Board Development Survey: Seeing a Board’s True Capacity

Client success story. Project completed 2023.

“With Conor’s help, we clearly understood our capacity and needs.”

The challenge

Our client, a local organization with provincial reach, was carrying out an ambitious strategic and board development plan. Board members were leaving, and key seats sat empty.

Their annual board survey showed high satisfaction, but leaders sensed it wasn’t telling the whole story. They were worried about blind spots and gaps in the board’s makeup, and they needed a clear picture of the board’s real capacity so members could work more efficiently and collaboratively.

Our approach

We started by meeting with the board’s executive to understand the group’s dynamics and its most pressing challenges. From there, we designed a custom approach with three ways of gathering insight:

1. Group discussions with the full board.
2. One-on-one conversations with individual members.
3. A customized online survey built around the questions this board needed answered.

Engaging people in several ways produced a large volume of honest, reliable and useful information.

The outcome

From planning to final report, the project took less than seven weeks.

The board received a detailed map of its skills across operations, oversight, governance and finance, along with a clear picture of each member’s communication preferences and available capacity.

With that insight, the organization refined its internal processes and focused its recruitment on filling specific skills gaps. The client called the survey “transformational” – for the first time, they fully understood their capacity and their needs.

Try this

Look at your last board survey. Does it tell you what skills your board has, what capacity members have to give and how they prefer to communicate? If it only measures satisfaction, there’s more to learn.

Be well.