Five tips for running effective board meetings

Board meetings give you the opportunity to shape the future of your business. However, often we receive feedback from CEOs and senior team leaders that they find them unproductive and see very little action taken as a result.

To support business owners and CEOs in these situations, these are our five top tips for running effective meetings.

1. Use a consistent agenda

It might sound simple but using a consistent agenda with a familiar structure will help improve the flow of your meetings. It will also make them more productive and focused, ensuring you discuss the most important items and are not side-tracked by less essential issues.

2. Review actions from the previous board meeting

The first item of every agenda should be to review the actions from the previous meeting. This gives everyone the opportunity to feedback on their actions and holds your individual board members accountable.

3. Focus on strategic issues

Make sure you keep operational and strategic issues separate. The board meeting should be centred around strategic discussions, a separate meeting should be held for operational matters. Focusing on one or two strategic issues per meeting will ensure you concentrate on the future of the business.

4. Speak up

Do you have board members that don’t speak up or air their views? It is important that everyone in the meeting gets their voice heard. This will ensure important insights and information are not missed. Board members will come from different areas of the business and have different skill-sets, all of which are invaluable when making business decisions.

5. Have an independent chair

Having an outside facilitator or independent person to chair your meetings means you will get the opinion of an objective observer that only has the business’ best interests at heart. External chairs also have experience working with a range of businesses which means you can also benefit from their experience and trust them as an impartial sounding board.

We have partners who act as NEDs or in a management support capacity for clients across a variety of sectors and industries.

If you have any specific challenges or would like advice on how you can make your board meetings more productive, contact hello@geraldedelman.com.