Secrets to Great Board Meetings
12 Secrets to Board Meetings Revealed for CTOs & Product Leaders
Welcome Leaders!
How do some execs seem to just crush Board meetings, over and over, every time?
Well, it’s easier than it looks, IF (and it’s a big IF) you know the secrets to the right mindset, preparation and execution for Board calls.
Today, I’m sharing many of these secrets with you.
I hope you enjoy learning them and then get to implement them as soon as possible. They can make a huge difference to your success in front of the Board.
Cheers,
I have seen some spectacular missteps, foot 🦶in mouth moments, and falls from grace in Board meetings throughout my 20+ year career.
I felt a little disappointment & even some 2nd-hand embarrassment for leaders faced with these circumstances, so I wanted to help avoid these scenarios for anyone that I can.
Consistently successful Board meetings are possible if you know the secrets to the right mindset, preparation and techniques.
And success is possible even in companies that are not doing so well financially. Even in these situations you can be a bright light 💡 and give a great performance.
Board Meetings Are Not Theater
Contrary to what you see on TV and maybe even what you feel when you’re preparing for a Board call, these meetings are rarely theater.
A very seasoned tech executive once said to me (after a particularly grueling Board meeting), “Well, I’m glad the theatrics are over.”
This is exactly the wrong mindset.
95% of the time Board meetings are critical decision-making conversations, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
Sure, a lot of decisions also get made behind the scenes in other meetings, but Board calls are where key strategy & company direction is being discussed.
It’s also where critically important assessments and judgements about you & your ideas are being made by highly influential stakeholders.
So, you better think about Board calls as a quarterly championship game rather than theater, and you should prepare for them accordingly.
One More Caveat
Before we get into the secrets, I admit that I exaggerated in the title, because there is never exactly a “great” Board meeting 😃. There are only acceptable board meetings and bad board meetings.
If anyone tells you their board meeting actually went great, I would view it with great skepticism.
90% of Boards play it close to the vest and regardless of the smiles and pats on the back you can be assured that an entirely separate series of thoughts and ideas you know nothing about is playing out in the heads of the Board. And those thoughts are not always what you believe they are or should be.
So its best to manage your own expectations — I’ll just put it that way.
Here Are The Secrets
So, you have your first board meeting coming up. Well, don’t worry too much because these secrets are going to help you makes sure it goes “acceptably well.” 😃
No Grace Periods
If you just landed in your role as an executive at the company be forewarned that most Boards don’t give you much of a grace period to solve key problems and develop a strategy. Boards are generally impatient. Truth be told I think you get about 25% of a grace period. Meaning, 25% of your 1st Board presentation can remain hazy and unclear, and that’s JUST for the 1st Board meeting. After that (in the 2nd and subsequent meetings) you better own any of the problems you inherited, have a plan for fixing them, and clearly be executing on fixing them or you’re already failing. Sorry, not trying to scare you 👻.
Boards Act Slow But You Shouldn’t
Boards can appear slow. In fact, Boards will usually deliberate and be very thoughtful about most things so they may come off as slower than you would expect. However, this doesn’t give you permission to go slow. A colleague of mine who was otherwise great, once made this mistake and got chastised. He said to me, “Bobby, I was just going the speed I thought the Board was going!” Here’s something to understand. Boards ALWAYS want you to be going SUPER fast. In fact, you can’t go fast enough! Don’t compare your speed to theirs! 🏃
Do Your Homework Right Away
A good Board meeting starts when the last Board meeting ends. Write down all your learnings immediately. If you’re doing Board calls quarterly then you should be spending an hour every 2 weeks (at least) reviewing these notes and prepping for the next Board meeting. Start putting together a revised structure for your deck (it can always get better) factoring in what you learned at the last Board call. I tend to include open ended questions I left the last Board meeting with into my thinking. This helps me brainstorm 🧠 for the next one and cover any gaps in strategy, plan, vision, etc, that might come up.
Leave Ego at The Door
We all have ego’s and the higher we rise the more of an ego we have (most of the time.) So by the time you start doing Board meetings you tend to think you’re hot 💩. But, guess what? Most Boards are chock-full of high achievers & you’re probably nothing special compared to them. You have to strive to leave your ego at the door so it doesn’t do battle with others. Sure, you should be confident, but humbleness is also greatly prized by Board-types. In fact, one of the best people I’ve worked for who is MASSIVELY accomplished, was so differential, polite and humble that the Board LOVED ❤️ them for it. Boards rarely love cocky execs unless you’re Steve Jobs.
Assume Every Board Meeting is a Slight Reset
What I mean is that the Board isn’t in the business every day so you have to explain a lot more context to them than you think. The right strategy is to overdo it on context and let the Board tell you when they want to hear less of it. DO NOT assume the Board remembers everything that was decided in the last meeting. Have a slide that shows “here were the decisions.” It will help tremendously to frame up the conversation. And like I said, if they want to skip over all that they will let you know. Give the Board an “on-ramp” 🛣️ in every meeting. And do it well and they will feel much more comfortable with the rest of your presentation.
Use Business-Oriented Language
Don’t jibber jabber on about tech-y topics in Board meetings. I’ve seen amazing CTOs straight up fail that way. ONLY do it if a Board member asks you directly to dive deep into a tech topic (and sometimes they will just to see if you have the chops).🥩 Most of the time in these meetings you should speak in business-oriented terms. Tie everything in product & technology back to KPIs, delivery, value, customers, business impact, risk mitigation and so forth. Remember, you’re at a strategic meeting.
Don’t Overreact to Anything
You are bound to get rattled in a Board meeting at some point or another. Sometimes the rattling will be on purpose coming from the Board. At other times it will come from somewhere else. Regardless of what happens don’t overreact to anything! Boards are looking for stable leaders not emotional basket-cases. I’ve literally seen weak leaders cry in Board meetings to get sympathy votes. Let me just tell you that that technique never works. I’ve also seen people yell and scream. Also a very, very bad look. 👀 So keep your composure and don’t overreact to anything.
Get Feedback Before the Meeting
The best way to know if you’ll succeed in a Board meeting is to get feedback about your presentation prior to the meeting. You should be developing a relationship with everyone on the Board, but you should especially have 1 or 2 people who you can show your deck to and have them tell you what they think (in confidence.) You can then decide to include any pointers 👉 they give you before the day of the meeting or prior to the send of the deck. This is a good technique to make sure you’re focusing on the right topics but be careful about who you ask.
Own Up to Mistakes
You will make mistakes as a leader. That’s inevitable and Boards know that. But what Boards hate is executives not owning up to their mistake. Boards like confident but humble leaders that take responsibility for both their wins and losses. The mistake may be minor or it may be major but either way you must accept that you’re accountable. Avoiding accountability is a sure-fire way to get on the bad side of a Board. In fact, it’s worse than making the mistake in the first place. Much worse!
Try Not to “Live” Problem-Solve
Scenarios will arise in Board calls where you will be put in a position to problem solve “live” and on the spot. Boards will accidentally do this sometimes and you have to resist falling into the trap. The trap is that the Board is asking you to solve a complex problem on the spot, but at the same time the Board wants careful and thoughtful decisions. Since knee-jerk reactions and instinct-only answers with Boards are not ideal, if the problem is sufficiently complex you must avoid trying to solve it right then & play for more time.
Lean on Risk Mitigation
Almost no Boards like risk. They will agree to take on some strategic risk of course, but generally speaking they don’t want to see much of it coming out of Product & Engineering. So anything you can do to mitigate & reduce risk is a good thing. I once had a colleague who mentioned they “hated thinking about risk — it’s just so negative.” If you want to be successful with Boards get that mindset out of your head! Risk mitigation is a key skill to learn for winning at the Board level. This is especially true for established businesses with steady growth (vs. something like a startup which is inherently risky).
Connect to the Numbers 🔢
Many boards are composed of finance experts and therefore numbers, KPIs and metrics are invariably a part of the conversation. Thus, you must know your numbers cold because you could easily get asked about it and because you need them to make key decisions & recommendations to the Board. This can be anything from deliverability rates, to budget, to headcount, to cost ratios, etc. Boards count on KPIs to steer the ship and so should you. So if you’re not a numbers oriented leader…
Get Better at Non-Linear 📈 Conversations
There has never been a Board meeting that has gone in a straight line. Board meetings almost always meander and rarely stick to an agenda. You will likely come with perfectly mapped out agenda items that will fly out the door about 30 minutes into the conversation. Such is life. You just have to get better at non-linear conversations. You have to be good at pivoting and switching up topics on a dime. With that said, the skilled leader will also know how to bring the conversation back to make some critical points. This issue should be its own standalone article because actually this is very, very difficult and few have mastered it — so I’ll write about it.
Conclusion
See, not too much to worry about. 😉
Remember, having “great” Board calls is rare, you just have to shoot for “acceptable” ones — but it’s totally possible the more you implement these secrets.
But even if you implement everything right with Board calls you’re going to have good days and bad days — it’s inevitable and you can’t control everything.
One last note: observe other strong leaders who know how to handle a Board meeting. This can radically accelerate your expertise and capability.