One of your primary goals should be collaborating with your board. So, clearly it makes sense to get that process started as early as possible. As the CEO you need to be facilitating collaboration between board members by providing opportunities for them to engage outside of your live meeting.
- Get the board materials out early to give the board members time to prepare. A good rule of thumb is to give to board members 1 day of review per 8 pages of materials. Don’t think you can deliver the materials 4 days in advance? Then you better keep the materials super focused and under 25 pages.
- I’d re-read A just because it’s such a good one.
- Provide a path for your board to ask questions or comment in advance of your board meeting. This gets the easy questions out of the way and out of the live meeting.
- Find ways to understand which topics your board cares about most. This could be 1:1 over email, or a group communications app. This will be invaluable to you as CEO. You’ll be able to anticipate the questions you’re likely to get in the meeting and have the best possible answers ready.
- Going back and forth about topics in advance of your live meeting also has a sneaky peer pressure effect that will often get unengaged board members to chime in earlier in the process. No board member wants to be seen as the only person who didn’t ask a single question.
- I once had a fish named Sneaky. He’s dead now though.
"In 2023 we should not be feeding out board materials in a non-iterative, fixed way that doesn't allow for questions and collaboration. It’s just fundamentally inefficient."
- Edward Norton, Co-Founder of Zeck, award-winning actor and entrepreneur
Watch Edward talk about the modern, effective board meeting (1:40)