Want a new year resolution for your board?

Author: Garth Nowland-Foreman - LEAD Director

Is it too late to say Happy New Year Ngā mihi o te Tau Hou? Well how about 新年快乐 (Xīn Nián Kuài Lè) for the Lunar New Year, at least? Even I agree it might be a bit too early for Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori!

In any case, even though its February many of us will still just be getting into any serious thinking about and planning for the year ahead. Regardless of the challenges, risks and opportunities, the good news is there is one thing your board can do (if it isn’t already) that can make your governance life just a little bit easier. And the really good news, is that it doesn’t take much effort.

We are used to seeing an agenda as pretty much essential for each board meeting, but what if we also had an agenda of board meetings for the year? How do you do it? Just four (or maybe five) simple steps.

(1)

Get everyone on the board or who works with the board involved in brainstorming a list of decisions or discussions the board has to cover in the next 12 months – things like planning for the AGM, annual programme reviews, performance appraisal of manager, Charities or other compliance returns, approving annual budget, board self-review, induction of new board members, board succession planning & recruitment, consideration of audit, etc. These can differ from organisation to organisation, but you get the picture. (If you need a ‘cheat’ have someone review the board minutes from the last couple of years to check over what you decided and the major discussions you actually had.)

(2)

Allocate all those activities that are ‘time sensitive’ (have to be done by a certain time) to the relevant scheduled board meeting. You can do this electronically or the old-fashioned way with Post-it notes for each different activity, and flipchart paper marked up with the different board meetings for the year.

(3)

Brainstorm a list of things that you know you should do if you want the board to function at its best, but you usually don’t get around to. This could be: deep dives into your major programme areas; generative ‘blue sky’ discussions that go back to a blank slate and ask if we weren’t already operating as we are, are there better ways of getting closer to our Vision and Mission; planning training and development opportunities for the board; naming the ‘elephants in the room’ that we don’t talk about, but should; considering who are the (potential) stakeholders we really need to work out how to collaborate with much better; etc etc. Again, this will differ for different organisations, but most boards we talk to know exactly what these big,unaddressed questions are.

(4)

Now, and (almost) finally, you can add in to your calendar of board meetings the non-time sensitive tasks from the first brainstorming session and all the tasks from the second brainstorming session. Now you have your Board’s Annual Agenda. But why would you bother? It’s not like we are looking around for stuff to keep us busy. Well, there are some (potentially) powerful payoffs. First, it helps to ensure all the tasks get done. This includes the time sensitive tasks, but is especially useful for the ‘important, but not urgent’ tasks that often just slide off individual board agendas. Second, it helps spread the governance workload across the year. And, what was largely unexpected, it also seems to have a third fortunate side-effect of lifting board members’ collective sense of responsibility and ownership of the board’s governance work. Rather than just turning up with a “I-wonder-what-they-want-us-to-talk-about-tonight” attitude, they are much more likely to see it as “their” agenda, because they collectively helped set it at the beginning of the year. Ironocally this unexpected result may end up being its most useful contribution to your board.

And, by the way, remember when I said there were four or five steps? As an optional fifth step, one board I was on, unexpectedly noticed that there was still a clump of tasks around the end and beginning of the financial year. So we did the unthinkable (for those who worship the orbit of the moon around the earth), and scheduled more meeting board meetings around that time, and had meetings further apart at times of the year when the workload was lighter (even when we had added in the tasks that were not time-bound).

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The Emperor has some new clothes