If your board of directors regularly get bogged down in the weeds, you are not alone as the vast majority of boards, from the smallest to the largest companies, organizations and non-profits, really struggle in this area and often feel stuck in a groundhog day cycle of all the board meetings being consumed by endless deep diving in operations and finance.
It’s important to say at the outset that this is a very natural and understandable problem. Each non-executive board member has to balance the responsibilities of overseeing the performance of the executive team, safeguarding the financial/legal health of the organization, discharging your statutory and fiduciary responsibilities as a board member with genuinely adding value in constructively supporting the CEO and executive team to achieve the organization’s objectives.
In recent years, the standards of corporate governance and national company/director law globally have correctly continued to strengthen with the result that the weight of legal, fiduciary and ethical responsibilities on the shoulders of board members has increased dramatically. The serious downside however of continually getting bogged down in the weeds of operations, performance, finance, sales, etc. is that it robs the board of the bandwidth to add serious value in the areas of strategy, risk, cybersecurity, talent development, succession planning, board performance, etc.
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