By Dan Clark
For several decades, credit union executives have prepared agenda packets for their directors. This helps them prepare for board actions — a good thing. In probably 80 percent of credit unions, prepared information passes one time a month from the office to the directors.
In recent years, credit union boards have been shifting away from acting on operational issues at their meetings to discussing the long-range future, strategic issues, the mission, etc. This, too, is a good thing.
Unfortunately, having all the data that expresses operations delivered in the package known as the board’s meeting materials minimizes—even derails—this important shift from operational focus to strategic discussion. All the information arrives in the same package (whether printed or available in electronic form) because it started out that all the information pertained to the board’s action agenda. Now, it all does not.
It is a given that directors need to have information to monitor the credit union’s performance. And it’s also true that directors need to have advance information and ideas to stimulate their discussions about the future. But it would be better to deliver the two types of information separately—not as one massive board packet.
Much of my work has to do with focus and mind-set. That is especially true when I facilitate strategic planning retreats. I have determined through experience and experimentation that on a given day, it’s best to start with the longest-term, most general planning ideas and gradually work down to details.
It’s a little like flying a hot air balloon. Since people are mired in daily business and personal issues, it takes a good deal of time to get the minds warmed up to thinking lofty, long-term and in the clouds. Getting people to make the mental shift from managing to visioning is a progressive, often gradual, process to orchestrate. Once up there, it only takes the smallest mention of a short-term concern to bring the far-reaching discussion crashing to the ground. It’s like opening the canopy of a balloon and letting all the hot air out.
A board meeting can suffer the same fate. The meeting is a change of venue, a break in one’s day. The board meeting is new context, allowing individuals to rise above the small and short-term, to deal with the large and long-term -- to get on a strategic level. However, if you start the board meeting on an operational footing, in 95% of the cases you’ll never reach the strategic level at that meeting.
To effect that high level for the participants of a board meeting, make the meeting materials all about the future. That means delivering all the operational reports in a separate package.
This also means you can hold your board meetings earlier in a month. Since the board no longer focuses on operational issues, it does not have to wait to receive operational reports in order to meet. You might even get into a preferred restaurant for the meeting because you are no longer competing for space with other boards later in the month.
Discussions of the long-range future do not rely on any month’s or any quarter’s results. Instead, as directors and executives discuss the long-range future, they do so with a memory of the operational trends displayed in the charts and graphs included periodically in the separate operational reports package.
This idea means change, and change can be a hassle. Nevertheless, if you are serious about having hot, future-oriented board discussions that soar in the clouds of long-term thought, then this is an idea that deserves some serious groundwork to launch it.
Dan Clark, a former CUES member, heads Dan Clark Associates: Governance and Strategic Planning, a member of CUES Financial Suppliers Forum, and is the author of the blog Musings on Governance.
Read more of Dan’s board agenda ideas in the CUES Skybox archives.
