Assess your Governance

Governance Effectiveness 'Quick Check'

The Quick Check is a short questionnaire designed to give board members and CEOs a quick impression of the effectiveness of their board. It contains fifteen items that research suggests correlate with effective governance.

This instrument is not intended to provide a definitive analysis of governance effectiveness, but to furnish a general indication of board members' perceptions of how effectively they are governing their organization. Its main purpose is to identify challenges and to encourage dialogue within the board and between the board and CEO. It is also intended to stimulate interest in board self-evaluation and improvement.

The Quick Check is one of a number of surveys the Institute On Governance has available, both paper-based and on-line. Responses to surveys of this kind provide useful insight into governance. For more information please contact Gina Delph at gdelph@iog.ca.

TAKE THE 'QUICK CHECK' ON-LINE

Through our work with many public and non-profit organizations, we have learned that there are both advantages and disadvantages to using surveys. They provide you with quick, anonymous and easily aggregated and comparable data.

But this information does not always give you the complete picture. Survey responses may include answers that respondents thought people wanted to hear, as opposed to the straight goods. More basically, they do not necessarily reveal other important issues, such as informal governance or “how things are done here”, including how meetings are run, how members are recruited, what organizational values prevail and what information is shared and with whom.

Surveys can tell you something about personal interaction but they don’t throw light on structural issues such as by-laws or the state of governance policies. They don’t allow you to explore questions such as whether a board is focussing its attention on the most important issues. For these kinds of reasons, interviews are very important and complement use of a diagnostic tool like a survey.