Do we need a CEO Evaluation and Support Committee?
Yes!
Your charter school is a complex multimillion-dollar business with many moving parts.
Running the day-to-day operations requires support from the board, and continuous feedback to ensure performance and advancement.
Key Responsibilities
The key responsibilities of the CEO support and evaluation committee are to design and develop in partnership with the CEO a:
• Year‐round process for the board to continually strengthen its partnership with the organization’s CEO
• Process for the CEO to set clear annual goals
• Structured process for the board to give and receive feedback several times throughout the year
• Formal process for the board to conduct an annual evaluation of the CEO’s performance
Common Mistakes
The most common mistakes charter school boards make when creating and implementing a CEO support and evaluation committee include:
• Not making it a year‐round function.
Working to strengthen the partnership between the board and the organization’s CEO should be a year‐round function. Too often, a CEO evaluation task force is haphazardly formed at the end of the year, right before the evaluation.
• Not fully engaging the CEO. Supporting and evaluating your leader should feel like a positive professional development experience, not a punitive one.
Chances are, your CEO spends a great deal of time working hard to make sure that everyone on the organization’s staff receives constructive feedback regularly and has a thorough annual evaluation of their performance.
They may have more experience designing evaluation processes and tools than the trustees serving on this committee.
Enlist your CEO in determining what will be the most helpful process for them to get and receive feedback from the board. Ideally, align the CEO support and evaluation process to mirror the process that is being conducted for the rest of the staff.
• Reinventing the wheel.
Designing a support and evaluation process is complex.
Too often, charter school boards make up their own evaluation tools. Consider using BoardOnTrack’s road-tested online CEO evaluation process, which has been used by hundreds of charter school boards nationwide.
• Misconstruing their role as it relates to surveying parents and staff.
Hearing from stakeholders is a vital management function. You can’t have a healthy organization if parents, students, and teachers don’t have a chance to weigh in frequently.
But soliciting this input is a management function and not the responsibility of the board or a board committee.
The organization should conduct anonymous parent, teacher, and student surveys at least once or twice per year.
The organization’s leadership should design these surveys and share the data with the board, both generally and as part of an annual evaluation. It is not the work of this committee to design or conduct these surveys.
CEO Support and Evaluation Committee
General Purpose
The CEO Support and Evaluation Committee is commissioned by and responsible to the board of trustees to assume the primary responsibility for developing and implementing a year‐round process to strengthen the board’s support, evaluation, and partnership with the organization’s CEO.
Appointments and Composition
1. Appointments of the chair and members of the committee shall be made annually by the chair of the board with the advice and consent of the board in accordance with the bylaws.
2. The chair of this committee shall be a member of the board of trustees.
3. Members of this committee shall be members of the board of trustees, subject to the conditions stated in the bylaws.
4. It is anticipated that the committee will be primarily comprised of the primary committee chairs and/or other officers of the board.
Responsibilities
1. Develop an annual timeline to support and evaluate the CEO, and have this timeline approved by the full board.
2. Annually review and revise as necessary the CEO’s job description.
3. Establish a process for the CEO to develop, share, and receive board approval of a set of annual organizational goals.
4. In partnership with the CEO, establish a clear and consistent way for the CEO to report to the full board regularly on progress towards the board-approved annual goals.
5. Annually create a survey instrument and process to conduct two structured check-ins between the full board and the CEO. It is anticipated that these will occur in November and March and will involve the CEO completing a self-evaluation and surveying the full board.
6. Annually implement a comprehensive CEO evaluation that includes a CEO self-evaluation, input from the
full board, and anonymous input from the CEO’s direct reports.
7. Annually prepare or revise the CEO’s contract as necessary.
8. Annually recommend CEO compensation adjustments to the full board, as appropriate.
9. Create specific, measurable, board-level goals for the year as part of the full board planning process.
10. Report to the board of trustees at regular meetings of the board in a manner determined by the board.
11. Annually evaluate its work as a committee and the objectives it has committed itself to, and report on the same to the board of trustees.
The attached pdf provides you a template for a job description for a CEO Support & Evaluation Committee.
Updated