Board meetings sometimes can be long and monotonous with people looking at their phones or worse still, dozing off! Or they could turn out to be like our contemporary news channels- all noise, no sense. So, how can you ensure that your board meetings don’t turn out like either of the above?
Here’s how!
Have a clear agenda: spend time thinking about what is the focus of the meeting. Once you are clear on the agenda of the meeting, there are fewer chances for the meeting to digress. Being the CEO you should be able to pinpoint the agenda and figure out how you would navigate through that agenda. ‘What do I want from this meeting’, is a simple question you need to ask yourself to be able to narrow down to your main agenda.
Discuss this with the senior management team and the chairperson, and you are good to go!
Plan ahead and send the board papers to the team a week in advance.
Sending the papers last minute indicates your lackadaisical attitude and that you are not well planned for the meeting. The team too will not come well prepared and will carry a laid-back attitude into the meeting.
Also, the papers can communicate things which don’t need to be discussed in the meeting and so, you can start with the agenda of the meeting immediately.
Don’t make powerpoint presentations a snooze fest! Powerpoint presentations need to focus on issues which are hard to communicate verbally. So don’t just bombard the team with a lot of text but just use slides to communicate visually driven information like trends, snapshots of key financials, and the main focus points for the next quarter. Graphical representations of the budget are great.
Don’t start one meeting before going through the minutes of the previous. It allows you track progress of any kind. There is always a link between the past and the present and your future is more clear and successful if you honour that link.
Statutory matters tend to take up a lot of time, so it would be ideal if a separate time slot is set up to discuss just that. This doesn’t shift attention from important business matters. Some statutory matters need to be discussed by both the committee and the board which could be a big waste of time. So if the committee meeting summary is sent to the board they can save a lot of time on repetition.
Use technology in the right way for the right purpose. You can keep powerpoint presentations and crisp and focus on using tools that keep all data and reading material in one place instead of getting lost in a barrage of emails. Tools like Boardvantage and One Drive will keep all members updated with the latest information. This reduces wastage of time and chaos.
