Strengthening effective collaboration between Executive Team and Board members helps build a high performing organization. Relationships at the top that are grounded in trust, alignment, and communication lead to more open communication, constructive discussion, and strategic decision-making.
The CEO and Executive Team are responsible for driving excellent engagement with their Board. Every Executive team fully understands the incredible difference it makes to have a highly supportive Board that balances constructive intelligent challenge, debate, and oversight with great expertise, encouragement, “independence of mind” and support that adds significant value to the Executive Team.
Yet, many Executive Teams are unsure what ‘great’ looks like. What is a healthy Executive Team to Board engagement model? As a result, many Executive Teams struggle to identify what they could do differently that will create effective relations.
A recent study by our diagnostic partner, Mirror Mirror, researched the pain points between Executive Teams and their Boards. The key factors surfaced include: lack of trust, poor decision-making, lack of openness, poor quality of debate, inadequate reporting, and micro-management by the Board. These are the leading causes of frustration and inefficiency – complicated by significant levels of misalignment within and between the two groups.
Executive Teams can generally function with an average relationship with their Board, but it is not a solution for the long run. It ultimately inhibits the Executive team’s ability to out-perform. When challenging times come around (as experienced with the pandemic and subsequent economic downturn), the combined Executive team and Board must excel in partnership for driving long-term sustainable success for their shareholders, stakeholders, customers and employees.
The Board Engagement Module
A New Diagnostic Assessment Tool to Help Improve Board/Executive Collaboration
We are proud to introduce a new tool, developed by our partner, Mirror Mirror, a team of highly experienced diagnostic experts who help companies globally to understand the extent of alignment within their organization. Based on expert knowledge from Board Excellence, a leading advisor of Boards based in Ireland, Mirror Mirror has developed a new diagnostic assessment that identifies levels of alignment and engagement between Executive Teams and their Boards. The diagnostic assesses eight focus areas based on Executive members’ perceptions.
This assessment incorporates what ‘great’ looks like from the Executive Team perspective and crucially integrates this with the expectations of Boards to enable a progressive engagement model that empowers the Executive Team and Board to excel together for Shareholders and stakeholders.
It provides practical recommendations for Executives for healthier, more constructive ways to approach communication and engagement with their Board. Through this improved communication and engagement, a greater level of trust can grow, leading to high-quality Board and committee meetings that add significant value, sharper reporting, healthier challenge, and debate, improved strategic focus, greater support, and value-add from the Non-Executive Directors and most importantly, high-quality decision-making.
This data-driven assessment is entirely confidential, allowing Executives a platform to share their observations and views, easily and safely. The output is a detailed report showing the extent of alignment between respondents on each metric, alongside commentary and recommendations based on the results. The recommendations are based on deep experience of supporting Executive teams and their Boards, including practical advice on what can be done to achieve positive change.
A more valuable, collaborative, trusting, and effective working relationship with your Board is within reach. A critical first step towards achieving this is an hones,t structured assessment of the current working relationship, how it compares with best practices, and embracing the practical recommendations to drive sustained improvement in how your Executive Team works with your Board.
Advice on Best Practices and Improvements
We now offer this assessment as part of our independent Board evaluations conducted for clients. Identifying key areas is step one. Our step two is to share best practices, resources and steps needed to improve the key Executive Team - Board relationship significantly.
Reach us to learn more at 510-517-7791 or https://boardwise.biz/contact.html
Ready to improve the relationship with your Board and enable a progressive engagement model? Visit here to find out more.
Boardwise is a proud distributor of Mirror Mirror’s, Board Engagement Module..
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