be adaptable and step in to provide support where necessary. Fostering a collaborative atmosphere will encourage everyone to seek assistance when deadlines loom and a task seems too far behind.
Learning from each other and sharing responsibilities not only supports the health of the organization but also improves personal and professional skills that you can apply in all aspects of your life.
More resources
If you’re a board member and need more insights, we have resources on donor relations and key governance strategies to help you navigate this responsibility.
Currently establishing a board? Look at the slides and recording from our 2022 Non-Profit Seminar to learn how to build a board that checks all the boxes.
Still left wondering about the financial aspects of overseeing a non-profit? Connect with one of our financial pros, and we’ll fill in all the gaps!
More Insights