Organizations
Board Optimization Planning
Led by Brett Egan, President of the DeVos Institute of Arts and NonProfit Management, the Board Optimization Planning process is a high-intensity offering designed for advanced boards seeking to maximize their effectiveness.
This initiative creates consensus around current areas of effectiveness and equips boards with strategies to further align governance practice with organizational priorities.
Through rigorous analysis and expert facilitation, the program addresses governance structure, culture, composition, engagement, financial expectations, and self-regulation.
Each process is tailored to the participating organization’s unique context yet proceeds in a principled, time-sensitive, efficient manner to ensure strategy is developed in five key areas defined by the Institute through decades of experience in governance strategy development.
The Scope
This program supports high-performance boards in celebrating successes and refining, as necessary, their fiduciary, ambassadorial, and fund-development roles, establishing clarity and consensus in five critical areas:
- Culture
- How decisions are made, who is involved, and the level of transparency expected.
- Embedding organizational values into board actions and policies.
- Defining expectations for board-staff leadership and establishing mutually-respectful methods to ensure accountability.
- Board meeting leadership, structure, tone, and expectations.
- Roles of the Chair, Executive Committee and Staff leadership in promoting a high-performance culture.
- Composition
- Determining the ideal board size, member affiliations and expertises in alignment with the organization’s strategic direction.
- Strategies for recruitment, onboarding, and meeting representation goals.
- Committee subjects, charters, and structure.
- Evaluation and refinement of (or need for) Affiliate boards or governance groups (e.g. Advisory or Emeritus).
- Engagement
- Identification of under-activated energy and resources within the current board.
- Methods to activate board members’ full potential through participation, committee service, and tools to support their contributions.
- Leveraging diverse backgrounds and assets to meet organizational goals.
- Methods to assess and encourage active engagement.
- Creating plans for transitioning, as appropriate, certain current members into roles better suited to their interests or capacities, such as advisory boards, to preserve goodwill and institutional knowledge.
- Financial Performance
- Setting clear expectations for financial contributions at both the individual and aggregate levels.
- Respectfully balancing varying financial capacities of board members.
- Aligning financial contributions with strategic organizational needs.
- Creating a five-year roadmap for both annual and capital expectations.
- Maintenance
- Establishing protocols for Board self-regulation, governance, and replenishment.
- Methods to transition members to advisory or non-fiduciary roles when appropriate.
- Developing performance review processes and accountability measures.
- Bylaws review and identification of items requiring modification due to the planning process (or de facto practices pre-existing the planning process).
For more information, please download our brochure here.
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