Best Practices for Independent Directors on Family Business Boards
During many years of serving as an Independent Director on my sixteen years of serving five different family business boards, I’ve developed five best practices to share with fellow family Directors. These include:
- Focus on effective communication and building trust among Directors (both independents and family members) through regular meetings, clear agendas and insuring active participation from everyone during meetings. Have a board dinner prior to each meeting to re-connect and engage the full board informally.
- Foster a board culture of accountability, transparency, and constructive dialogue to promote effective decision-making.
- Ensure you are regularly updated on the family owners shared vision to ensure business strategies and tactics align with it. I’ve seen board effectiveness impacted by not being current on the family owners shared thinking about what success looks like to them in the present & future (versus in the past).
- Bring your current competitive perspectives and diverse skills to the boardroom to enhance the board’s collective wisdom in a dynamic and highly competitive business environment.
- Implement a candid annual board evaluation process to assess the effectiveness of the board and identify areas for improvement moving forward.
