Often board and committee meetings end before the board addresses its most critical agenda topics. Or, those topics get short shrift so the board can adjourn on time. Human nature is to spend time on the topics for which the answers come more easily, less on the uncomfortable topics. But boards and committees really need to get to those tough agenda topics if they want to move their companies forward. If this is happening to you and your board, you are not alone. Happily, there is a solution.
Effective use of a board’s limited time requires an understanding of board priorities – then rigorously planning board and committee agenda based on those priorities. The board’s three Priorities are:
- Company’s Leadership. It is the Board’s most important function. Identifying, developing, and retaining high quality leadership is critical to an enterprise’s success.
- Company’s Strategy. It is about setting the Company’s direction, the aim and trajectory of its products and services, its capital allocation, and its contributions to society.
- Execution. A Board reviews and discusses results, evaluates proposed transactions, and pursues “red flags.”
All corporate boards, whether start-up or well-established, have these Priorities in common. Devoting the appropriate time and energy to these Priorities can drive the Board’s impact and the Company’s success.
But, building board and committee agenda the old-fashioned way will not move your board and company forward. Until now, that has been a time-consuming, manual process.
Going forward, you can improve board effectiveness and decision-making with Foresight. Foresight is an interactive, secure SaaS platform that streamlines and elevates the agenda planning process (as well as follow-ups). Foresight is an effective tool to elevate priorities and build effective agenda– for the entire year and for each board and committee meeting.
Foresight helps produce agendas that:
- Prioritize agenda topics which have the greatest strategic value.
- Allocate more time to those more important agenda topics, over the more ministerial but still essential agenda topics.
- Better reflect how much time agenda items and meetings are likely to require, allowing chairs to better plan and lead meetings and management and directors make travel plans.
- Are planned for the year but be easily adjusted as meeting planning progresses.
- Validate compliance with relevant governance and regulatory requirements.
Foresight also produces analytics that allow comparisons between planned and actual time allocations. Management, Lead Directors and Chairs can use those analytics when building future agenda and to lead more efficient and effective meetings.
Use Foresight to better plan your agenda and generate the analytics needed to help your board devote enough attention to the topics that really drive your company’s success.
