A great board meeting provides an opportunity for a deep discussion of important business issues and decisions, and also for establishing the company’s policies. To reap the maximum benefit from every board meeting, you need to plan ahead, manage expectations regarding the amount of discussion feasible, and stick to the agenda.

The best way to avoid boring meetings is to set the actual goals for your meeting and revisit them frequently to ensure that the actual meeting is staying on track. When you are caught up in reports or technicalities which might have been reviewed prior, you waste the opportunity to let your board members debate matters that are not solved by the management team on its own.

Think about creating a consensus agenda to reduce the time that meetings take. This allows the board to swiftly approve any reports/documents that don’t need more discussion and prevents the meeting from getting too long.

Distribute board packets three to four days prior to the meeting to allow attendees to review them before the meeting. This reduces the time spent in the meeting reading reports and gives them a chance to ask questions before they get more complicated.

Make sure to include the word “parking lot” at the end of the board package in order that items that are not relevant to this meeting can be pushed off for another meeting and will not interfere with the most important agenda items. This https://yearsboard.com/the-elements-of-ma-data-rooms/ will also reduce the chance of the most important items on the agenda being moved to later in the meeting or not discussed at all.