Boards which take an honest and open approach to evaluations fare better in terms of improving their performance, whether this means making incremental changes or accelerating change over time.

Personal Best. This type of board does an earnest job of evaluating its performance, year after year. It looks at what it can do to improve, based on its own progress and relative only to itself. What they learn is: “Here is how we did last year. Here is how we did this year.” Like an athlete hoping to take a few more seconds off their time, a board can make incremental changes and improvements with this approach.

Normative Best Practices. Other boards conduct evaluations that include a common core set of key performance criteria. That way, they can look at their own performance and compare it to a norm within their industry peers or similar sized companies. They can also learn about best practices used by other companies that may accelerate improvements for their own board. Our board evaluation tool therefore includes thirteen core areas with metrics used across companies in all industries and countries. This maximizes the amount clients can learn about their results and best practices the world over, year after year. Boards who take this approach tend to have directors with a deep commitment to performance improvement and an earnest intent to learn and share.