I’ve sat on several boards over the years, and I work with CEOs on their own board challenges. Here’s what I’ve learned: your board will operate at whatever altitude you invite them into.
Bring them into operational detail – the stuff your leadership team should own – and they’ll stay there. Once a board gets comfortable in the weeds, it’s hard to pull them back out, even on things that were never meant to be theirs.
As a CEO, your job is figuring out where your board adds value. It’s usually not in the day-to-day decisions. It’s in the strategic conversations – the hard trade-offs where their outside experience genuinely helps and frankly, can keep you out of trouble.
One more thing: send your board robust and strategic pre-work along with discussion questions. Most board members would expect to spend at least 30 minutes+ for a non- profit board and much more time for a for-profit board. If you’re not sending pre-reads, you’re spending meeting time walking through what they could’ve reviewed on their own or perhaps you’re not digging into meaty and substantive content. The real value of getting together is the discussion and often a bit of debate – not the download.
So look at your next board agenda. Is it strategic, or operational? Because wherever you take them, that’s where they’ll stay and play.
