It’s CEO and trustee appraisals season at the Association of Chairs. We are starting with me, moving onto Liz, our interim CEO, and then appraising all our trustees over the course of the year.
Getting good honest feedback is really important, but really hard. Human nature means we will rarely say to people’s faces what we really think about them – particularly if it runs in the opposite direction to the power dynamics.
In other words, managers find it easier to be honest to those below them in the organisation, but few are brave enough to be honest in the other direction. Few people criticise their boss to their face.
The trustee appraisals process at Association of Chairs
Any good appraisal process needs to be anonymous and encourage both positive and negative views.
At the Association of Chairs we have put together a short survey for my colleagues to complete on SurveyMonkey. You can download and adapt it for your own purposes.
The survey uses the learnings from market research in order to try and encourage honest feedback in a number of ways:
- It’s anonymous – so nobody knows who has said what (providing they are careful about how specific they get).
- It balances positive and negative feedback – everyone explains what is good and what needs improving.
- It probes specific areas – people can think about specific things or cover areas of specific concern or both.
- It mixes open-ended answers, and scaled questions – in this case on a 1 to 10 scale or free text.
- It’s pretty short – about 5 minutes.
My colleagues are giving their thoughts over the next few weeks, and we’ll see what they say. Eeeek!
Individual trustee appraisals
For CEOs and chairs, getting feedback is relatively straightforward. Most people on a board of trustees, or on a senior management team, will have seen their chair or CEO in action and have views on them. Individual trustees are more complicated in my view to give feedback on.
Why are individual appraisals challenging?
This is for several reasons. The amount of contact with a trustee can be limited – a few meetings, a few conversations, and a few emails a year. Staff colleagues may have more contact in a month, or even a week, than trustees have in a year. This means judgements may need to be formed on limited interactions.
The second challenge is that trustees are volunteers. They give their time for nothing, and they often have day jobs too, balancing trustee duties alongside these and their private lives. While staff are contracted for a given amount of time each week or each month, trustees aren’t. This means that the contribution of trustees is measured less on quantity, and more on quality.
Comparing the potential contribution of a trustee with a young family and a day job, against one with no child or an empty nest, and who is retired, is unfair. It’s an uneven contest. Yet all trustees have the same legal responsibilities… so shouldn’t they all be judged against the same criteria?
This is why it’s not easy appraising individual trustees.
Make appraisals into a two-way conversation
Our solution at AoC is that while I as Chair, and Liz as CEO, will have a survey, the trustees will have a conversation. This aims to be a two-way process:
- How are you finding things?
- What do you think is going well?
- What contribution would you like to make over the next year?
We’ll see how it goes as the year progresses.
The importance of exit interviews
In my experience, exit interviews are a vital part of the appraisal process for the wider organisation. Any departing trustee (or senior manager) should be offered an exit interview. This is a great role for a trustee with HR or people skills.
Departing trustees and staff often have a candour and perspective that is more difficult to articulate while still in post. An exit interview needs to be done with somebody who they didn’t work with closely, and for staff it needs a clear promise that any references won’t be affected.
Three tips for trustee appraisals
Three final tips for the trustee appraisal process.
- Honesty is vital. If people think one thing and say another it’s no use. This does mean that the wording of feedback is important. My colleagues at nfpResearch used to talk about the ‘bad news sandwich’ for clients (they used more fruity language, but this is a family blog). Tell them the good news, then deliver the bad, and then remind of the good stuff again. All too often managers just deliver the bad news.
- Feedback is two way. It’s for both organisation and individual. While the individual should be learning and developing, so should the organisation. What do all these bits of feedback tell the organisation about its culture, its approach and how it needs to be changed?
- Just do it. No appraisal process will be perfect from day one. The organisation needs to learn what works best. Start somewhere. Have your trustees given feedback on your chair? Did your last two departing trustees do an exit interview? It may take a while to do it all, but over time even the smallest trustee board can have a great appraisal process and keep learning.
I’d love to hear how any chairs or boards have got on with the appraisal process, and what you have learnt. Email me on [email protected]
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