“Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” – Holono-Me Governance Survey
A high-functioning governing body is a key strategic asset in moving any organisation forward. Objectively assessing the overall effectiveness of your board, and working with its members to prioritise next steps, can represent a challenge for many leaders.
Many of the self-assessment tools for boards that can be found online use Likert scale ratings for members to rate their experiences. The difficulty with Likert scales is that in boards where groupthink is prevalent, or where boards are operating in a low trust environment, the results can be difficult to interpret with any clarity.
At Holono-Me we have developed an ipsative survey. Our survey offers a set of aspirational statements of how boards work together. Each statement is repeated and paired with every other statement, to give a ranking. The statement ranked in first place is the board’s greatest strength and the statement ranked last is where the board opportunities for growth lie. What is helpful about the data is that any board, no matter how successful, will have a rank one and a final rank. The ipsative survey therefore offers a psychologically safe way to evaluate board effectiveness. The removal of the Likert scale also removes inherent cultural and perceptual biases, such as central tendency bias, since an ipsative survey requires a forced choice between two or more statements.
Our survey draws on the partnership principles of Holono.me, because we understand that relationships are the foundation to every successful partnership. We hope to use our survey results to support organisations seeking to build strong governance partnerships with their trustees. We currently have participation from nearly 40 organisations (schools and NGOs), in seven different countries. If you or your organisation would like to participate, the link below will give you direct access to the survey. In keeping with our mission of building partnerships, any completed response (by a trustee, head of school, CEO, Board Chair) will receive (via email) a copy of the anonymised global dataset to support you in your own context with ongoing dialogue about effective governance. If you would like to compare your own context data against the global dataset, we will happily also share this data with you, but require a minimum participation of four trustees to ensure data anonymity. Please get in touch if this is of interest to you.
To access the survey please follow this link.
If you have any questions about the survey or your participation, please contact [email protected]