At every board meeting and committee meeting, review your goals and your progress towards meeting them. This keeps the board’s focus on the priorities for the year, not the personalities in the room.
Put your goals into practice year-round at your board and committee meetings. And get yourself on a smart annual cycle by establishing a summer board retreat to reflect on the previous year and plan a stellar upcoming year.
Use your goals to keep every meeting focused and strategically valuable.
Have something on the agenda that’s not related to your goals? Is it important enough to be on the agenda? If so, should it be worked into your goals?
Full Board Meetings
Most boards meet monthly, though some meet less frequently. Whatever your meeting cadence is, build your annual board meeting calendar based on goals. Even if you can’t put together the detailed agendas for every meeting, you can design the broad strokes for your full annual meeting calendar.
Then, as you prepare for each meeting, set each meeting agenda based on goals and their statuses.
Monthly Committee Meetings
Each committee meets monthly to move the ball down the field for each one of their goals. So they’re able to update the governance team, at every full board meeting, on the progress that they're making; and get the answers they need to continue their progress.
Each committee chair should be prepared to update the board on your progress, discuss any roadblocks, and ask for help as needed.
Quarterly Pulse Checks
While a practical conversation about goals should happen at every meeting, a higher level conversation should happen quarterly. Maintain an ongoing conversation about the organization’s strategic direction, drawing back to your charter promises and strategic plan. Reflect on your progress overall — as a board, and as an organization. Consider anything that seems to be getting in the way. Recalibrate as needed.
Annual Retreats
Put the power of a board retreat to work for you.
An annual board retreat can be a place to power through all of these steps at once.
Most boards hold their retreats in the summer.
At a summer retreat, you’ve got time and space to really focus on the big things. You can build in a true strategic planning session. Discuss in depth with your full governance team -- the CEO, the C-suite leadership, and the trustees -- your organizational priorities for the year.
To decide where you’re going, you’ve got to be clear about where you are. At an annual retreat, you can assess what got done in the previous year, revise your priorities as needed, and define what the upcoming goals look like.
Follow the retreat with focused committee work.
Within a couple of weeks of your retreat, each committee meets to delve into the best ways to meet the organization’s goals.
For instance, the Governance Committee meets to discuss the governance-related board development topics defined at the full retreat; the Finance Committee meets to dig into the budgetary and financial objectives. They all do the work, away from the full board meeting, developing their SMART goals and action plans.
Bring the full board back together to discuss and approve each committee’s work.
This is such an important and critical step -- to keep the board informed on what exactly each of these committees is going to be working on throughout the year and to transfer the formal charge to the board, to the committees.
It’s imperative you don’t set your goals and forget them. After all, your goals dictate what you’ll accomplish this year.
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