Is Your Board Neglecting Preventive Maintenance?
Sustaining Policy Governance®
Would you invest in a new car, and then not bother to have regular oil changes and tune-ups? It might run well for a while, but in time, that investment would lose value.
It saddens me when Boards do that very thing—invest time, energy and money into implementing the Policy Governance model—and then neglect basic "preventive maintenance."
Check your Board's practices against this list. If you answer "yes" to any of these questions, consider a "tune-up" soon!
New board members have joined us since we implemented Policy Governance and they did not receive a thorough orientation to the model within one or two months of taking office.
We have revised our Ends, and some of the statements now describe what activities our organization does, rather than the results of what it does.
We frequently have meetings in which a discussion of Ends does not appear on the agenda.
We do not have a deliberately planned strategy, which we carry out, for finding out the needs of our "owners."
We have a policy which schedules the frequency with which we will monitor the CEO's compliance with each Ends and Executive Limitation policy, but we often don't follow it.
A lot of time in our board meetings is spent discussing the means (methods) by which the staff do things.
We've set up some new committees that are "helping" or "advising" the staff.
Information we receive from the CEO is not usually clearly identified as "decision" information, "monitoring" information, or just "nice to know" information.
We often find ourselves making motions that "approve" the CEO's recommendations, or that "direct" the CEO to do something.
We have a new CEO since we implemented Policy Governance and he or she did not receive a thorough orientation to the model.
The board still discusses "approval" of budget items.
We rarely get around to evaluating our own performance at the end of a meeting.
We still try to find a "CEO Evaluation form" once a year.
We still depend largely on the CEO to develop our agenda.
Don't allow the neglect of basic maintenance to turn your shiny new governance model into a rusting "has-been" that isn't operating on all cylinders! Practice preventive maintenance. If any of the above practices are slipping into your use of the model (or haven't yet been eliminated from previous practices), a "refresher" may be a good investment for you.