by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

I sat in a board meeting the other day, fuming. Around the table was gathered a lot of expertise, experience and good business sense. We were discussing how to think about and plan for the business’s future. The past year had been excellent (the best to date) but there were enough warning signs to provoke us all into asking hard questions about the future.

But of course, few people truly enjoy hard questions.

So we got distracted. Discussions meandered and I felt I was wasting my time. I started to think about why the meeting was so ineffective – and what it would take to turn it into a smart, focused collaboration that would make the company stronger.

The problems with our board meeting had started at the very beginning – with dates. This one had shifted four or five times. Everyone was busy – good people are – so no date could be found that every board member could accommodate. Attendance was incomplete. A few members had missed the last meeting so they weren’t up to speed. One arrived late and everything discussed so far had to be repeated.

If you want to get the best from your board, you hold quarterly meetings and schedule these year by year. Your board members put them in their diaries and stick to them – which means you have to stick to them too. Continuity counts: if attendance at your board meetings is sporadic, no one can follow the story, no one can compare quarters and identify patterns. I always get a little nervous when companies can’t stick to a meeting schedule: if something this simple is so hard – how are they doing on the really tough stuff?

When it came to the board papers, I subscribe more to the chaos than to the conspiracy school of thought – but this time it was hard to tell. We didn’t get the financial statements ahead of time so were asked to read and comment on them in the meeting. I considered the possibility that that this was a ruse to avoid serious scrutiny – but decided it was more likely to be good, old-fashioned, incompetence. What was certain was that the board members (especially those brought in for their financial savvy) were insulted. However simple your company’s finances are, not even Alan Greenspan could bring much insight to them at a single glance.

Imagine you paid your board members a consulting fee: would you really want to be paying for them to sit at your meeting reading? Meetings aren’t for reporting: that should happen, in the board papers, at least a week ahead of time. Meetings are for discussion, thinking out loud, coming to decisions.

Board meetings are about Issues. An “issue” is a polite word for anything from a question to a problem or a crisis. Issues may include things such as growth strategy (are we growing fast enough? Do we have the resources growth will demand?); competition (what is the competition and how do we address it? How might we use it to our own benefit?); tax strategy (are we being as smart as we could be in our treatment of tax?); or product development (too many products? Too few? Innovative enough?). Issues also include so-called softer topics like company culture (do options really help with staff retention? Is our pay scale competitive? What do we do to make great people love working here?)

In my companies, I’ve always made the agenda a list of issues. Just drawing up the agenda helped me to think about where we were and where we were going. In a hectic business, drawing up that agenda was sometimes the only strategic thinking I had time for.

For every issue, there’s an action item – or several. The action items are the tactical response to the strategic challenge. They may not provide the full answer but they’re about moving the issue on, not letting it become the elephant in the room. Action items are either decisions or the steps you need to take to reach a decision. And they have to be owned by someone – the person whose report will go into the board papers for next time. These should be shared among board members; no one person should make all the running. Everyone should carry their weight.

So at the end of meetings like these, the minutes are simple: issue, action item, owner. You don’t need a shorthand specialist. You just need focus.

Well-run meetings won’t give you all the benefits a board has to offer. You will still need informal meetings and phone calls. But when it does come to meetings, members of the board must be given all they need to put their experience to good effect.

After my disorganised board meeting, I emailed the chairman a note about how it might be run in future. So the next one should be interesting.

I just wish I had a date for it.

Margaret Heffernan’s new book The Naked Truth: A Manifesto for Working Women will be published this October. Contact www.mheffernan.com

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