Board meeting agenda timings: create focus, or dampen creativity?
Having timings against the agenda in a board meeting can help to give focus to the meeting. It can also stifle creativity and open debate.
Wellmeadow supports ambitious companies with business growth enabled by HubSpot.
We've worked with over 100+ businesses at board-level across sectors such as automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, legal, SaaS, and professional services.
A successful meeting needs to have a few key ingredients, and one of these is a good agenda. A Board Meeting without an agenda is not likely to be very effective and could cause serious governance issues.
We have developed the board meeting agenda that we use over several years of chairing over 200 board meetings per year. It broadly breaks down into three sections:
Here is the full agenda we use:
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
Agenda for the [Company Name] Board Meeting
to be held at 10:00 am on 1 October 2020 at 100 Wellmeadow Road
Formalities and governance
1 Formalities & Apologies
3 Declaration of Conflicts of Interests
4 AOB - Items to add to the agenda
5 Review of minutes of the last meeting
6 Review of outstanding actions
7 Matters Arising
8 Decisions made since last meeting
9 Risk Register and Bribery Act Log
10 Policy Review
Reports
11 Health, Safety and Environment
12 Finance
13 Sales & Marketing
14 Operations
15 HR
Strategic Projects
16 Project 1
17 Project 2
18 Project 3
19 Date of next meeting
You should try to split your time carefully to make sure you don't run out of time before you get to the more important points. Aim for at least half the meeting on the Strategic Projects.
You can read more tips about running board meetings here or you can download a free pdf of the complete Good Board Meeting Guide to take away.
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