02/08/2024

Help Your Board Be the Best Version of Itself

Good CEOs recognize three practices are vital to strengthening their boards

Whether your association meets its strategic goals depends greatly on how well the board defines direction, invests leadership, and supports execution. Central to the board’s success in playing those roles is the board-CEO partnership, the nurturing of which arguably falls disproportionately to the executive. To a large degree, the groundwork you lay to sustain engagement and trust enables your board’s best. Those CEOs who most successfully tap into their boards’ vision and leadership capacity are sensitive to the importance of three practices that transcend association management fundamentals.

Enabling Ongoing Learning

Foundational association governance research reported in What Makes High-Performing Boards (2013, ASAE) documented that the highest-performing boards embrace a culture of learning and they benefit from staffs that prepare them well for meetings by providing relevant, complete information. Board orientation is important, but enhancing and tapping into collective knowledge of leaders demands a continual approach.

The CEO, collaborating with the chief elected officer, must be a catalyst for strategic board discussions that stimulate learning—for example, about impactful subjects such as diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility—while appreciating nuances that might steer subject matter choices and direction. Further, it is essential that cyclical board onboarding surfaces and clarifies philosophical considerations. For example, brokering conversations about the board’s risk tolerance and compensation philosophies builds healthy discourse and trust, making difficult board discussions that may come later more comfortable to have.

Please select this link to read the complete article from ASAE’s Center for Association Leadership.