The board as a team: it takes the right framework; Directors arrive alone and leave alone, yet somehow need to make a great deal happen when they are together. To elevate performance, teamwork is essential.

• Author: Rosen, Rich
• Position: HEIDRICK & STRUGGLES GOVERNANCE LETTER

BOARDS TODAY face a performance imperative that was hard to imagine even as recently as a few years ago. The increased scrutiny, the growing complexity of business and ethical issues faced, and the need to strike the right balance between mentoring and monitoring can strain the capacity of even the best boards.

Certainly, most boards have laid the foundation for greater effectiveness. As a result of the corporate governance movement of the past dozen years, they have taken on more independent directors, established the requisite committees with the appropriate charters, and instituted annual performance reviews to ensure compliance. But as directors return to their traditional role as sounding boards for strategy while continuing to grapple with compliance issues, they will need to look and behave more like high-performance teams if they are to achieve the level of excellence required in today's demanding environment.

That doesn't mean boards should emulate top executive teams in terms of teamwork. It's simply not possible or required. The best executive teams achieve extraordinary levels of teamwork through carefully meshed interdependent parts, a few stars, many role players, and experience working together daily--making decisions, executing strategy, and leading large numbers of people. Board members, all of them accomplished "stars" in their own right, come from highly diverse backgrounds without the common culture, consistent leadership, and time spent together that help management teams jell. Board members don't lead others. They are not executers--they are thinkers. They don't have their own organizational resources supporting their role on the board. They are responsible to shareholders but can't drive results. Other than replacing and motivating the CEO, their opportunity for impact is limited to the four to eight times a year when they meet. They arrive alone and leave alone, and somehow need to make a great deal happen when they are together.

Yet because the window of opportunity to make a difference is so narrow, it is all the more important that boards find the most effective way to tap into the collective experience, insights, and intellect of their members. A poor meeting can't be rectified until the next one; two bad meetings and nearly a half-year of impact is lost. If boards are to avoid such lackluster results and, more positively, fully leverage their expertise to produce superior corporate performance, teamwork is essential. Like the first U.S. Olympic Dream Team in men's basketball--a collection of virtuosos who, for the brief time they played together, melded their uniformly all-star level skills to perfection--boards can achieve a degree of teamwork that can dramatically elevate their performance.

A framework for board teamwork

Exhortations to greater teamwork can make for stirring moments but, as most leaders know, teamwork must be consciously sought and systematically created. Boards can create the requisite board-specific teamwork through careful attention to four areas:

* Board composition -- get the right team members.

* Agenda-shaping -- get the board talking about the right things.

* Board interaction -- get them talking in the right way.

* Individual performance -- help them work in the best possible way.

The vehicle for evaluating and improving performance in each of these four critical areas already exists--the annual board review. Unfortunately, in our experience, board reviews are often perfunctory and lack the richness of detail, insight, and feedback required to produce real change.

Instead of undertaking this yearly exercise to "check the boxes," boards should use it to review their overall effectiveness, their composition, board dynamics, and the development of individual members.

These more comprehensive reviews should then be followed by team development discussions...