A board chair called me in October, six weeks before their executive director’s annual evaluation. She was nervous because the evaluation process they had used for three years was producing tension and the ED had finally addressed it with the board. The executive director found it demoralizing and the board felt like they were going through a compliance exercise. Everyone recognized that the tool needed to be revised.
Their executive evaluation was a ten-page document built around performance ratings for a list of competencies with no shared definition. Individual board members submitted them independently and the scores were averaged. The board chair delivered a summary, and the ED received it with very little dialogue, no context, and no room for her own voice.
The board was avoiding difficult conversations, even though the ED welcomed them. This is not surprising because board members are almost never trained in giving and receiving feedback, and most executives are not either. So the avoidance wasn’t strategic, it was a gap in capacity that the process had never been designed to address.
The evaluation itself had never been designed to address much at all. It had not been developed participatorily and had changed very little since the founding of the organization fifteen years before. There was no structure for the ED to communicate her own experience of the year and the trust wasn’t there for her to share what she was carrying, where she needed more support, what she believed the board needed to understand about the work. The board and the organization were being deprived of information that only the executive director could offer.
This board had clear values: transparency, dignity, partnership. They talked about those values often but there was a gap between the values they named and the governance structures they used. The evaluation process communicated something about power and judgment that was the opposite of what this board said it stood for.
We worked with this board to redesign their process from the ground up to ensure that it served the board’s actual governing values, and particularly their stated value of partnership with their executive director. What we built together had three core features based on the direct expression of the three values this board already claimed.
Trust: Building the container before the conversation. While “trust” was not one of their three values, we had to deepen the trust between the board and executive. We built that trust deliberately providing a focused session for board leadership on giving and receiving feedback where they learned things like offering observations rather than verdicts and to stay curious rather than defensive. We introduced quarterly check-ins between the board chair and the director: non-evaluative, structured, relational conversations that kept both parties informed about each other’s experience across the year. By the time the annual evaluation arrived, the director was continuing a relationship that had been tended all year instead of reading scorecards from her supervisors.
Transparency: Co-designed criteria. Before the evaluation cycle began, we facilitated a structured conversation between board leadership and the director to surface shared expectations for the year including the priorities, the measures of success, the places the organization was asking the director to grow. These criteria became the foundation of the evaluation because both parties had shaped them. When criteria are co-created, they carry something a competency rubric never can: genuine mutual understanding. Transparency in governance means building the decisions together, in the open, before the year begins.
Dignity: A narrative self-assessment. Rather than responding to a rating grid, the director submitted a written reflection of what she had accomplished, where she had encountered difficulty, what she needed from the board to lead well in the coming year. This changed the quality of the board’s understanding of her experience. It also created the conditions for honesty that the old process had foreclosed. Dignity in evaluation means designing a process that treats the executive as someone with valuable knowledge about her own experience.
Partnership: A conversation, not a delivery. The board chair and one other member met with the ED to discuss the evaluation together, with structured norms that made genuine dialogue possible. They also built in a component the old process had never included: space for the director to offer her own observations about board effectiveness and the support she needed going forward. Accountability flowed in both directions because partnership, if it means anything, means that the governance relationship is mutual.
By the following year, this board considered their evaluation process one of their strongest governance practices. The director described it as the most useful professional conversation she had in the year.
If you know me, you know I get really excited about values and how to operationalize them in all board governance structures and organizational structures. The design of these processes, the structure of your conversations, and the direction of accountability can change everything.
The Hive Collective works with boards to design evaluation frameworks that are both rigorous and humane, and that close the gap between stated values and actual governance practice. If your process needs a rethink, we’d be glad to help.
