Board evaluation

Typical client situations

►Desire to improve board effectiveness and teamwork

►New strategy or situation requires new board composition

►Board succession planning to be brought to the forefront

►Corporate governance calls for an objective third-party evaluation

►Need for a better mix of competences and diversity

►Board member is leaving

►Board wants to do a self-evaluation in the years between the recommended third-party / external evaluation

Our Approach

Is your board best-in-class? This is a key question at the forefront of the minds of
shareholders, chairmen, board members, and CEOs when considering the effectiveness
of their working relationships and the contribution each member is making towards the
realization of the company’s strategic goals.

Leadership Advisor Group will design the board evaluation process together with you. We do not
provide a fixed framework as our starting point will be to understand your company situation and
relate that to our substantial experience working with other boards, shareholders, authorities and
academia, with the purpose of developing the most relevant approach.

Based on our board evaluation experience, we typically do the following:

• Comment on whether the board is operating beyond compliance and risk management,
  taking a long-term view of the company and its business
• Find the strengths and uniqueness of the board and while also identify any potential for
  improvement
• Deliver detailed and confidential feedback and suggestions related to topics like the
  relationship between top management and the board, quality of board meetings and
  committees, board composition, key processes, team dynamics and individual contributions
• Ensure board members feel enlightened, inspired, and engaged, and that they have been
  provided with the insight and tools necessary for contributing to a world-class board
  performance

Our vision is that together with our clients, we will set the standard and continuously raise the bar for effective board practice.

With the overall goal of increasing board effectiveness, our philosophy is that a board evaluation
should be bespoke, as every board and company is different.

As a fundamental platform to build upon, we find two elements to be paramount: bespoke online
questionnaire in combination with individual interviews of board members.

The bespoke online questionnaire is pivotal to ensure the most relevant questions are asked in the same way and all key stakeholders get the opportunity to answer and comment anonymously.

Individual interviews of board members should follow suit as they are a critical source for understanding more subtle topics and open up for “deep dives” as well as for follow-up questions to the online questionnaire results.

Depending on the client situation, the evaluation can contain a few or several additional elements. Together with our clients, many of whom are leading in their industry, we have developed over the years an arsenal of useful tools, and are we constantly researching best practices and evolving our methods to remain on the forefront.

In order to ensure our integrity and independence we do not undertake more than three
consecutive board evaluations for the same client. Additionally, we will not provide any other
services (like non-executive search etc.) to a client during the course of a board evaluation
engagement, or subsequently accept any work from them which might create a perception of a
conflict of interest.

Since good governance guidelines strongly recommend that organizations conduct self-evaluations in the years when not being evaluated by an external consultant, we also assist our clients by offering “hybrid” self-evaluations using our OnlineBoardEvaluations.com service. You can read more about these on our site here. Click here to see the survey options, and here to tell us the scope and ideal timing of your next self-evaluation survey.