9 steps to turn board evaluations into stronger governance

There is a pattern most boards will recognise. The evaluation gets completed. Themes are discussed. Someone notes that preparation could be stronger, or that certain agenda items are not getting the time they deserve, or that communication between the board and management has some rough edges. And then the next meeting arrives and none of that has changed. 

It is tempting to call this a follow-through problem, but that is too simple. The people in these rooms are disciplined, experienced, and usually quite motivated to improve. What is missing is not commitment but architecture: a structured connection between what the evaluation surfaces and how the board actually runs its meetings. Without that, insights stay in the room where they were discussed and go no further. 

According to PwC, “The most effective assessments are conducted annually; periodically facilitated by a third party to encourage candid perspectives; draw on a range of inputs, including from executive management; translate results into concrete action plans; and capture real-time feedback to keep progress on track.”  

This article provides practical guidance on how to elevate the way your board evaluations work. 

What makes a good board evaluation? 

Worth asking before anything else, because a lot of boards are running evaluations that are not designed to produce anything actionable.  

The most common version looks like this: a questionnaire goes out, responses come back, someone writes a summary, the summary is discussed at a meeting, a few themes are acknowledged. This is compliance masquerading as reflection. It documents that an evaluation happened. It does not reliably improve anything. 

PwC’s Annual Corporate Directors Survey found that, “Board assessments are often treated as check-the-box exercises, rather than genuine drivers of change. Among respondents, 78% don't believe their board's assessment process provides a complete picture of overall board performance.” 

An evaluation worth running starts with honest question design. Not "how effective is our board?" but "where in our meeting process do we consistently run out of time on the things that matter most?" Not "how would you rate communication between the board and management?" but "describe the last time you felt a decision was made without the right information in the room." Specific questions about concrete situations produce answers that can actually be acted on. Abstract questions produce abstract answers. 

The structural point that most boards miss: individual reflection before group discussion. Senior leaders are skilled at reading a room and adjusting accordingly. Give board members a group setting and they tend to converge toward a diplomatically acceptable consensus. Give them a private channel and you tend to get a more accurate account of what is actually happening. Both inputs matter, but the sequence matters too. 

An evaluation that is designed without any plan for what happens with the findings is an evaluation designed to be filed. Before the questionnaire goes out, the Chairperson and Corporate Secretary should know who will analyse the results, how findings will be shared, and what the mechanism is for translating themes into specific changes to how the board meets. That plan does not need to be elaborate. It needs to exist. 

9 steps to turn evaluations into stronger governance 

1. Set clear goals  

Agreeing upfront on what the evaluation needs to answer sounds obvious enough that most boards skip it. The result is evaluations that try to assess everything and end up changing nothing in particular. 

According to a non-executive chair interviewed by Skadden, “Boards expect management teams to evidence accountability for their actions, evaluate outcomes and implement improvements. If we require that of management, then as directors we should model those same behaviors and engage in self-reflection and self-improvement.” 

The more useful approach is for the Chairperson and Corporate Secretary to identify two or three specific questions before the process begins. Is the board concerned about how much time certain topics receive? About whether members feel adequately prepared? About how well the board is exercising its oversight role versus getting drawn into operational detail? Naming these in advance shapes the questionnaire, sharpens the analysis, and gives the board a baseline to return to in subsequent cycles. Progress becomes something you can actually measure. 

2. Design for insight, not coverage 

There is a real temptation to make evaluation questionnaires comprehensive, covering every dimension of board performance to make sure nothing gets missed. In practice, longer questionnaires produce thinner data. 

As Spencer Stuart confirms, “Consensus on what board members aim to accomplish through the process promotes their willingness to invest time, energy, and candor. Such clarification also helps boards set the proper tone for the process and correct any misimpressions of ulterior motives or futility.”   

Boards that get genuine value from evaluations tend to go narrower and deeper. They ask about specific meeting situations rather than general impressions. They tailor questions by role, because the Corporate Secretary experiences the preparation process very differently to a Board member who reviews materials in the back of a car on the way to the meeting.  

A question worth keeping is one where a candid answer could lead to a concrete change. If there is no obvious path from the answer to a changed practice, cut the question. 

3. Make individual reflection genuinely safe 

The value of individual reflection depends almost entirely on whether people believe it is actually confidential. When board members doubt that, they self-censor in ways that are difficult to detect and that produce a distorted picture. 

The Chairperson sets this tone, not in the policies around data handling but in their behaviour. How they talk about the evaluation process, whether they visibly receive uncomfortable findings without defensiveness, and how they respond when the board's own performance is under scrutiny, all of this signals to other members whether honesty is genuinely welcome here or just nominally welcome. 

4. Analyse for patterns, not positions 

When results come in, the instinct is often to look for the most striking individual responses. That is almost never where the useful signal is. 

What matters is where multiple members, independently, identify the same friction. Where there is strong consensus on what is working and the board can afford to stop worrying about it. And where views diverge sharply, because that divergence itself is usually telling you something about how differently the meeting process lands depending on your role or how long you have been on the board. 

This is the stage where an external set of eyes earns their keep. Someone who has not been in the room does not have the same blind spots and is often better placed to notice patterns that familiarity has made invisible to the people closest to the process. 

5. Share findings in a way that opens discussion 

A findings presentation that lands like a performance review tends to close the conversation rather than open it. The Corporate Secretary's role in framing this carefully is underappreciated.  

According to Tom Proverbs-Garbett from Pinsent Masons, “The purpose of an evaluation is not to appraise the board, giving it some sort of pass or fail, but rather to consider its capabilities and behaviours and to make recommendations for improvement.” 

The goal is not to deliver conclusions but to give the board a collective picture of itself and create the conditions for a genuine conversation about what it means. That means presenting themes rather than tallying scores. It means acknowledging what is genuinely working alongside what is not. And it means the Chairperson holding back from pushing toward solutions in the same session the findings are shared, because members usually need a little time to absorb and process before they are ready to discuss implications. Sharing findings a week before the follow-up discussion is a small logistical change that tends to produce a meaningfully better conversation. 

6. Use meetings to drive action 

Here is where the architecture problem shows up most visibly. Boards leave the evaluation discussion with good intentions and genuine agreement that certain things should change. Then the next meeting is called, the agenda is built in the usual way, and none of the agreed changes have been operationalised. The follow-up is treated as something running parallel to the meeting process rather than embedded in it, and gradually it fades. 

According to Marc S. Gerber from Skadden, “The key is to have an action plan to address those items and then follow up to confirm whether the desired changes were implemented, and whether directors feel the changes addressed the issue or are otherwise working to their satisfaction.”  

Translating evaluation findings into meeting-level changes is the work that actually closes this gap. If preparation is a recurring theme, what specifically changes about when materials are distributed and how they are structured? If certain topics are consistently crowded out, which items currently on the agenda are earning less time than they are taking? These are not governance questions. They are meeting design questions, and they have answers. 

The Corporate Secretary is usually best placed to lead this, given her oversight of the agenda, the documents, and the minutes. Sherpany's meeting feedback feature helps here by building structured reflection into every meeting cycle, not just the annual evaluation. Rather than waiting twelve months to find out whether something changed, the Chairperson and Corporate Secretary can track how the meeting process is developing in something closer to real time. 

7. Document what you learn 

Board membership changes. So do priorities and institutional context. An insight that was vivid and present in the room during the evaluation discussion becomes harder to recall six months later and is often entirely invisible to someone who joins the board the following year. 

A record does not need to be elaborate: what the evaluation surfaced, what the board committed to in response, and a way to track whether those commitments are being acted on. The point is that it exists somewhere accessible, not buried in a PDF in a folder that requires three people's help to locate. 

8. Put it on the agenda and keep it there 

The most reliable way to make evaluation findings stick is to connect them explicitly to how future agendas are built. 

If the evaluation finds that operational reporting is crowding out strategic discussion, that is not a cultural problem to address in the abstract. It is an agenda design problem with a practical solution. If members consistently feel underprepared on a particular type of decision, the question is what changes about how supporting materials are prepared and when they land. 

9. Consider external facilitation for the hard conversations 

Not every evaluation cycle requires external facilitation. But there are situations where independence earns its cost many times over. 

When findings have surfaced something that members find genuinely difficult to address together. When the Chairperson's own performance is a significant part of what needs to be discussed. When the board has been running the same internal process for several years and it has started to feel more like a ritual than a review. An external facilitator who knows governance brings a different frame of reference, can hold the space for difficult conversations more neutrally, and is not carrying the social dynamics of the boardroom into the room. 

According to a 2026 article from PwC, “Boards that conduct leading-edge assessments are also engaging independent third-party facilitators and tying assessments to concrete follow-up actions. Notably, directors on boards that use an external facilitator are more likely to say their assessments are effective, with 81% agreeing.”  

It is also worth remembering that external facilitation does not have to mean the whole process. Sometimes bringing someone in for a single session, to help the board make sense of its evaluation findings together, is enough to move things that had been stuck. 

How Sherpany supports more action-oriented board evaluations 

The features most relevant to evaluation follow-through are not the obvious ones. Sherpany was purpose-built for formal meetings, and our solution has features that are tailored to effective board evaluations.  

These include:   

• Meeting feedback gives boards a way to check in on how the meeting process is working after every cycle, rather than accumulating twelve months of drift before the annual review surfaces it.  
• Topic Hub keeps the priorities that matter most visible across meetings, even as new agenda items compete for space.  
• Tasks and Decisions turns commitments into assignments, which is the point at which they become real. 

None of this replaces the quality of the evaluation itself or the Chairperson's skill in facilitating what follows from it. What it does is remove some of the friction that causes good intentions to go nowhere, which is usually where the process breaks down. 

Master your board evaluations today with Sherpany 

The boards that get the most from their evaluations are not necessarily the ones running the most sophisticated process. They are the ones that have built a reliable connection between what the evaluation finds and how they run their next meeting. That connection is what this article has tried to make practical. 

The nine steps here are not sequential in a rigid sense. Some will already be in place. Others will matter more in certain cycles than others. The thread running through all of them is the same: evaluation insights need a structural home in the meeting process, or they will not survive contact with the next packed agenda.  

If you’re ready to elevate how your board evaluations work, book a free demo today and find out how Sherpany can help.