10 Ways to Help Increase the Effectiveness of Your Board Meeting
As you balance your board responsibilities with other work, family, personal and life demands, it is important that the time that you do volunteer to serve your association is productive and that you consider it to be time well spent. The following suggestions are simple ways to help increase the effectiveness and productivity of your association's board meetings:
- Build a quaility agenda and use the written agenda and board package to help drive the meeting goals. Encourage all board members to review the agenda and board package prior to each meeting to help ensure everyone's familiarity with the agenda items in advance of discussion and thereby save time during the meeting.
- Start the meeting on time. Respect fellow board members by committing to be at the meeting on time and expecting the meeting to start on time (start the meeting once a minimum quorum is achieved).
- Establish ground rules for conduct during the meeting. Set some agreed upon ground rules for the conduct of the meeting to help facilitate the effectiveness of the meeting. This should be achieved by soliciting input from all board members and not just be dictated by one person (some examples include: phones are turned off or put on vibrate; no phone calls, emails or texting unless an emergency or you leave the meeting; one person speaking at a time, mutual respect and courtesy; meeting starts on time; etc.). Commit to revisit these ground rules every so often and commit to identify ways to continuously improve the effectiveness of your meetings.
- Stick to the agenda. Keep the discussion focused on association business only (usually the responsibility of the meeting chair). Social conversation is also important but can continue after the formal association business is concluded. When you finish each agenda item, make sure you have established assigned responsibility for any follow up action. Make sure you leave the meeting knowing "who" is assigned to "what" and "when" for any agenda items requiring action.
- When wrestling with potentially tough issues it may be helpful to present a solution or options to the issue at the same time you introduce to help better refine the group's discussion and move to a quicker resolution.
- Use a placeholder slot at the end of the meeting to put any non-agenda issues that may be raised during the meeting. At the end of the meeting when you do review the non-agenda issues, decide whether you can act quickly on them or if not, decide whether to take incremental steps, no action and/or table.
- Identify someone on the board to be an enforcer to help keep the meeting on track and to help to determine the flow of business. This person should politely enforce. This person should have skills to help mediate disputes as well as find consensus in the group (usually the responsibility of the meeting chair but does not have to be).
- Use organized discussion to help diffuse conflicts or heated discussion. Robert's Rules and Parliamentary Procedure can assist the flow of the discussion but should not get in the way of the discussion with obscure rules or become frustrating to participating board members.
- Consider using a timed agenda to help keep the meeting moving. To do so you would assign each agenda item with a beginning time. The time allotted to begin each agenda item becomes the ending the time for the previous agenda item. The times identified do not have to be strictly followed but can act as a guide as to whether there is a need to push forward due to time constraints.
- Finish the meeting on time. The productiveness and effectiveness of most meeting starts to diminish substantially after 90 minutes.
Thank you for reading the Imagineers Board Newsletter. If you have any question or need any additional information on any articles provided in this newsletter, please contact us at 1-800-560-7268.
Imagineers LLC
Email: Gpassacantando@imagineersllc.com
Phone: 1-800-560-7268
Fax: 860-236-3951
Web: http://www.imagineersllc.com
