A well-run board director meeting allows your board to make informed and ethical decisions. The board should be able to review documents, hold discussions and reach a consensus on complicated americanboardroom.com/what-is-board-management-software issues. The meeting must be documented appropriately, allowing for future reference and also to ensure compliance. The process can be challenging to navigate but it is vital that the board makes the most of their time and resources.

Board work can be both exhilarating and exhausting. To ensure that meetings are productive, it’s important to avoid these common pitfalls.

1. Recapitulating discussion points from previous meeting

Reminiscing about the discussion from the previous board meeting will take up time and distract you from the most pressing agenda items. Getting sidetracked by new discussion topics will also prevent you from reaching your goals for the meeting. If you must discuss a topic that wasn’t originally scheduled for discussion, have the members agree to push it to the end of the meeting with the agreement to reevaluate the issue and decide if the topic should be researched further, added to the next agenda or assigned as an item to be discussed later.

2. Information sharing is too much

Board members need to be well-informed. However, the board’s document should be designed in a way that can encourage constructive discussion and provoke questions, not be an exhaustive overview of every piece of information available to the board’s consideration. It could appear as if the board is acting as a preschool teacher, but it allows them to concentrate on the crucial decisions.