Director effectiveness

Organisations spend a significant amount of time, money and effort developing and appraising the performance of their CEO and the senior leadership team but not many invest resources in the growth and development of their directors.

Organisations that develop and appraise their directors testify to the importance of such action and the significant return they achieve on that investment. With boards, governance and corporate structure effectiveness being linked to professional & CEO appraisals.

A simple, unobtrusive approach

Our Director Effectiveness Survey uses a special online data collection technology that has been designed to be unobtrusive and to be completed in one web-based survey by each participant over the web in less than 30 minutes.

The survey can also be completed by executives that regularly attend board meetings and who therefore know the directors well. They can rate the attributes of each and provide comments in relation to their strengths and opportunities for improvement or just provide comments without a rating. Either way, this will be of significant additional benefit to each director. The same methodology can be applied across leadership teams and various areas of the corporate structure.

Our Director Effectiveness framework

Our Director Effectiveness Survey uses the following framework:

Two Director Effectiveness Surveys to choose from

Insync has developed two Director Effectiveness Surveys that are often used as a component of an Insync externally facilitated board performance review. The two Director Effectiveness Surveys can also be used on a stand-alone basis and acquired online from our Board Benchmarking division, with or without additional professional advice to interpret and act on the survey results. The two surveys include:

• A premium Director Effectiveness Survey comprising 14 survey items and 4 discrete factors of a director’s effectiveness, that takes around 30 minutes to complete based on 7 directors. A separate report is provided to each director, normally via the Chair. This is our most common Director Effectiveness Survey.
• An extended Director Effectiveness Survey comprising 28 survey items and 4 discrete factors of a director’s effectiveness, that takes around 40 minutes to complete based on 7 directors. A separate report is provided to each director, normally via the Chair.

If you are conducting a Board Effectiveness Survey you can opt to add a short Director Effectiveness Survey Module to the end of your Board Effectiveness Survey. The Director Effectiveness Survey Module is a lite touch review of directors comprising only 3 survey items and 2 open questions. It only takes around 5 minutes to complete based on 7 directors. A separate scorecard is provided to each director, normally via the Chair.

Individual reports as well as a group report

Individual reports or scorecards show each director’s rating of themselves as well as the rating of each director by others. It also shows how the rating of each director by others is compared to the rating by others of all directors. This perspective highlights the perceptions of the director’s strengths relative to other directors.

The written responses add context and further insights to the numerical data included in each report.

A separate group summary shows the average results for all directors, which identifies those issues that the directors excel at overall and those issues where they can most improve as a group.

Debrief of results

Much of the value is derived from the feedback process where directors are encouraged to determine what the ratings and comments of peers are saying to them in terms of their main strengths and where their contribution to the board can be enhanced. The process includes matching up their views with the views of the Chair and/or an expert facilitator from Insync and helping each director develop a plan to enhance their performance.

What our clients say

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