Why Your Board Meetings Aren’t Working
I’ve sat in hundreds (thousands?) of board meetings over the past two decades – as a board member, as a board observer, invited guest, etc. Some were excellent. Many were not. And the gap between a well-run board meeting and a poorly run one is enormous – not just in terms of the value the board provides, but in the trust it builds (or erodes) between management and the board.
This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Brad wrote extensively about it in Startup Boards, and a few years ago, I wrote a five-part series – Designing the Ideal Board Meeting – that went into the mechanics in depth. That series covered everything from what to do before the meeting to how to build your board package to running the meeting itself to handling board conflict. But the core problems haven’t changed, so it’s worth revisiting.
The most common mistake I see is that board meetings become status update sessions. The CEO and exec team spend hours walking through slides that board members could have read in advance. Board meetings are expensive – in preparation, travel, and the opportunity cost of getting senior people in the same room for half a day. If you’re using that time to read aloud from a deck, you’re not getting your money’s worth.
The fix starts well before the meeting. As I wrote in Before the Meeting, most of what determines a board meeting’s quality happens before anyone sits down. Quarterly is the right cadence for most startups – monthly is a real burden on everyone. Between meetings, communicate regularly: email updates, KPI dashboards, quick calls when something material happens. The goal is that board members arrive informed. Nobody should be surprised by anything in the meeting. Surprises kill trust.
Send the agenda 10 to 14 days ahead – not the night before – and solicit input from board members. You want them thinking about the hard questions before the meeting, not reacting in real time.
On the board package: start with a CEO letter – not a formal memo, but an honest look at what you’re thinking about, what’s keeping you up at night, what’s going well. Follow it with consistent reporting, the same KPIs and format meeting after meeting, so board members can see trends without decoding a new layout every quarter. I’ve seen 160-page board decks. They’re counterproductive. Bullets and dashboards beat prose and appendices every time.
Be intentional about what you discuss in the room. Pick one or two deep-dive topics that genuinely benefit from outside perspective. Don’t rehash what’s in the materials. Use the meeting for conversations you can’t have asynchronously. Include your executive team so the board sees management in action, but the CEO has to own the agenda and the clock – don’t let it devolve into a VP-by-VP status meeting where strategic discussion never happens.
Be explicit about which topics need a board decision versus which are for input. Build in breaks – three to four hours is the right length, and fatigue kills quality. Always hold an executive session, even if it’s brief. Making it routine normalizes it so it doesn’t feel like an alarm bell. Follow it with direct feedback to the CEO.
And follow up. Clear notes on action items, who owns them, and what the board expects next. The number of board meetings where the momentum simply evaporates afterward is staggering.
One more thing – and something I devoted an entire post to: disagreement in the boardroom is a feature, not a bug. If your board always agrees with you, you’re either not bringing them hard enough questions or they’re not doing their jobs. As a CEO, distinguish between one dominant voice and genuine board consensus. And if after reflection you still believe you’re right – make the call and communicate your reasoning.
If you want a practical, tactical companion to all of this, the team at Domestique recently published a great piece – Why Most Board Meetings Are Useless and How to Fix Them – on the most common board meeting problems and how to address them. It’s a thorough overview of best practices – including a board meeting template that I think nails the why behind each element, not just the how. Worth a read for any founder or CEO who wants to get more out of their board time.
Board meetings don’t have to be a chore. A well-run meeting builds the kind of trust between the CEO and the board that compounds over time. And that trust is worth more than anything that happens in the meeting itself.