Some Tips for a Successful Board Self-Examination

The facilitator then should aggregate the data from the survey and bring it back to the board in its full form, not as a summary of the data.

“Not just a summary of ‘you said you were good at X and not Y’ but use their words, because, for my money, a board self-assessment is the best way to help a board start to engage in a change process, an improvement process, a ‘let’s do things differently, better, smarter, faster, whatever’ and it has to come from them,” Bobowick says. “It can’t come from an outside person, the chief executive, a consultant saying ‘you should do this.’”