Fase 2 Diseño de las tareas

The academic was able to demonstrate an online performance evaluation survey that he and his colleagues were developing and using, within this some questions could loosely be termed performance indicators. Other than this none of the interviewees, again, except the academic as noted above was able to point to the usage of comprehensive corporate governance performance indicators. But even those developed by academic and his colleagues were generic performance indicators applicable to a wide variety of boards that were capable of validation. These performance indicators were designed to gather data for a research project and they were not customisable to a particular board’s circumstances.

To some extent the usage of corporate governance performance indicators applicable to particular boards were reported. One of the interviewees was able to show the researcher considerable evidence of usage, over multiple boards, of the usage of performance indicators that track the key board role of strategy. This evidence was in the form of strategic plans, including implementation plans with key deliverables, he had facilitated development of. In these instances the strategic plan is work-shopped in a facilitated board retreat, an integrated strategic plan is developed and importantly that the strategic plan includes performance milestones and indicators applicable to all the parties involved in the implementation of that plan, including the board.

Other performance indicators reported by the interviewees were less sophisticated. Attendance as a measure of an aspect of board performance was mentioned by three out of five of the interviewees with such comments doubtful as to its efficacy as a measure, such as:

…there’s a question between what they measure and whether I think it’s important. You can measure attendance at board meetings, and it probably is, okay, if you don’t turn up at board meetings, you don’t [perform] (Interviewee 1 - 15 September 2009)

Other interviewees saw attendance as important, as demonstrated by such comments as:

[Organisation Name] had a board member, for example who … was elected board member. She used to take four months off each year and go and winter in the Northern Hemisphere. I wish I could’ve done it. Taking four months off each year from the board, I just thought was ridiculous. Eventually she stood down, which was a good thing (Interviewee 3 – 25 October 2011)

Similarly another interviewee supported the measurement of time but extended the phenomena being measured to add ‘treasure and talent’; these are explained in the quotation below. He gave the example of three simple performance indicators used in an American not-for-profit organisation he had experience with, saying:

We have three broad headings; time, treasure and talent. Time – these are the Americans. Time, treasure and talent.

The time is have you put your time into it, the treasure is have you given money or have you raised money and finally, the talent is have you been innovative, have you contributed to strategic development, have you given introductions, have you been an ambassador (Interviewee 5 – 6 December 2011)

The notion of intellectual talent was mentioned by the same expert who looked to see fellow board members with sufficient seniority and experience, with such comments as:

They’ve made some bad mistakes with their chairs… But two of their chairs have been bad appointments and the [organisation] has suffered as a result. Four years ago they got a woman who’s got a very vivacious personality but

she was the fundraiser at a school, never – she was a teacher who couldn’t teach so she became a fundraiser. She didn’t have any staff and because she had this lovely outgoing personality – I’d already left the board – people said

[named person] will be great. And also [named person] had breast cancer and made a terrific brave recovery, thank God, but they thought isn’t she a hero. So what happens,[named person] comes on the board, she’s never managed anything, she’s the chair and what they had to do was – I don’t know how they did it, allowed her to become chair, she’d been on the committee, allowed her to become chair, but the good board members began leaving, they fell off the tree. So that now four, five years later, there aren’t sufficient [calibre of]

people on the board to be the chair. (Interviewee 5 – 6 December 2011)

The same interviewee when asked what was one of the things he looked for in fellow board members effectively cited intellect, saying:

Yes, the level of board members… Seniority, the level of thought. (Interviewee 5 – 6 December 2011)

This interviewee then went on to describe both good and bad examples of intellect of members of boards that he had been a member.

The same interviewee also provided an example of where a board evaluation did assist in identifying specific skills lacking in a board, saying;

This evaluation did partially help us to look at the criteria we were seeking in new board members. So one of them should be that – a few of them should be that on the board we didn’t have enough people with clinical background and we were a health organization (Interviewee 5 – 6 December 2011)

Interestingly, only one of the experts considered intellectual talent in terms of performance indicators; additionally qualifications were not mentioned.

Finally, in terms of performance indicators one of the interviewees was able to describe a situation where individual board members were required to meet membership recruitment targets applicable to districts from which they came, saying:

[We] wanted them to actually be proactive within their own state based areas for recruitment of new members. So if [we] had 20% growth expected to the membership for the next year then the board might need to be accountable for, let’s say 5% of that. (Interviewee 4 – 10 October 2011)

Beyond these simple examples of performance indicators, discussion of board roles illuminated the research. The next section reports the responses concerning board roles.