A great board meeting provides an opportunity for a deep discussions of the most important business issues and decision-making, as well as nailing down corporate policies. To get the most from every board meeting, you need to plan ahead, set expectations about the amount of discussion that is possible, and stick to the agenda.
The best way to avoid boring meetings is to establish actual meeting goals and refer back to those frequently to ensure that the meeting is in line with the goals. When you get caught up with reports or technicalities that could have been reviewed prior to you lose the chance to let your board members debate problems that cannot be resolved by the management team on its own.
You might want to consider drafting a consent agenda to limit the amount of duration of meetings. This will allow board members to quickly approve documents and reports that don’t need further discussion.
Distribute the board materials three to four days before the meeting so that the attendees can review them before the meeting. This reduces the amount of time spent in the meeting reading reports and gives them a chance to ask questions before they become more complicated.
Make sure to include a «parking lot» at the end of the board package to ensure that items that are not relevant to this meeting can be moved off for another meeting and will not interfere with the most important agenda items. This also reduces the possibility of the most important agenda items being pushed to later in the meeting or not being discussed at all.