5 minutes
Today’s credit union board continually finds valuable face-to-face time a shrinking commodity. From risk to regulatory oversight, each board meeting covers a more complicated array of agenda items. Finding time to accommodate all the business and still be able to comfortably dialogue about strategy and future-facing decisions requires some sophisticated agenda management and board meeting facilitation.
Fortunately the board governance literature addresses some tactics and strategy for mining time from your busy agenda to reinvest in strategic dialogue. Let’s look at a few.
The consent agenda is a modern day tactic more and more boards are finding useful. It comprises lumping reports and committee minutes that need no discussion with other minor business items that can be approved with dispatch (such as raising the signing limit on the payables schedule) in a “consent” item. This item is approved early in the meeting in one quick vote, saving otherwise time-consuming reporting. Boards digest the consent agenda items in their preparation for the meeting as with any other pre-submitted materials. As a safety device, any board member may ask for a consent agenda item to be moved to the regular agenda for discussion. The consent agenda allows more information to be included in the minutes (a great help to show regulators the breadth of your work) while protecting valuable discussion time.
“Dashboard” reports on financials, member satisfaction and other measures of organizational health are another device for cutting discussion time and focusing board attention on the key performance indicators. The creation of dashboards requires a bit of board work to identify the key performance indicators needed to track with precision. Then, the executive team creates a visual display that indicates if current performance (e.g. ROA, member growth, loan production) is meeting expectations. A color-coded graph uses “green” for on-target numbers with “yellow” indicating some unwanted variation but nothing serious. A “red” categorization is reserved for performance indicators that require analysis time and responsive decision-making. Dashboards tend to reduce oral reporting and the anecdotal and unnecessary discussion typical of group meetings that can occur when considering reports on performance.
Board “rules of engagement” are gaining popularity as another means of scoping efficient and effective board meeting behavior. In creating rules of engagement, directors identify the participation behavior they believe will tighten up efficiency, reduce redundancy and straying off the track. Such things as “no speech making—limiting comments and observations to 3-5 minutes”; not continuing to repeat points made by other participants; sticking to the topic and not straying onto ancillary topics; staying on a strategic and policy level rather than diving into operational detail; moving on when the board moves on; and using “appreciative inquiry” with one another to ensure clarity are examples of rules of engagement guidelines. With these agreements in place, the chair can more adeptly facilitate efficient discussion while reserving time to explore a broad range of perspectives. Dialogue requires ample time to be effective in governance, so cutting back trivial chit-chat, off-agenda forays, and expecting crisp thinking and speaking opens up time for greater generative exploration.
“Executive summaries” as a board reporting and proposal mechanism can also save time by focusing board attention and allowing response to a report or proposal to start in “dialogue” mode. The executive summary is a one- to two-page document that begins with the proposed action or the state of an item being updated (in a crisp sentence), explores a few data points and frequently asked questions, and ends with the potential impact of the recommended decision (e.g. financial impact, political impact, organizational culture impact, etc.). Using executive briefing techniques is commonplace in corporate America and finding its way into board rooms. Executive summaries work well for cutting to the chase in a discussion by avoiding the long windup and introduction of items, and allowing the board to get right into questions, discussion or decisions.
Board “web portals” for viewing board meeting packets, submitting follow-up questions and better digesting materials are becoming more popular—not simply to save printing that giant board book, but also to tee up issues with greater clarity. With ample work ahead of time, the board can bypass the sometimes-tedious clarification that takes up face-to-face board time. This simply requires a password-protected section of the organization’s website for board members. There are also vendor-offered programs that offer portals for board use.
What board action is required? To help focus discussion, it helps to indicate on the agenda the nature of the board action required for each item: decision-making, informational update—no action necessary, education, background for future decisions, business environment update, etc. Indicating what each agenda item requires of a board focuses the discussion to that purpose and is helpful in staying on track or getting to the outcome more quickly.
Last, but possibly the most important of all strategies to protect a board’s time, is the active facilitation required of the board chairman. Active facilitation requires the chair to help people stay on agenda by interrupting any breakaway discussion, interrupting the overly verbal comment, and moving along when it’s clear no new comments or ideas are surfacing. The above-mentioned rules of engagement help a chair maintain this behavior. If you as chair wish to be a more active facilitator to protect board time, simply announce your intentions to the board. By alerting the board in advance that you may interrupt, call for the question, or move the conversation along, they will be less surprised and offended when you do. Every director has sat through a meeting where they wished the chair would close off conversation when thoughts were exhausted or one long-winded member wouldn’t get off his pulpit. Support your chair in moving things along.
In general the level of decision-making and oversight required of credit union boards is similar to that of a professional consultant with whom you might contract. That puts the economic value of an hour of board time at about $300 per hour per board member. Calculate the economic impact of your last board meeting using this figure. If you have nine board members for two hours, that’s nine board members times two hours times $300—or $5,400. Now, consider how efficient you were as a $300 per hour board member. It’s eye-opening and changes the conversation about why we need to be more efficient with our time.
Les Wallace, Ph.D., the 9Minute Mentor, is president of Signature Resources Inc. He is co-author of A Legacy of 21st Century Leadership and author of Principles of 21st Century Governance.
