The Board Meeting Rescue Kit.

• Author: BALKCOM, JOHN
• Position: Brief Article

Published by the National Center for Nonprofit Boards, Washington D.C., 32 pages, $12.00

WHEN I COMPLETED my final board meeting as a management consultant last year, the chairman of my client company turned to me and said: "How do you think the meeting went?" If I had had this fine booklet with me, I would have given it to the chairman and said, "Read this, and then let's talk."

The Board Meeting Rescue Kit: 20 Ideas for Jumpstarting Your Board Meetings provides not only short, specific, actionable suggestions for improving board meetings, but also excellent tools for evaluating the results. Although the National Center for Nonprofit Boards (NCNB) expressly addresses its "20 Ideas" to nonprofit governance, I find the ideas here equally applicable to the conduct of for-profit board meetings.

Once past its rather lightweight introduction, The Board Meeting Rescue Kit gets right to the heart of the matter of governing director conduct in board meetings: "Establish rules of conduct" This simple suggestion -- together with its corollary discussion -- addresses what I regard as the single most common and debilitating failure in the boardroom: the negligence of board members to agree in advance on basic rules of conduct, on mutual respect "at and away from the board table," and on how to disagree constructively. Both the advance agreement on ground rules and the use of a board briefing handbook along the lines of the NCNB's excellent outline hold great promise of reducing the frequency of surprises and conflicts in the venue of the board meeting.

After briefly positing the ameliorative steps "Before" a meeting, the NCNB devotes the longest single section of this tract to a dozen ideas on the time "During" the board meeting. Of these, the use of consent agendas -- as collective ways of amending or approving minutes, making minor procedural changes, reconfirming standard documents, and ratifying routine actions required by the bylaws -- provides a way of freeing up significant time for board deliberations on non-routine matters.

Two of the NCNB's "During" suggestions seem problematic, especially for the nonprofit with the unusually large board. The two suggestions are to "focus on decision making" and to "involve all board members." With a board of over 50 members, as at St. John's College, these suggestions look impractical, as plenary sessions of the board almost necessarily serve for information sharing and for ratification of key committee...