CEO Self-Evaluation Exercise

Chair and Trustee Self-Evaluation Exercise

You, as the CEO, can take the lead by following these two key steps:

1. Identify two or three important issues in the relationship that both you and the board chair would like to resolve.
2. Raise these issues with the chair and ask if he/she is willing to work on one of them along with you. Choose one that seems relatively simple to resolve, preferably one that would let you work with a committee, rather than the entire board.

Here’s an idea for an issue you could choose:

• How to get the board to feel more ownership of a major decision by getting the trustees to debate alternatives, without getting lost in endless discussion, so the board can still reach a decision by the end of a meeting.

Here’s another:

• How to get the board to identify the one change in its working relationship with you that would make the biggest difference in the board’s effectiveness.

And yet another:

• How to get the board to improve its own effectiveness by keeping focused on the issues at hand, so that all board members (yourself included) believe that time in board meetings is well spent.

Or finally:

• How to structure executive sessions so that you feel comfortable letting board members have discussions on their own, so long as they share the gist of the discussions with you.