Reviewing the effectiveness of your board - What is good practice?

It is good practice for a board of any organisation to conduct an annual review of their effectiveness. This is a useful health check and should help directors and chief executives concerned about particular aspects of the board to identify and address areas where improvements can be made. In practice the best-run boards conduct such reviews annually whereas the worst-run boards rarely undertake health checks at all.

The simplest approach to the review is to use a questionnaire. Board members complete it anonymously and the results are then aggregated and discussed by the board. A model questionnaire is available here. This will need modification depending on the circumstances of the association. Unless there are serious governance issues the exercise can be conducted entirely in-house, with the chief executive or the board secretary carrying out the survey and analysing the results. Most board members will be familiar with such exercises through either their own businesses or through other boards on which they sit.

If the1-5 scale of satisfaction is used in the questionnaire then most results should be 4 or above. An average of anything under 4 needs attention.

From time to time, boards need to undertake more detailed reviews of governance. A regular effectiveness review may be the trigger for this. Such reviews typically cover the size, composition and method of selection of the board, the committee structure and the extent of delegation to the secretariat. External professional assistance is often desirable for such reviews, particularly where there are known to be problems or widely differing views. Where there is general satisfaction with governance arrangements then a comprehensive review once every three or four years, conducted in-house, is good practice.