Dr. Earl R. Smith II
Managing Partner, The Federal Circle
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
Dr-Smith.com
Board assessment and self-evaluations are a normal part of a director’s life. A proper governance model can provide opportunities for assessments to play a constructive role in corporate and personal growth. The depth of the assessment must be determined before the actual assessment begins. Boards may choose to conduct only minimal assessments to meet compliance requirements. However, ambitious boards with strong, confident leadership may choose to tackle issues to improve corporate governance and ultimately lead to a stronger governance model and improve the performance of the company.
When establishing the appropriate assessment model, the board of directors as a whole considers issues such as:
- Assessment approach and depth
- Assessment responsibilities
- Assessment committee resources (how wide to cast the net)
- Assessment result dissemination
The strength or weakness of a board often determines the depth of assessment. A board taking a minimalist approach to corporate assessment is often a weak and resistant to change. The Chairman of the board of directors may have a leadership style that dominates the rest of the directors. Weak boards often believe a strong assessment of the governing body signals a lack of confidence in the Chairman – when actually the opposite is true.
Leadership assessments that tackle tough issues demonstrate confidence in the board of director’s capability to address touchy issues and meet challenges for the benefit of the shareholders. A leadership that takes this approach is seizing an opportunity to improve corporate governance, and establish a leadership development program that addresses the issues important to the performance of the company. Whether the weakness lies in compliance management, corporate ethics, corporate finance, or Sarbanes-Oxley regulation compliance, failure to identify a problem, acknowledge a problem and correct a problem is malfeasance of corporate governance.
The responsibility for seeing that the assessment is conducted within the parameters set out by the board rests with the assessment committee. A small single issue assessment may be done by the committee, however a major in-depth assessment will probably yield more valuable results if conducted by an outside, independent professional skilled in interviewing and assessment disciplines. I have arranged many of these assessments – and the value of having a third-party conduct an independent assessment can be huge – with the shareholders and board members benefiting. Using state-of-the-art technology, assessments are quick, confidential and highly effective. The board and committee should outline an effective strategy addressing the following:
- Confidentiality: the Chairman should address this. Directors not related to the assessment committee should allow the assessment committee to work independently of the board. Members of the assessment committee should be required to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding all sensitive information.
- Issues: the board should arrive at a set number of critical issues to be address by the assessment committee. The committee should have the authority to ‘follow the trail as the need arises, but the assessment committee should not be on a ‘witch-hunt.’
- Data collection: the assessment committee should have the sole discretion of the method of collecting data. The consultant or firm collecting the data should understand the committee’s objective and act as an adviser to the committee on data collection methods used successfully in the past.
- Feedback management: the board should dictate to the committee the expected feedback package to come from the assessment. A single-issue assessment may only require an oral report from the committee. A thorough, multi-issue leadership assessment may require the consultant to produce a report and to appear before the board to discuss results and recommendations for leadership development.
Most boards and committees with competent leadership want to conduct a meaningful assessment of the strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensive board assessment is great strategic tool to begin the process of better board governance and often leads to personal growth of the directors involved.
© Dr. Earl R. Smith II
~~~~~~~~~~
Related Articles:
-
Board Succession Planning – Two Tiered Candidate Criteria
-
Officer and Director Vetting
-
Good Governance – Minority Board Service
-
Good Governance – Balancing Eight Key Factors
-
Board Succession Planning – Two Tiered Candidate Criteria
-
Good Governance – Strategic Positioning for Strategic Planning
-
Governance and Risk Management Strategic Plans
~~~~~~~~~~
65 Responses to “Board Assessment: Raising Touchy Issues”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Dave Opton wrote:
This may sound too idealistic, but at the end of the day I think it comes down to TRUST, especially on the Sr. Mgt. team. My feeling is that for feedback to be really effective people need to trust the person giving the feedback and that whatever it is that I am hearing is offered to help, not to hurt.
The minipulation usually comes from those who are only giving lip service to being part of the team when in truth they have their own agenda, and while I can’t prove it, my belief is that this could comes about as the result of that individual’s personality, but more likely because the members of the team see what behavior is rewarded and behave accordingly. Not something that should surprise anyone.
Dave, thanks for the comment. I agree that the programs are vulnerable to both misuse and misinterpretation. Senior executives seem particularly prone to attempting manipulation. How would you work to see that they are not subject to either? Dr. Smith
Dave Opton wrote:
This is indeed an interesting discussion and certainly one that has been on going in the corporate executive development universe for as long as I can remember which is rapidly approaching 46+ years in the business word
While my area of expertise is not MD/OD ( I am a generalist) in my
experience I would agree with Phillip that there is indeed a difference between management assessment programs, team and personal development and organizational change efforts.
It has also been my observation that irrespective of the objective to which any of the foregoing a program’s efforts are directed, they often fail because the organization does not have the “will” to sustain the effort – particularly follow-up and when it comes to assessments, the use of the term immediately puts people on the defensive.
these programs have been around a long time, and unfortunately the perception that most executives have is that they are subjected to them as a means to an end, with the end being that the instrument is going to be used as tool to take them out of the business.
In short, what was intended to be viewed as developmental has often been misused and in many organizations that reputation is nearly impossible to overcome.
Posted by
360 degree assessments, where multiple individuals assess their performance subjectively in an attempt to highlight problem areas – and in the hopes that doing so will result in change.
360 degree assessments are a fine tool for figuring out WHAT isn’t working (e.g., John isn’t a good communicator, or Frank doesn’t provide enough details to his team), and even then there are lots of issues with honesty, bias, dishonesty due to lack of anonymity, etc.. The problem is, simply pointing out that John isn’t a good communicator does little to explain WHY he isn’t. Understand WHAT the problem is (e.g., Mary doesn’t close, Betty doesn’t prospect or gives away the product) does little to resolve the problem if you can’t then understand why Betty or Mary, or Frank or John do what the 360 says they do (or don’t).
In our consulting, we use ‘Innermetrix’ trilogy of assessment tools to offer clients (staff, managers/directors, and executives) personality profiles as a glimpse into how powerful such information (1. WHAT natural talents you possess, 2. HOW you prefer to behave, and 3. WHY you are motivated to do things) can be in helping them answer whatever questions they have.
The key will be to figure out what’s the pain or the symptoms they are trying to resolve, then we can show them what/why/how their profiles measure and we help provide those answers in ways a 360 never can.
Bill Boyer wrote:
Check out the podcast from Tino. To quickly explain, the D is for Dominance, I for Influence, S for steadiness, and C for conscientiousness. Just from the name of the each behavorial style you can quickly see how each of the styles will impact how these individuals interact, manage, or sell to others. You can also instruct this person for to determine which of the four behaviors the person you are interacting with fits. Do a seach on DiSC and many of the sites will allow to do a free DiSC on yourself. While you can work with people just from the report itself, I would strongly recommend that anyone is planning to use DiSC have some training in intrepreting the results.
Bill & Tino, thanks for the comments. It is this real world stuff that I was looking for. There are a lot of programs out there and such information helps to sort them out. I found Bill’s comment on measuring “behaviors more than personality traits” very interesting. Bill, could you expand on that? Dr. Smith
manager-tools.commanager-tools.com
Tino Go wrote:
I’ve found DiSC to be very useful also. There is a great podcast series on DiSC (and many other useful topics) at http://www.manager-tools.com/purchase-the-disc-profile . The web page I’ve cited has a number of free podcasts (as well as links for the purchase of the test).
Myers-Briggs provides interesting insight into a personality type, but can be hard to translate into management actions or routines.
Bill Boyer wrote:
I have used DiSC with a fair amount of success. This measures behaviors more than personality traits. Not only does the individual learn a great deal about his behaviors, he/she also taught how to better interact with others my determined their basic behavioral traits.
I have not had any problems getting executives to take this. It only takes about 15 minutes on the internet and the results are totally non threatening.
DiSC and Myers-Briggs are used equally in organizations per some surveys I have read. And the “360″ evaluations are even more popular.
Dave Opton wrote:
I too have been exposed to any number of assessment products over the years. I have yet to find one that I thought was particularly reliable in terms of prediciting success in a leadership role. Probably because no one as yet has been able to really define what leadership is.
What I have found, however, is that the use of assessment tools in terms of teambuillding has been very helpful. Primarily, I think, because once all team members have taken the same instrument and it has been shared with each other by an experienced facilitator it can be a powerful force in improving how team members communicate with each other. Among other things, it helps to create a common vocabulary amongst the team so that people are less likely to become defensive because everyone knows and undersrtands that the characteristics that surface through the common experience are present to one degree or another in us all.
Greg McDonald wrote:
I completely agree, Tino. You need full authority to carry through a turnaround!
Thanks, Graham. I’ll look at that website. I know who to go for for help on communication. “I’ll be back”!
Reagan, Thanks for a ‘real life’ addition to the discussion. I have seen this over and over again with management that receives a complex message and turns it into a simple-minded conclusion. Many assessment programs highlight the need to change the culture of an organization for instance. One that I worked with had a very bad attitude towards customer service. Senior management just could not get their mind around the real problem so they took to changing the personnel around. This was like moving the flatware around on a table top and calling it change. The situation finally resolved itself when the board replaced most of the senior management team. Even on the way out the door, they could not see that they were the problem. I am a firm believer that the experience and gravitas of the team running the programs is critical to its success. Light-weight consultants may be able to generate the data but the real heavy lifting of managing the aftermath is far beyond them. As a result, many of these programs do far more harm than good. Dr. Smith
Reagan Rawe wrote:
I went through several “assessment” programs; The surveys were very confidential and the responses were very accurate as what was happening in the organization (major oil & gas corporation); I was one of the people was asked to roll out the tabulation out to the field personnel so that they would feel comfortable that the concerns had reached the “top”; I was allowed to sit in on the initial presentation to management (up to the region VP); The reaction from management was hilarious; They spent 4 hours going slide-by-slide to 1)See which group had the most “problem” people and 2)Try and figure out which person in that group was the “disguntled employee” so they could seek revenge; Management came to the conclusion that the “real problem” was with the level of management just below them…. Good information, extremely bad presentation by the company that charged several million dollars for the work and widened the gap between “the suits” and “workers”;
systemsthinking.co.uksystemsthinking.co.uk
Graham Truscott wrote:
Greg,
I went to a superb lecture by John Seddon last night. I think you’d enjoy his take on successful organisations and radical turnarounds in organisational performance. Take a look at http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk . As you know, effective communications make a massive difference to successful implementation or delivery of anything – and you know where to come for help with that…It would be great to work with you again in one capacity or another.
Tino Go wrote;
Great comments from everyone.
Communications in all directions are necessary. The problem is when there are key members who “just don’t want to play ball,” and with whom one doesn’t have any authority over. When senior management allows disfunctional or incoherently disruptive behavior, all of the assessment tools in the world won’t help a company.
Without eliminating the impediments (the people who resist change from self-generated inertia) to evolution, all change initiatives will underperform or fail.
Yvonne, Thanks for the comment and for the reminder that assessment programs are not limited to use with management teams of for-profit companies. Dr. Smith