How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment
Board Self-Assessment is a single of the essential leadership practices that highly effective nonprofit boards follow to ensure long-term governance excellence. It requires the board to take a step back from their day-to-day activities and evaluate its effectiveness. This allows the board members to address issues that might otherwise cause friction and anger.
There are a myriad of ways to conduct a self-assessment on your board, ranging from interviews and surveys to facilitated discussions. The best method will depend on the size of your board, the resources you have available and the level of detail you’d like to include in the assessment.
If you choose to conduct the assessment make sure you know the goals of the assessment. For instance, do desire to improve governance, align governance to organizational goals, or improve accountability? Once you’ve determined this you can then pick an evaluation tool.
Some tools allow you to compare results against other health care facilities and hospitals while others concentrate solely on your organization’s governance practices. It’s crucial to ensure that the tools you select are impartial and don’t single out directors. This will create a secure environment for honest feedback.
A lot of boards also have peer review processes that allows board members to review their peers as directors. This can be a valuable and productive activity, but it’s important that the process remains private. Some directors may be reluctant to criticize a director due to fear of consequences. In this instance it is generally better to let the facilitator review the responses to determine which insights are relevant to share with the board.
