How to Conduct a Board Self-Assessment

Self-Assessment of Boards is among the fundamental leadership practices top-performing boards of nonprofits employ to ensure long-term excellence in governance. It requires the board to take a break from day-to-day business and candidly reflect on its effectiveness. This allows board members to tackle issues that might otherwise cause friction and anger.

There are a variety of ways to conduct a self-assessment on your board from surveys and interviews to guided discussions. The best method will depend on the size of your board, the resources you have available and the amount of depth you’d like to include in the assessment.

Once you have decided on the method you want to use, make sure you are clear about what you hope to accomplish with the assessment. Do you want to enhance accountability, improve governance, or align governance with goals of the organization? Once you have determined this, you are able to select an evaluation tool.

Some tools allow you to compare results against other health care facilities and hospitals while others focus on the governance practices of your company. Regardless of what you select it is crucial that the tools used are unbiased and do not make any calls to the individual directors. This will create an environment where honest feedback can be given.

A majority of boards have a peer review process, which asks directors to review each other. This is a productive and beneficial process, but it is essential that the process stays secret. It isn’t easy for some directors to criticize an individual director when they are afraid that it will come back on them. In this instance, it is often better to let the facilitator review the responses to determine what insights are relevant to be shared with the board.

Board Self-Assessment Checklist