Boards should do more benchmarking

While top leadership teams and boards usually put in a lot of effort benchmarking the company to competitors, only a few boards benchmark themselves against other (competitor) boards.

Hence most boards miss out on understanding what other boards do well in terms of composition, types of committees, number of annual board meetings, board remuneration and more. This information can be extremely useful when reflecting on whether your board might be missing out vs competitors in any area.

You could consider conducting a Board Benchmarking Study including comparison of these key areas:

  1. Board size
  2. Board composition (the types of prior and current experience, as well as factors such as age, gender, nationality, and tenure)
  3. The number of board meetings conducted in a year
  4. The number and names of committees
  5. The number of committee meetings in a year
  6. Shares held by board members
  7. Requirements of board members to invest in their respective companies
  8. Remuneration of board members

This comparison can help you consider whether your board composition is as relevant and diverse as related boards, and whether the setup of your committees, number of board and committee meetings, share and investment policies, or remuneration should be adjusted to strengthen the board for the future. The knowledge gained from benchmarking can help take the board and the company performance from good to great!

Our team at Leadership Advisor Group has recently conducted a Board Benchmarking study for a European leader in its industry. Contact us at reception@leadershipadvisorgroup.com if you’d like help in this area.

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Interested in self-evaluation? Try Online Board Evaluations

Well-aligned with national corporate- and foundation/charity governance recommendations, our board clients usually conduct an external board evaluation every three years. However, most national governance recommendations recommend that boards perform a self-evaluation in the years between an external board evaluation. Therefore, we have developed OnlineBoardEvaluations.com which is a tool enabling boards to self-evaluate effectively and effortlessly every year.