CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

NON–BOARD MEETING TIME

Time with members of your board other than the few hours in actual board meetings is as important to get right as time in board meetings. I'd categorize the time you need to spend with directors in three buckets: ad hoc, pre-meeting, and social.

AD HOC MEETINGS

You have one-on-one meetings with people who report to you. You almost certainly vary them between phone, in-office and out-of-office. Why should your board be any different? Ad hoc meetings are just that—unscheduled (not recurring), opportunistic, sometimes social. I try to meet with each of my directors a couple of times per year without having a specific reason to do so.

For ones who are local to me, dropping by their office or scheduling a quick breakfast or drink is easy. For out-of-towners, I let their executive assistants know that I'd like them to tell me when they're traveling to New York and to save me a slot; or I make a point of seeing them when I'm in their city.

These meetings are good opportunities to establish and solidify direct and personal relationships with each member of your board. The more you know about them and what's going on in their lives, the more you can get out of them in meetings and the more you can help them make useful connections for you. If you don't think of board members as your boss—if you think of them as your strategic inner circle—how great is it to be able to sit with each of them periodically to talk about things going on in your head that you can't share with anyone else?

PRE-MEETINGS

Sometimes, you will have a tough issue coming up at your next board meeting. You are unsure about whether to fire a co-founder. You are worried your largest customer is about to bail. You just discovered that one of your top coders might have stolen code from his former employer and used it in your code base.

Rip off the bandage and call your board members one at a time. Give them a heads up about what they're about to see or hear. Tell them what your initial instinct is about the topic. Let them hear your emotions about it.

Whatever it is, board meetings—and Board Books—are not the place for surprises. Get the surprise out of the way; let your directors digest the news; let them read about it dispassionately in your Board Book. Then have the discussion when cooler heads (usually yours) prevail.

Again, you should make recourse to pre-meetings only when you really need to prep board members for an extraordinary situation. Don't get into a regular rhythm of having “the meeting before the meeting,” just as you don't want to get into the habit of having “the meeting after the meeting.” In most cases, the give-and-take should happen in the open. Use your judgment to determine if you're facing a special case.

SOCIAL OUTINGS

As I mentioned, a high-functioning board isn't materially different from any other high-functioning team. The group needs to have a clear charter or set of responsibilities, clear lines of communication and open dialogue. As with any team, making sure that the people on a board know how to connect with each other as individuals is critical to building good relationships and having good communication—both inside and outside of board meetings.

We have always done a dinner either before or after every in-person board meeting to drive this behavior. They take different forms: sometimes they are board-only; sometimes board and senior management; sometimes just dinner; sometimes an event as well as dinner, like bowling (the lowest common denominator of sporting activities) or a group cooking class. Whatever form the social time takes—and it doesn't have to be expensive at all—I've found it to be an incredibly valuable part of team building for the board over the years.

You'd never go a whole year without having a team lunch or dinner or outing. Treat your board the same way!