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Align your system to achieve more, together.
Higher education systems must balance institutional autonomy with systemwide priorities, bringing leadership, strategy, and resources together across diverse institutions and missions.
AGB Consulting helps your board make better decisions, operate more strategically, strengthen alignment across your system, and move your system forward with confidence even in complex and evolving environments.
Grounded in deep experience working with systems, our experts—former system heads, presidents, trustees, and higher education leaders—work alongside your board and leadership team to clarify priorities, define roles, and move from coordination to true systemwide impact.
Strengthen Governance and Leadership
Find opportunities to strengthen structure, culture, or leadership relationships and improve how your board operates.
Build Capability
Equip your board and leaders with the knowledge, alignment, and confidence to lead effectively.
Drive Strategy
Guide your institutions through complex decisions about strategy, sustainability, and the future.
Strengthen governance and leadership.
When governance is fragmented or unclear, AGB helps you define roles, strengthen relationships, and improve how decisions are made across the system.
Systems work with AGB to evaluate and assess.
Evaluate your system’s leadership: Work with AGB to establish a consistent, systemwide approach to leadership assessment and gain an objective 360-degree view of your leaders’ effectiveness. Identify strengths, support development, and inform contract decisions for chancellors, presidents, and senior leaders.
Plan for future leaders: Determine who is ready to serve as the next president or chancellor across the system and preparing a pipeline to help future leaders rise to the moment.
Conduct a comprehensive board assessment: Identify strengths and gaps, resulting in a board or system development roadmap.
Use the Board Performance Survey: Complete your complimentary annual check-in. Understand short-term board and system needs with a brief self-assessment, best conducted between comprehensive board assessments.
We also help systems address foundational governance issues.
Review governance practice: Not sure what’s wrong, but know something isn’t right? Engage in a structured, neutral third-party evaluation to improve overall governance.
Foster effective committees: Evaluate whether you have the right committees doing the right work to achieve the system’s goals.
Update your governing documents: Get expert advice to improve your foundational documents, including bylaws, committee charters, affiliate memoranda of understanding, and more.
Define fiduciary responsibilities across system levels: Clarify duties across the statewide coordinating board, system, and institution levels.
Governance crisis response: Rebuild confidence in system governance after a crisis. As a respected and neutral third party, we help diagnose the root causes of a crisis and develop a roadmap that strengthens stakeholders’ belief in system and institutional leadership.
Build capability.
When system leaders need a shared understanding of roles, responsibilities, and priorities across multiple institutions, AGB helps align your board and leadership team.
Boards often start here:
Design a retreat: AGB tailors support for your system board or for leadership across the system that covers the topics you need, led by a facilitator with just the right expertise.
Plan a Principles of Trusteeship Workshop: Strengthen fiduciary understanding and board engagement in a system environment, responsive to the divided governance roles seen in some systems.
Conduct a Higher Education Landscape Workshop: Help board members learn your system, its institutions and affiliated entities, effective financial oversight, and opportunities in the national higher education landscape.
Ongoing advisory support includes:
One-Hour Governance Consultation: Complimentary, once per year. Seek outside perspective on a governance challenge from one of AGB’s experts.
President or Board Chair Advisory Services: Regular advisory sessions with a board chair or president with expertise in system leadership.
President–Board Chair Alignment: Engage in strategic, data-driven planning designed to foster a common vision between the president, board chair, and state leadership.
Drive strategy.
When systems need to move beyond coordination to true alignment, AGB helps you define strategy, prioritize investments, and measure success across institutions.
Boards partner with AGB to lead system success…
Host a Systemness Retreat: Engage presidents, board chairs, and other leaders from within the system for a working retreat on how to achieve mission-focused statewide education goals.
Measure system performance: Align the board on key performance indicators across the system, engaging partners across the state, setting mission-appropriate goals for each institution, and monitoring success.
Engage in strategic planning: Achieve the mission and serve the system’s students while supporting financial sustainability.
…And maximize the value of external engagement.
Create a Merger, Partnership, and System Optimization Strategy: All systems need a data-driven partnership strategy to identify and act on opportunities to grow or consolidate for efficiency. Prepare with a systemwide, national, or international scan for best-fit partners that meet your emerging goals.
Align Foundation and System Strategy and Operations: Ensure the system and its foundations share a strategy and operational model that maximizes outcomes and fairly supports colleges and universities across the state.
Engage Your Stakeholders: The success of the system depends on buy-in from across its network. Develop a plan to engage each of the system’s stakeholder groups and build support for future initiatives.
Start a conversation with us.
Talk with an AGB expert about what your board is facing and what steps could help you move forward.
Complete this form to get started.
Or begin with tools included with AGB membership.
Many boards start here before engaging in deeper consulting work.
One-Hour Governance Consultation
Get an outside perspective on a governance, leadership, or strategy challenge. In a focused, one-on-one conversation, an AGB expert will help you clarify the issue, share relevant leading practices, and identify practical next steps.Learn more →
Board Performance Survey
Understand how your board is performing today. This short assessment highlights strengths, surfaces areas for improvement, and provides a starting point for conversations about your board’s effectiveness.Learn more →