A Direct Line Blog

By Donya Parrish, MCU VP- Risk Management

Last week some of you had the opportunity to hear David Reed speak at our MonDak Conference in Las Vegas. He had a simple message on Building the Best Possible Board Meeting — set expectations! His list of expectations for directors seems obvious and reasonable. For those of you who weren’t able to hear the session, here is what he proposed directors should do:

• Be on time
• Actively participate
• Come prepared
• Be nice to others

Simple enough, right? There are of course barriers to some of these suggestions. For example, to come prepared, you have to get the packet a reasonable time ahead of the meeting. If that is a continual problem, David had a solution: change the date of the meeting. If that doesn’t help, the issue might run deeper than just having the data timely.

Everyone wants to make the most of the meeting and the time directors give to an organization as a volunteer. If you have been looking for a way to improve your monthly meetings, the short list above might be a place to start. And, if you don’t get buy-in from others, putting the expectations into a position description or writing them into meeting rules might help smooth the change.

For those of you who attended MonDak, I would love to hear your biggest takeaway from the meeting. There were several to choose from!