The Chair, Coaching CEOs and Managing BODs

Seth Levine from Foundry Ventures in Boulder wrote a post a week back or so <Link> as a primer on how to do CEO reviews. In the comment stream the question was asked, who should deliver the review? In my experience this is best done by the Chairman/women of the board, aka the Chair. In my experience the Chair can provide a key mentoring and organizing role that makes a CEO’s job easier.

A few challenges:

• Boards aren’t always as effective as we would like. Agenda’s can conflict, personalities can be, well personalities.
• Boards sometimes need to be managed. Agenda’s organized, difficult issues broached. CEOs and particularly first time CEOs need help with these challenges.
• CEO’s need feedback more frequently then annual performance reviews. A best practice that we use is to always have an executive session at the end of every board meeting, without the CEO, followed by one on one feedback to the CEO.

An active, involved, seasoned Chair can provide a key role across these challenges. The Chair can help the CEO before meetings sorting out the agenda, in the meetings by running the agenda and after the meeting in providing feedback from the executive session. This helps the CEO organize the meeting beforehand. Insures the CEO is focused on the content during the meeting. After the meeting the Chair should provide post meeting feedback to the CEO and begin the planning process for the next meeting. The pattern makes it completely natural for the Chair to be in charge of the annual CEO performance review process.