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20 ways to be a better board member
Practice meetings are indispensable and need to be productive.
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“Corporate Governance: The manner in which boards direct a corporation … the set of processes, customs, policies, laws and institutions affecting the way people direct, administer or control a corporation.”
–Wikipedia
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
– Thomas Sowell
Meetings are the Rodney Dangerfield of business management, getting no respect and lots of eye rolling. But practice meetings are indispensable in a business as braided and fast-changing as health care, and as perfectionistic as ophthalmology.
If we are going to have meetings, they may as well be good ones, starting at the top of the organization with the board of directors. And good board meetings require that board members be good — that they attend, contribute wisely and play nicely.
Here is how to improve these meetings and their attendees alike, in 20 directed guidelines.
1. Board meetings for all but the largest practices should be held monthly. Not weekly (unless there is an emergency) and not quarterly. Monthly.
2. Practice board meetings are especially tedious affairs in most settings. They are held after hours, on empty stomachs, in grim little windowless rooms. Bad move. Find a pleasant, airy location. Serve a meal. And open a few nice bottles of wine if that is your style.
3. Chair the meeting actively. The president, managing partner or administrator of the practice will typically have this duty. He or she should lead with a friendly iron fist, with a time-apportioned agenda and a willingness to cut off wandering conversations.
4. Develop an important, realistically narrow agenda. A board meeting is not a time for making lots of announcements — that is why memos and bulletins were invented. Board meetings are for discussing and making important decisions. Period.
5. Come often. As a board member, you should attend at least 10 out of 12 monthly meetings each year, and you should never miss two meetings in a row. If attendance is a problem, commence a penalty system — or a reward system, paying board members for each meeting attended.
6. Come prepared. Read the agenda and supporting materials at least several hours before the meeting. Make margin notes. Look up information about things you don’t know on the Internet. Arrive informed, energetic and curious.
7. Be present. Turn off your iPhone, iPad or whatever other kind of electronic placenta you are plugged into. Don’t bring a stack of mail or checks to sign. Pretend it is 1958 and give the meeting your upright, undivided attention.
8. Respect the chair. If he has done the job correctly, he has put several hours into this meeting so that you don’t have to. It always helps to thank the chair at the end of the meeting if he did a good job.
9. Have visitors. Your attorney and accountant should each come to at least one meeting a year to hold forth on the latest issues, opportunities and dangers germane to your business. Your department heads should each present the latest developments in their respective areas at least once a year. (You will learn more about your company, and a little stand-and-deliver pucker factor for them will keep them on their toes.)
10. Hold formal votes. Amazingly, most ophthalmic practice boards are run as consensual affairs. Attendees will discuss a topic. Endlessly. To death. And then, when everyone has exhausted themselves and the meeting is in its third hour, and with nary a voting hand in the air, somebody brings up another topic. Folks drive home and tell their partners, “We sure did talk a lot, but there were no decisions made.” If this is your practice, shift from a consensual board to one that casts votes where the majority or supermajority wins.
11. Use Robert’s Rules of Order to conduct your voting. It is simple: One person makes a motion. Another person seconds the motion. The chair calls for and leads a brief discussion of the motion. The motion is voted up or down, and we move on to the next item of business.
12. Vote your fiduciary responsibility. “Fiduciary” is a funny word. It comes from the Latin fiduciarius, from fiducia, connoting confidence, trust. In a board setting, and legally, it has formal weight: You are duty-bound to vote for the benefit of the company, not your personal benefit.
13. Apply humility, curiosity, proportion and common sense. You know everything about corneal disease; you don’t know everything about accrual basis accounting. Ask copious questions, especially dumb ones that everyone else is too embarrassed to ask and belie their ignorance. Seek out the simple, elegant answer more than the complex one, just as you would as a diagnostician.
14. Speak your piece. Don’t withhold a dissenting opinion and then grumble at the next meeting about a past vote. Use the discussion period held before every vote to assert your views.
15. Don’t be a glory hog or a bully. You may be the oldest partner. You may even be the smartest partner (certainly so, if you are reading this). But don’t take up more than your fair share of the agenda or the discussion.
16. Apply courtesy and put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes. If you are 2 years from retirement and the board is considering a decision that will impact the practice for the next decade, give your younger colleagues the benefit of a louder voice and greater vote on the matter. They are the ones who will have to live with the consequences, not you.
17. Respect the vote. Your ideas and favorite initiatives will sometimes be voted down. Don’t shuffle around the clinic in the days that follow telling everyone what a rotten decision was made. When you walk out of the board room, everyone should be united behind the majority decision.
18. Memorialize the meeting. This does not have to be verbatim notes. For the typical meeting, a one- to two-page recap of announcements and major decisions will suffice.
19. Get involved. Volunteer. Accept committee and task force assignments cheerfully. Get after assigned readings. Take your rotation to train staff, perform outreach chores or attend hospital meetings.
20. Even if you did not support a particular vote, allow your practice administrator and managing partner to implement the board’s directives without interference. Along the way, be responsive to your practice leaders by monitoring and answering all email and voice mail within 48 hours.
For more information:
John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology and a new book, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams. He can be reached at pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.