Creating a Well-Orchestrated Board Meeting Agenda

The agenda for your board meeting can help you meet your goals and help make meetings more productive. It sets the tone for the meeting, outlines the issues to be discussed, and ensures that everyone has the same opportunity to take part.

The distribution of the agenda in advance will help participants be well-prepared and ready to participate. This lets attendees ask questions or provide feedback before the meeting. It is best to have someone with a deep understanding of your organization’s mission as well as compliance requirements and the current business environment take the direction in drafting a well-structured agenda for board meetings. This will usually be the founder of the company or the chairman of the board.

Start the meeting with the call to order and an overview of the previous meeting minutes. Include a section of reports from the department’s key committee leaders (e.g. Governance Committee report and Finance Committee report). Include an area for items from the past (follow-ups ongoing projects or proposals) and new items (strategic initiatives or proposals).

Give each item on boardroomadventures.com/ the agenda an allocated amount of time, but don’t go overboard with it. Too much information may overburden participants and prevent a meaningful discussion. It is preferential to include more details in an additional document and distribute it to those who are interested in the discussion afterward rather than overburdening the agenda with unnecessarily long or lengthy reports. After all issues open and new business have been discussed, the chairperson of the board or facilitator of the meeting will officially end the board’s meeting and adjourn it.