Designing the Ideal Board Meeting Series

This is the 5th post in my Designing the Ideal Board Meeting series. Today’s post focuses on board conflict and disagreements. It’s not something that’s often talked about on boards and I think the fear of conflict often drives some of the negative behavior I’ve encouraged you to avoid through my earlier posts (a great example of conflict avoidant behavior is a CEO calling each board member ahead of the meeting – something I think at its core is done to head off any disagreements at the actual meeting itself). Let me start with a story: One of the first boards I was ever on was run by a rather mercurial CEO. He was very command and control oriented and was…

This is the 4th post in my Designing the Ideal Board Meeting series. I hope this series so far has helped you think a bit differently about how you approach the lead-up to your board meetings. By the time you walk into the meeting you should have a clear agenda that everyone has agreed to, one or two areas of the business that you plan to dive more deeply into, prepared materials that are of a style, length, detail and consistency that efficiently and effectively brings your board up to speed on the business and have been communicating with your board regularly so that there aren’t any big surprises in store for them when they get to the meeting. Here…

This is the 3rd post in my “Designing the Ideal Board Meeting” series. I didn’t mention this in my prior post but thought of it as I started writing this section on how to put together a good board package. Companies often bias to wanting to hold their board meetings a few weeks after the end of each quarter. The rationale is that this allows the board to review quarterly results. For private companies, I think this is a mistake. For starters, since this is a general bias across the industry you’re fighting for your board member’s time just when everyone else is as well. Not only are these meetings hard to schedule but you’re asking your board members to…

All good board meetings start well before the meeting itself, so let’s start there for this series on board meetings. Timing – how frequently should you meet? Most boards plan meetings a year at a time. That makes sense given busy schedules, but leads to the question of when and how often should a board meet. As a good rule of thumb, most startup boards meet quarterly (in fact, most boards of any kind meet about this frequently). This cadence feels appropriate for the level of work that’s involved in putting together board level materials and for a board to perform the appropriate level of governance. There was a time when it was typical for venture boards to meet monthly for…

This is the first of a multi-part series on Board Meetings. The question of what the ideal board meeting looks like comes up quite a bit in my world and I’m hoping to add my voice to the debate through a few posts (with what I hope will be clear and actionable advice). We’ll cover the creation of a board agenda, the board deck, pre-board communication, how to best run a board meeting, decision topics vs. discussion topics and post meeting follow-up, among other ideas in the coming weeks. I hope that the reasoning behind designing a good board experience is obvious, but it’s worth stating that getting your board together is expensive. It’s expensive in terms of out of…