What To Do When Your “High-Performing” Board Is Only Limping Along

Written by Ann Quinn and John Dinkel

Every organizational leader wants a high-performing board. After all, high-performing boards have a powerful impact on an organization’s success, providing not only strategic insight and expertise but also their own financial resources and connections. It’s why organizational management and the board itself put so much time and effort into selecting the right individuals to sit on the board.

Yet despite making this significant investment in establishing a high-performing board, many leaders feel their boards are not as helpful or engaged as they could be. 

And they’re right.

Organizations can have fantastic board members and be very committed to facilitating the board’s work and still not see the return they expected. So, what’s the extra special sauce that distinguishes a high-performing board from one that’s limping along?

Our work with boards shows that effective board development and engagement is deeply rooted in effective governance structures and practices. In fact, governance is the foundation of a high-performing board. However, development and engagement also must be built with intention and purpose, and boards never stop needing cultivation and nurturing. It’s simply not enough to set up governance structures and assume board engagement and development will follow.

In reality, the extra special sauce for triggering high board performance requires many ingredients. Leave out one or two and you’ll continue to be disappointed. The good news is that once you create traction in the right direction, board effectiveness and engagement do become more organic, inherent to how your board functions.

High performance begets high performance.

Here are a few of our best board development tips for gaining traction toward a board that continually moves itself and your organization forward.

Give Board Committees More Attention

Committees can be one of the best ways to engage your board members, but it’s also one of the biggest reasons board members check out. Working at the committee level overcomes this by increasing understanding of the organization and its mission, and by building relationships between board members and staff. Make sure to align your board committees with your organization’s strategy for optimum results and to ensure committee members recognize their reason for being and feel inspired by the purpose of their work. It’s equally important to select your committee leadership carefully since they are responsible for keeping the committee on task and in action, and to include committee-level assessments as part of your overall board evaluation process.

Refine Board Recruitment

Board recruitment should be driven by the strategic needs of your organization to augment and complement skills, expertise and connections, and to facilitate the recruitment process itself. After all, if you don’t know the type of board member you’re looking for, your search will be unfocused and potentially endless and fruitless. Knowing exactly what you’re looking for also provides clarity to board members about why they were selected, setting expectations for their contribution in the process. Additionally, conduct recruitment year-round, engaging the business community through networking and referrals from existing board members. This is the most efficient way to build a pipeline of qualified and excited candidates. 

Never Assume Board Members Are Trained

All boards benefit from ongoing training about the organization, the external landscape and board roles and responsibilities. It may sound shocking, but even highly accomplished board members might not have specialized knowledge about your organization’s mission, business model or products/services. When you intensify training and make it ongoing your board members will ask better strategic questions and be better fiduciaries for your organization. 

Cook Up A Competition

A fun (and highly underestimated) way to dramatically increase board engagement is through board contests or challenges. This method helps board members build stronger relationships with each other and learn more about your mission while encouraging peer-driven competition. You can create a board challenge for just about anything: fundraising, corporate sponsorships, building relationships for leadership, board recruitment, brand awareness and more.

Keep each competition fairly short; four to six weeks is a best practice. 

Know Who Your Board Members Know

Highly networked board members are conduits for corporate partners, strategic alliances, new board members, staff and volunteers. Yet leveraging board members’ connections doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. Develop a strategy for tapping into your board member’s connections on an ongoing basis to promote growth within your own network and that of your organization.  When recruiting, ascertain what each prospective board member’s network looks like and how it could serve your organization. While LinkedIn is a great tool for this, having a direct discussion is crucial too.

Don’t Let Your Strategic Plan Gather Dust

An organization’s strategic plan is a roadmap to its future success. But over time, momentum toward its goals can be lost and, when this happens, management often stops sharing the sharing the plan with the board. To counter this, always carve out time in board meetings to share the results and outcomes your organization is seeing and to address related strategic issues and topics.

Also make time at the committee level to reacquaint members with the strategic plan on a regular basis.

Make It Easy For Your Board Members — And Yourself

Given how busy the most high-performing individuals are, you need to make it easy for your board members to understand expectations and how they can plug into the work that needs to be done on behalf of your organization. Creating strategies and tools like those we discussed will help with this and will also make board members feel valued and, therefore, more invested in the work. Though it sounds simple enough, it’s definitely not easy. As a leader, we know you have an organization to lead too. Feel free to reach out to us with questions about where to start and how to implement these tips with your board.

Ann Quinn, CEO

Quinn Strategy Group works with organizations to develop strategy, identify key objectives and priorities and strengthen and align organizational resources which includes increasing the effectiveness and contribution of their boards. Through a proven process of discovery, analysis and meaningful action facilitated by a close collaboration with clients, Ann and her team ensure transparency, inclusive decision making and impact.