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Here are several you can try.
Following board best practices may seem like a daunting prospect. Will it require a complex change or heavy amounts of research? Not necessarily. There are a number of ways you can simply change your board’s collective frame of mind to improve your practices significantly.
One of the things I hear frequently from boards is they struggle to find the time during meetings to sufficiently cover the strategic items they want to explore and develop for their credit union. They only have a finite number of hours and meetings in a year, and the agendas are always jam-packed.
To address this, one simple practice I recommend is having the secretary mark down the amount of time the board actually spends on each agenda item in every meeting. When you measure these time periods, trends will appear. After three or four meetings, you’ll be able to identify where you may be spending too much time, and where you can make a shift to allocate more time to strategic items.
Sometimes boards find themselves continually struggling with a particular responsibility—like CEO succession planning, board renewal or strategic oversight. Often, when a board carries out its responsibilities or makes decisions in a certain area, I find the process involved is not sufficiently formal.
How do you know if your board’s processes are formal enough? I like to use an alliterative device. I call it “The 3 Rs”: Is your process regular, repeatable and rigorous?
A process is regular if it is something done within a certain, specified time frame and on a regular basis.
A process is repeatable if it is both well documented and understood; and if it can be undertaken in the same way every time you go through it. You can change the process as needed, but those adjustments must also be repeatable, clear, documented and well understood.
A process is rigorous if it addresses all of the necessary elements of the responsibility you are carrying out or decision you are making.
Have your board use “The 3 Rs” to take an inventory of all of your processes, and you will quickly locate those that aren’t sufficiently formal and need to be more fully developed.
Matt Fullbrook is Manager of the Clarkson Centre for Board Effectiveness at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, and a board effectiveness consultant.
