How to Organize Effective Board Meetings

Organizing Board Meetings

Insight from Michael Girdley

Michael Girdley always has great advice, especially on building your own company. When I read his advice on organizing update meetings, the content hit home.

At Firstbase.io, I used to have to own many different departments. At some point in my tenure there, I was overseeing:

• Product

• Engineering

• CX

• Business Operations

• Finance

• People Ops

• Compliance

• Growth

Once a week, I would receive semi-organized updates from my teams. Girdleys system is way better.

Girdley will do the following to make sure he has productive meetings:

1. The department head/CEO will distribute the agenda and slide deck 72 hours before the meeting.

2. At the meeting, ask if anyone has issues to discuss after talking through housekeeping. Those get added to the Issue Processing part of the agenda.

3. The slide deck owner will then walk through the deck. Be sure to realize that this deck has already been reviewed. Just need to add color. The slide deck included a goal review for the current and future quarters, financial metrics, and wins for the quarter.

4. The biggest part of the meeting is discussing issues that must be resolved.

5. Finally once the meeting is over, the meeting gets rated by each person to understand where the meeting can improve.