Board Composition and Selection

Compose a strong, strategic board.

It is vital that the composition of a governing board reflect the community that it serves. The foremost reason is to support justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion (JDE&I) within institutional communities. But those values are also essential for building and maintaining high-performance, strategic boards.

Institutions and foundations face daunting challenges. They must be able to look at issues from every angle and address them with creative solutions. That’s possible only when boards include a wide span of relevant backgrounds, viewpoints, and interests. It is critical to the success of boards (and therefore to the sustainability of institutions) that all aspects of composition and selection align toward JDE&I.

Questions for boards.

Click below to reveal key questions for your board to consider.

Goals

  1. Does our current composition support our mission and strategic goals?
  2. Is our current composition consistent with our stated goals for JDE&I?
  3. Are we laying the groundwork for composing the board we’ll need in three, five, or 10 years?

Opportunities

  1. Where are there skill gaps and how do we fill them?
  2. What must we do to achieve a board that is diverse in all of its facets?
  3. Are we consistently competitive or are we losing top candidates to other boards?
  4. What must we do to make our board seats more desirable?
  5. What can we learn from our board composition successes and failures?

Processes

  1. What does our current composition tell us about our selection process?
  2. Could our selection process operate more efficiently while producing higher-quality candidates?
  3. How can we make the “recruitment journey” a more compelling experience for our candidates?

Hear what it's like to work with AGB experts.

Linda Livingstone
President
Baylor University

AGB helps you align, diversify, and strengthen your board.

AGB provides diagnostic reviews of board selection processes and board composition, conducted from the perspectives of an institution or foundation’s mission, community, business model, strategy, and challenges. Our experts take the following steps:

Evaluate Board Skills and Perspectives

Find Hand Graduate

Assess Mission Alignment

Governance

Evaluate and Benchmark Selection Processes

Crisis

Understand Gaps and How to Fill Them 

Develop an Action Plan

Strategy

Ensure Ongoing Adherence to the Plan

“AGB has been able to help us to structure
our board, determine how many members we should have, what types of committees we should have, and what the most important committees that we should have are.”

Vita Pickrum, EdD, CFRE

Vice President of the Division of Institutional Advancement and President, Delaware State University Foundation

Build a board that reflects the community it serves.

AGB Consulting will help you determine whether your current board possesses the skills, perspectives, and expertise you’ll need to address short-term contingencies, target growth, and achieve long-term sustainability. The results of your engagement will be an action plan for composing a strong, strategic board and a consistent selection process for maintaining it.

AGB Consulting services - Board Composition and Selection

Contact AGB.

To learn how AGB Consulting’s services can benefit your institution, please contact 202-776-0865 or consulting@AGB.org. Or use this contact form: