A good board meeting provides a space to discuss crucial business issues and make decisions, as well as establish the policies of the company. To maximize the value of every board meeting, you must to plan ahead, manage expectations regarding the amount of discussion that is feasible, and follow the agenda.

To avoid boring meetings, establish realistic goals for your meetings. Review them frequently to ensure that the www.yearsboard.com/should-your-ceo-serve-as-a-board-member/ meeting stays on the right track. By getting bogged down in reports or technicalities which could have been reviewed prior you, you are wasting the opportunity to have your board members discuss problems that cannot be addressed by the management team on its own.

Consider creating a consent agenda to cut down on time that meetings take. This will allow the board to swiftly approve any documents or reports that don’t require more discussion and keep the meeting from being too long.

Distribute board packs 3 to 4 days before the meeting so that attendees can go through them in advance of the meeting. This can reduce the amount of time during the meeting to read reports and gives them a an opportunity to ask questions before they become more complicated.

Include an “parking area” at the end of the board’s package so that items that aren’t relevant to this meeting can be moved over to a later meeting. This won’t interfere with the most important agenda item. This will also help to mitigate the risk that the most important agenda items are moved later in the meeting and will not be discussed at all.