Supporting and evaluating your chief executive is among the most important functions of any board.
The board is responsible for effectively selecting, supporting, and evaluating your organization’s CEO.
With a proven evaluation instrument built right into BoardOnTrack, the leader evaluation process becomes simple and straightforward.
Here’s how it works. But remember - your annual CEO evaluation is only part of the process.
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Your CEO Evaluation Coordinator Takes the Lead.
Usually, the Board Chair or the chair of your CEO Support & Evaluation Committee will lead the process.
If you don’t have a CEO Support & Evaluation Committee, your Governance Committee might take the lead, or perhaps a board member who has HR experience.
To start a new evaluation in BoardOnTrack, select the start date, and BoardOnTrack will automatically complete a 90-day timeline for you.
Be sure to follow a good process. Your start date should be agreed upon with your governance team and your CEO.
It’s easy to change the dates should you need to, but it’s ideal to have your process buttoned down right from the outset.
BoardOnTrack Guides You Through a Proven, Evidence-Based CEO Evaluation Process.
What’s the most common reason CEOs name for not having a consistent evaluation? It’s that the board hasn’t set the process. BoardOnTrack solves this by building the process for you. Year to year, even if your board officers change, you have a proven process you can rely on.
We’ve designed this process based on the experiences of hundreds of boards nationwide, as well as BoardOnTrack’s founder’s extensive knowledge.
With our evaluation process checklist, the right steps are all laid out for you.
From when to gather your CEO’s input, to the board’s input, and even staff’s input, and what happens next.
Your board doesn’t have to create the process. We’ve done it for you.
As you complete the actions laid out for you in each step of our process, BoardOnTrack will check off the steps for you, automatically.
You’ll easily see where you are in the process, and what’s next. Without adding project management to your own list of things to do.
Customize Your CEO's Title
Leaders go by many names. We use the term CEO to denote the person at the very top of the organization who reports directly to the board.
In your board settings in the Admin panel, you can choose the right title for your CEO from a pre-set list of title options.
What if none of these fit the title your organization uses for your top executive? Tell us what you prefer, and we can add a custom title just for you.
We want the experience to fit you, your organization, and your school leader, through and through.
Customize Your Evaluation to Fit Your Organization’s Unique Needs.
Starting in April 2022, BoardOnTrack’s Evaluation is fully customizable, including creating an entirely custom survey if you choose. BoardOnTrack still comes with our best-practice CEO evaluation included. We’ve done the work of designing and testing a fit-for-purpose CEO evaluation tool so you don’t have to, and we recommend you use it so there will be less work for your team.
You can see in the screenshot above that step 2 now asks you to select a survey to use. As shown below, you’ll be able to choose the BoardOnTrack template or any survey you’ve customized using Survey Builder.
BoardOnTrack Will Remember Your Settings
When you start a new evaluation next year or later in the year, you’ll be presented with your previous Survey Builder-based evaluations as shown above, and you can choose to start with the survey from any one of them, or you can choose our standard survey.
Your CEO Completes a Self-Evaluation
Before the board (or anyone else) is asked to evaluate your CEO, they’ll do an evaluation of their own performance.
When you click Start, the CEO will receive an email alerting them that it’s time to do their own evaluation.
Based on the goals set for them, and the profile of a BoardSavvy CEO, they’ll answer the questions in the BoardOnTrack CEO evaluation survey. These are the same questions that the board, and if you choose to include them, senior staff will answer later.
Upload Documents to Help Celebrate Your Successes
As part of their self-evaluation, the CEO can create a portfolio of evidence related to their work and performance.
Some of our CEOs even add assets there throughout the year, so that it’s all ready and waiting for them when it’s time to complete the self-evaluation.
What Kind of Documentation Should A CEO Include in the Self-Evaluation?
Here’s an example: if your CEO had a goal this year of improving teacher retention by 10%, they could upload a document that shows the teacher retention rates for this year.
Or, to support a goal related to closing the achievement gap as measured through test scores, they’d upload the presentation they gave to the board illustrating this year’s test scores performance.
It’s all stored in BoardOnTrack, in perpetuity, meaning that year over year, you’re building a history of your successes. So, you’re building an institutional memory at the same time you are effectively evaluating each year’s progress.
With the CEO’s Self-Evaluation Complete, the Board Will Now Evaluate the CEO.
Share the CEO’s Self-Evaluation with the Board.
Once the CEO has completed the survey, your CEO Evaluation Coordinator can share the CEO’s answers with all board members. Those answers will appear in an easy-to-read report even before any trustees have weighed in. Note that although BoardOnTrack recommends sharing the CEO's self-evaluation with the board before the board conducts its evaluation, you can ask board members to get started before they've seen the CEO's report if you choose.
You can choose with whom the CEO’s answers are shared.
We recommend that they be shared with the full board. After all, the full board will be asked to weigh in on the CEO’s evaluation.
If you’re including staff in your evaluation process, note that they won’t see the CEO’s Self-Evaluation. There’s no risk of even accidentally sharing it with them.
Use BoardOnTrack to Invite Each Board Member to Do the Evaluation
BoardOnTrack will email all invited board members providing them with a direct link to the evaluation.
While the evaluation tool is thorough, it should take no more than 30 minutes for each trustee to complete the evaluation. (This assumes you are using the standard BoardOnTrack survey. Depending on your customizations, it could be longer or shorter of course.)
Easily Include Staff Members in the CEO Evaluation
The board should decide whether senior staff will participate in your CEO evaluation.
We recommend a modified 360-degree evaluation.
With this approach, the senior staff is invited to participate in the evaluation process. This might include the CFO, CAO, Dean of Students, or principal. Note that to keep the data anonymous, you must include at least two staff members if you choose this approach.
Ultimately, it’s the board’s role to conduct the final evaluation and document it in a memo.
Some boards choose not to have direct reports weigh in. But the board has a relatively small window into the CEO’s performance day-to-day. And these staff members work with the CEO on a daily basis.
Each staff member will need a BoardOnTrack login. We’ve made this easy to do by creating different user types for staff and board.
And just like the board, any staff members you choose to include in the process will receive email alerts via BoardOnTrack linking them to the survey.
Keep Track of Who's Done What at Each Stage of the Process
Even while responses are anonymized in the report, with BoardOnTrack, your coordinator can easily track who’s completed their responses, and who has yet to respond.
You can send reminder emails to those who need them directly from the platform.
BoardOnTrack Summarizes the Evaluation Results in a Simple Report
Your CEO evaluation becomes far more actionable when you can aggregate and evaluate the data. This is one of the biggest differences between using BoardOnTrack to evaluate your CEO compared to the other approaches we’ve seen.
BoardOnTrack creates a robust, yet simple, report for you.
View and share the results easily right in BoardOnTrack. You can print or export to PDF as well.
Some features of the report:
- Your respondents’ ratings are shown graphically, including averages for the board and staff, so you can quickly and easily see an overview of the CEO’s performance and dig into details as necessary.
- Data is color-coded to separate the CEO’s responses from the board’s.
- All Board members’ and direct reports’ responses are anonymous.
- All free-text comments are easy to read and understand. Board members’ and direct reports’ comments are also anonymous.
- With one click, see a print view of the report.
Your CEO Support & Evaluation Committee Will Review the Report and Finalize the Evaluation with the Board and CEO.
BoardOnTrack provides you with a sample CEO evaluation memo.
Documenting the evaluation process that took place and summarizing the results is arguably the most important step in the evaluation process.
Your memo documents your process, and it provides an executive summary with highlights of the results — the strengths and potential areas for improvement next year. The documentation section of the evaluation stores this memo, so BoardOnTrack is maintaining your institutional memory for you.
Note: If you don’t have a CEO Support & Evaluation Committee, the group that led this process will handle this step. This might be your Governance Committee. If your board is relatively small, you might be a committee of the whole, together.
We're here to help.
If you need some help with the CEO evaluation tool, advice for running a good process, or any other assistance, we're here.
Start a chat with us in BoardOnTrack during business hours, send us a help request if we're not online, or book a call with your Governance Coach.
Don't have access to the CEO Evaluation?
Your membership might not include it. Don't worry! We can easily add it. Schedule time to talk with us about how.
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