Board Meeting Best Practices (What 25 years of experience taught me)

There is no class in school that teaches you how to run a great board meeting, but over 25 years I've learned a lot about how to do it well. Let's dig in. For this video, I will use a fictional company. It's called Grilldy's. It's a beloved neighborhood bar and grill with big ambitions. It's so hard to pronounce. Anyway, before we dig into the actual template, let's talk about what's already happened before the board meeting. 72 hours before the meeting, the CEO distributed the agenda and the complete slide deck. It means that everybody now in the room who's a board director or a member of the the team that's attending the meeting, they have studied the materials. And we do something super important. We start on time and we finish on time. We set the tone for the whole meeting through this one thing. Next, we review the agenda for the meeting, and then we dig into some housekeeping and get ready to get to work. For our fictional company, we created this agenda. The way you have a great board meeting is by really getting to the meaty issues as quickly as possible. People want to be on a board and they want to solve problems and make things happen. Along the way, as we go through this meeting, we ask first if anybody has any issues or topics they want to make sure we uncover. We put those in a parking lot, which is a list of potential issues that we want to solve in that IDS section at the end of the meeting. That is an area where we identify, discuss, and then solve issues. I borrowed this from the EOS framework, which is a business operating system you can learn about through books or by searching on the web. But this framework allows you a very structured way to go after tackling your problems and solving them as a group. After we write down these issues, we go through and revisit our desired culture that we want for the board. The chair picks one or two of these and spends a couple minutes talking through them. They'll give a little color and reinforce the things that we expect each board member to do. Every board has a different set of expectations. You'll create these either as a board chair or together as a group. In my case, I tend to bring these as the board chairman because I want to set the tone of what we're going to be doing and how we're going to be treating these meetings. So in the case here, I've listed 7 different expectations in terms of the things I expect from board members who are coming to a board meeting. One of my favorites here is be direct but kind. You don't want to be the type of board where people are going to be really mean to each other. That's no fun. But you also don't want to be a board where people are so kind that they avoid talking about real stuff. So that's why I love putting this one in. You need to decide what type of board you want to have and codify that in this section and then bring it up each individual meeting, whether it's quarterly or annually, to make sure everybody's on the same page and knows what you expect of them as the board chair and/or owner of the company. So we finish up the first section, which is the logistics section, and we go secondarily to the management presentation. This is the first meaty thing we're gonna do. The idea here is that over about 45 minutes, plus or minus, the CEO and CFO catch up everybody in the room. Remember, this particular presentation materials and this board deck were sent out over 3 days prior. So the CEO should not get up there and just read these slides. The CEO should walk us through and make sure that anything that is a big takeaway that he wants to make sure, or she wants to make sure, that everybody knows gets highlighted. But the other thing about sending the deck out 3 days ahead of time is it forces everybody to come in prepared and really think deeply about the issues we're going to tackle and potentially bring up issues that we maybe haven't even thought about. It's much better to do that than to surprise everybody with the information the day of and then hope that they're ready to talk about it. This is the format we use for the management presentation. In our particular case, we've set this section for 45 minutes where the CEO is going to give us color on each one of these topics. Walking through the VTO is very important. The VTO comes from the EOS operating system that I love to use to run businesses. So here, through this section, the CEO is level-setting everyone about our business and vision. And I love these systems like EOS, Scaling Up, and others that do these page strategic plans. It's the old idea that if I'd have had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter. And to me, one-page strategic plans are excellent. They're front and back of one piece of paper to make you really focus on what's truly important and use the minimum amount of words to describe your true focus as a business. He or she shows the latest iteration of this living document and lets us know if there were any changes from last time. Given this is a quarterly meeting rather than an annual meeting, the document should be pretty standard. It will only have changed in terms of the quarterly goals themselves. Okay, here is the front page sample of our fictional company called Grilled Lease. What's beautiful about the EOS system or other systems that do one-page strategic plans is the entire vision of where the company is going to be 10 years from now all the way to what's happening this week gets encapsulated in this one particular document. Any company that's running EOS or a system like it, I can look at it very quickly at a glance and understand what their entire strategy is to achieve their vision and how they're executing on that right now. So here's the back page of the VTO. So the VTO goes all the way from a 10-year vision down to what's going on this week.

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So now that we've reset what the long-term and near-term plan is for the business, we zoom into the results for this past quarter. Remember, we're doing a quarterly meeting for our company here. The CEO gives us an overview of our rocks, which are the way EOS talks about quarterly goals. What were the 5, 3, 5, 7 things that we tried to achieve that were our highest priority things last quarter? And then tell us how we did. What were the things the team tried to do and how did the results turn out? And then he goes in or she goes into the numbers for the quarter. One thing I like to do is the goals that turn out well and the numbers that turn out well, they get a green. The ones that don't turn out well, they get put into a red color and the ones that are okay, they get put into yellow. So here's the document that the CEO has pulled up this slide and the CEO is showing us how the quarter went. Going through the numbers that we expected, everything from revenue to profitability to our key KPIs. Then the CEO goes in below that to talk about the individual SMART goals that we created for the company. It's very easy to have 50 different goals that your company can achieve, but you don't ever really prioritize which ones are the most important. And EOS says in any given quarter, your team can only have 3 to 7 goals that it's trying to achieve. It doesn't mean you don't do other stuff, it just means that you're going to focus on what is really going to push the ball forward for the company and what really truly matters the most. And here we have several goals that we didn't achieve for the quarter, the CEO walks us through a retrospective on what went wrong and what went right with each one of those things. Next up from the CEO is to tell us what's gonna happen in the coming quarter, right? So, so far we've been looking backwards in terms of our results. It's the same format as before, and we stick with the EOS model here with 3 to 7 SMART goals. The CEO has already done a planning scenario with his or her team and has come back with the numbers and the objectives that they're gonna try to achieve in this quarter. And here the CEO walks us through those so we can understand what the company's gonna try to achieve both from a number perspective and also from a goal perspective for the remainder of the quarter that we're currently in. Next, we do something that I think is super important, and most companies forget to do this. Notice we've spent a lot of time on the facts so far, but we have to remember that we all are emotional human beings who are in here trying to make something special for our family, our community, and the customers that we serve. So we stop here and we celebrate some wins. This is so important, and we reserve an entire slide in a few moments for that. We also look at our KPIs and the status for each area of the business for the quarter as defined by the EOS system. Next, we move on to a thing that we like to call the scorecard. So this is a bit different than the EOS scorecard, where we take the main areas of the business and we rate each one in terms of health. And this is totally subjective by the CEO. So here in this particular situation, the CEO has rated several things green, one or two yellow, and some deficient. And in this case, the CEO has just gone through this slide, highlighted a couple talking points, and then moved on quickly. Again, the CEO is not reading the slides because that would be lame. Next, the CEO hands everything over the CFO, and all the usual financial slides and numbers are presented. As a board, we listen for anything that might need to be problem solved later, and the CFO highlights big takeaways that we should have and things we should understand about the numbers. Now we get to the most important part of the meeting. For the next 60 to 150 minutes, we will process issues as a board. Anything that we've identified in going through the information or that people have brought beforehand we will have put into the parking lot of things that we're going to process during this time. And we do it all using a very structured framework called the IDS system, which we took from the EOS system that I've talked about before. And we'll go through them one at a time. So here's the issues section that we've built so far in this meeting. Notice we're going to spend 2 hours out of the total meeting, so the majority of the meeting time, just focused on solving problems. And people love this when you do it as part of your board meetings. There's nothing more boring than a board meeting that's just you sitting there worrying about issues that aren't important, or the CEO reading you the slides. Much more interesting is when you as a board get to tackle the real meaty problems facing a business. Here we have 4 different issues that we put forth. The creator for each one is put here, as well as the description of what the issue is. And then lastly, we've put a priority next to that issue— high, medium, or low. And it's pretty straightforward. We start with the high issues and we work our way down to do the low issues last. So a quick word about issues. They could be challenges, or they are informational things like a presentation on our world-class competitor Chili's. And we use the IDS system to go through each one of these issues one at a time and solve problems. And if you want to know more about how the IDEA system works, I encourage you to buy a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. It's about $12 or $15, you can get it on Amazon, and it makes things really easy to understand in terms of this particular system. Here we've gone through and identified on the left the individual issue that is the core of what we want to deal with. Then we moved on to discuss that issue, but we only did that once everybody agreed exactly what the issue was that we're trying to identify. And lastly, we went through after finishing discussing, and only then did we go through and figure out how we're going to solve it. And the cool thing about going through this process where you identify the real issue, you agree on it, then you discuss it and get all the data out, is by the time you get all the data on the table, there is almost always universal consensus on the right solution in terms of solving that particular issue. And after those 2 hours is over, the ending time is reached, or after we run out of issues, the meeting goes to a closing phase. And this is the very last thing that we to run a great board meeting. And the thing I love here is we rate the meeting, and this is another habit that we stole from EOS and other frameworks. So here's an example of us going through this process of adjournment. Each person in the room rated the meeting by a number and then said what would be better next time. Then we took suggestions beyond that for better for next time. We wrote them here, and then we closed the meeting. And the idea is we can make every meeting better than the previous one. Finally, we asked folks to give us ideas on things that we should add to the meeting for next in terms of key topics they want to cover. That way the meeting gets better and it also gets tailored to exactly what the board members are looking to cover. And that's it. That is my framework and how I run great board meetings. I do dozens of them each year and I'm getting better every single time. But I've learned if you use this framework, you can have great board meetings and have even better company's teamwork and camaraderie by running a structured, well-defined board meeting. And it will make everything better for you and your your business life. Thanks for watching this video here on YouTube. If you're interested in getting this format for the board template, it is available for free on my website, girdley.com, and we'll have a link below in the comments. And if you enjoyed this, do me a favor. I would love to get it in front of more people, and the best way we can do that is comment below in the comment section something positively or even something constructive that I could do better for next time. And please, thumbs up are appreciated, and please click the notification button so you don't miss anything that I present. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on Girdley World.