16 board management best practices to adopt for 2025
Board management is an art. Your board oversees the direction of your organization, but who oversees the efficiency and effectiveness of your board? Adopting board management best practices can help you build the best board possible and equip them to respond to an ever-changing corporate landscape.
With risks and opportunities evolving faster than ever, boards must closely manage their activities to remain agile, capable and effective. Here, we’ll explain the board management best practices for 2025 to keep you ahead, whether you’re actively managing enterprise risk or choosing new board management software.
And don't forget to download our guide, which provides expert guidance and actionable steps for the most crucial steps in the process of improving board effectiveness.
16 board management best practices
1. Establish inclusive norms for board practices and behaviors
“Whether we know it or not, we all have norms and norms are just the habits of a group, and when the group functions well, those habits work,” says Lori McKenzie, co-founder of Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.
The norms the board establishes are directly related to board performance. Defining norms brings clarity to the practices and behaviors the board will follow. While more informal than a governance model, it’s nonetheless a blueprint for how the board will act as a group — all the more important in modern, diverse boardrooms.
“As boards become diverse, the group think tends to exclude people and perspectives that are not part of a traditional board structure,” McKenzie says.
Boards can break down exclusive structures by intentionally offering each board member an opportunity to share their perspective.
2. Education: Stay on top of new risks, opportunities and best practices
Keeping abreast of board management best practices is a best practice in itself. Digitally savvy boards recognize that issues like cybersecurity need to be front of mind. And as shareholder activism goes mainstream, activist investors have become unlikely heroes, driving campaigns that are “much more reflective of the world in which companies operate” and far more likely to inform board thinking than they were even a year ago.
As we look toward 2025, the world is a volatile place; digital threats are on the rise, the economy remains in flux and the regulatory landscape is shifting rapidly. But as Christine O’Donnell, Industry Analyst at Verdantix, noted in a recent report on the future of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology, good governance is a crucial underpinning for boards in an uncertain world. This good governance not only creates a strong foundation for effective global oversight but also, as she puts it, “increases resilience and competitiveness across diverse risk landscapes,” — both of which are vital to keeping pace with a changing outlook and shifting expectations as you tackle top issues facing GRC.
A need to focus on risk is one of the biggest takeaways when we assess board management and GRC in 2024 and into 2025 — but the most compelling risks are constantly evolving, as are the regulatory and legislative requirements you need to comply with.
Did you know? Diligent offers a range of educational materials that keep board members updated on topics like AI, cyber, board governance and more.
The Diligent Education & Templates Library offers a variety of learning paths, including short courses, templates, videos and full certifications developed exclusively for our customers by the Diligent Institute and its partners. Speak to a representative to learn more about the Diligent One Platform.
3. Re-orient existing directors
Board directors are never so experienced that they can’t benefit from a refresher on familiar topics or training on topics they may be less engaged with.
“You’re trying to reinforce [norms] over time,” says Jim Meyer, deputy general counsel, corporate governance at Fannie Mae. “One of the ways you’re doing it is you’re making everybody aware through education efforts that you may be reboarding existing board members through annual education series.”
While these series can be shorter for existing directors, they should remind them of the board’s guiding principles and how they can uphold them. Ongoing education can then tie into regular board evaluations.
4. Effectively onboard and mentor new directors
New directors are either new to the organization, new to serving on a board or both. In all cases, it is essential to integrate them effectively into the boardroom and its culture.
When recruiting new directors, be transparent about behavioral norms and probe whether candidates can contribute to the culture positively. Committees should also consider if a candidate’s personal values, experiences and motivations will help the board evolve.
Once the new director is selected, the onboarding process should begin. A well-structured onboarding process helps new directors understand their fiduciary duties, the company's strategy and board practices, enabling them to provide informed oversight and decision-making.
Additionally, onboarding facilitates relationship-building among directors and with management, fostering a collaborative and trusting board dynamic that enhances overall governance. By tailoring the onboarding process to each director's learning preferences and experience level, companies can maximize the value and impact of new directors on board management.
In an episode of Inside Today's Boardroom, Tracy Lee Brown, Director at the PwC Governance Insights Center asserted, "A robust onboarding program will allow the company to quickly tap into that new director's skills and expertise and also gain their perspectives."
But a good onboarding program isn't the end. Take time to mentor your new directors. Check-in periodically and informally, and provide or solicit feedback about the board’s culture. This board management best practice can help board directors utilize their skills for the board’s best interest.
5. Build strong relationships
Engaging the board requires trust. Board directors must feel supported by each other — even through disagreement — to do the best work possible.
Board and committee chairs should add connection exercises to meetings and retreats to facilitate open dialogue. This should include ongoing get-togethers and activities that include the entire board.
The more collaboration you foster, the more effective the board will be. Don’t overlook relationships outside the board, either. Connecting with the broader company and its shareholders can enable the board to work through bigger challenges.
6. Address problematic behaviors
Board directors may make decisions or act in a way that defies board norms. This isn’t always due to malintent.
Take time to identify the root of the problematic behavior. Is it due to a lack of understanding about policies or obligations, or do they have a challenging personal style?
In either case, education and coaching can help directors get back on the right track. If, however, their behavior indicates a more serious breach in the code of conduct, reprimanding them or even requesting their resignation may be necessary to maintain the board’s integrity.
7. Keep shareholders and stakeholders top of mind, and prioritize the issues that matter to your stakeholders
Your stakeholders should be front and center when identifying and striving for board management best practices. This doesn’t just mean investors: all stakeholders are increasingly vocal about the issues they think organizations and their boards should prioritize and, as we noted, being listened to in unprecedented ways. Today, activist investors inform board discussions in ways they wouldn’t have done a few years ago.
Engage with these stakeholders: experienced non-exec director Ray Troubh believes that “interaction of the large shareholders and the board members should be more frequent” than it’s traditionally been if you’re seeking best practice stakeholder engagement.
This is especially critical given the universal proxy rules adopted in 2023, which empower shareholders to make their feelings known come the annual shareholder meeting. While the 2024 proxy season brought about the “most expensive shareholder fight ever,” it also underscored the value of cultivating stakeholder relationships.
“Now, when shareholder proposals come in, they come against a background of a lot of prior work,” said KPMG BLC Senior Advisor Stephen Brown said in a June webcast.
That prior work includes engaging with investors and asset managers and voluntarily disclosing sensitive information — like emissions data. Corporations should commit to making shareholder transparency inherent in good board management.
Engaging with stakeholders is a critical first step. Yet, discussions aren’t enough. Board management should encourage boards to remember they serve their stakeholders. To do that, directors need to act.
For example, 89% of investors consider a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) posture before buying shares, while an estimated 4 in 10 employees care about ESG. A well-managed board will respond to that focus by integrating ESG into the corporation’s strategic direction, risk management and reporting.
8. Strengthen full board, committee and individual evaluations
The annual evaluation process is the key to reinforcing the board norms and expectations. While many boards are familiar with full board and committee evaluations, the utility of individual evaluations is on the rise.
“NACD now recommends you do an individual interview process at least one every two years to try to reinforce some of your behavioral norms on the board,” Meyer says.
While many board members may feel uncomfortable with the idea, leveraging consistent, unbiased evaluation frameworks and emphasizing confidentiality can help put them at ease.
“We’ve worked really hard to try to educate people about what the questions are,” Meyer says. “We make it clear that it’s going to be a confidential process. We engage an outside consultant through the board’s external council, which is independent of management.”
9. Cultivate an agile approach and an adaptive board
The need for corporate agility, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, becomes even more vital during economic uncertainty Maria Moats noted the potential for recession in 2023 or 2024 — and the fact that “some would say in Europe they are already in recession” — as a critical driver for better governance; it’s also an impetus for an agile approach. Adapting to the prevailing conditions is a prerequisite for successful boards and businesses.
This agility is as vital within your board as across the broader organization. Boards are evolving constructs. The best boards recognize when they need external expertise, drawing on skills honed outside your sector. They keep an eye on new trends in board makeup, like the advent of board technology committees to tackle changing risks. In 2023, flexibility is one of the top board management best practices. Don’t let an inflexible approach hinder your board.
10. Engage with and value differences
The days of boards being dominated by a single demographic are changing. Businesses now realize that diversity of thought delivers strategic advantage and is the basis of an ethically sound company, as outlined in a Diligent Institute report.
How do you structure a board? The answer is to provide a diverse range of thinking by developing experience and comfort in engaging in conversations about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Fostering a culture that allows for learning and mistakes without judgment is essential to building relationships across lines of difference.
Explore the benefits of reverse mentoring as a way to leave behind old thought processes. Question whether there are barriers to equality on your board, and ensure your succession planning techniques enable you to build a diverse board pipeline.
11. Facilitate effective meetings by getting on top of governance
Whether this is following best practices in separating the roles of CEO and chair or ensuring a robust audit trail for your board decisions, best practices in governance and risk and compliance should be a vital focus of every board.
Running more effective board meetings is a core element of this governance, ensuring timely information sharing before meetings so that decisions are made with a 360-degree vision and capturing actions to execute all compliance and board duties
“As we interviewed all of these directors, what they said is that the pre-meeting and post-meeting make the main meeting super effective,” McKenzie says. “If they’re not used well, then there’s not really good discussion during the meeting.”
The executive committee can set the stage for productive meetings by deciding in advance how to incorporate key challenges in discussions. This also includes encouraging respectful dissent so you can resolve any lingering concerns.
12. Address risk enterprise-wide
As corporations face risk from all sides — cybersecurity, fraud and climate change, among others — boards must develop a more integrated view of risk. Rather than waiting until risks arise, successful board management will push directors to identify risk and the opportunities it can present proactively.
Boards that embrace enterprise risk management (ERM) can more clearly define risk-related roles and responsibilities and make more strategic decisions that protect the organization from costly threats.
13. Assign ownership of board culture to the nominating and corporate governance committee
Assigning board culture to a specific committee ensures accountability and consistency. The nominating and corporate governance committee is a natural choice because it oversees many aspects of board management.
Making an informal directive isn’t enough, though. Modify the committee’s charter to reflect the new role. This should empower the committee to build culture into existing recruitment, onboarding and evaluation processes.
This committee is also well suited to monitoring governance changes that could impact board culture. The election/appointment of new directors, new committees and changes in leadership can all rock the boat; it’s up to the nominating and governance committee to keep directors aligned with the accepted board norms.
14. Integrate technology to enhance board management efficiency
According to PwC, “Business is in a third wave of corporate governance evolution.” The Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts spurred new strategic challenges many boards have struggled to surmount. In recent years, however, technology has made a difference.
Consider Aegon, an insurance, pension and asset-management provider headquartered in The Netherlands. Managing over 475 billion of their own and their customers’ investments, Aegon quickly amassed a daunting number of weekly and quarterly board meetings. Preparing for them required long working days and hundreds of pages of print board books with complicated security and versioning protocols.
“At one point, we put materials online using a basic tool, but that did not replace the need for hard copies,” said Henk Snijders, Deputy Company Secretary for Aegon.
Then, they integrated a premium solution. Enterprise board management technology from Diligent saved Aegon’s company secretariat a week’s worth of labor over an entire year of board meetings by centralizing the data and collaboration in a single platform.
“It took [the board] a few months to watch everyone else using the iPad-based solution before they were ready to adopt Diligent Boards themselves,” Snijders said. “They never asked for paper again.”
15. Proactively learn and adopt AI tools
Workplace technology expert at Harvard Business School Karim R. Lakhani said that artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied anywhere you can apply thinking. In recent years, Generative AI has only increased its foothold in the boardroom, and many CEOs are preparing for radical change.
68% of CEOs say generative AI will significantly change how their companies create value over the next three years. That means effective board management must harness AI. What can that look like in the boardroom?
As PwC share in their recent report, board management must position boards to both oversee emerging technologies to safeguard the company and influence how the board executes on strategic opportunities. To meet both needs, boards should educate themselves about AI’s opportunities and limitations and tap into internal specialists and external resources to keep AI on the board's agenda.
Board management AI can be used to shave time off board meeting preparation as well as in-meeting tasks, enabling the CoSec to take a more strategic role. They can use AI as a tool to support the agenda creation process as well as instantly creating meeting minutes. It can even able directors to ask the right questions ahead of meetings!
Discover how Diligent AI, a purpose-built AI and secure solution, can support your board management processes. Learn more here.
16. Explore how board management software boosts effectiveness
This discipline in running board meetings doesn’t just benefit your governance processes. Boards of directors are busy people, balancing their board responsibilities with the other challenges of their role.
Board meetings and the business that follows them need to be carried out most efficiently to maximize effectiveness and best use of board members’ time. This is why introducing the right technology makes our board management best practices list. Board management software facilitates collaboration, streamlines meeting organization and bolsters security — saving directors’ time and driving better data-driven decisions.
Technology is the single best tool boards have to stay afloat amid the rapid tides of change. Growing numbers of boards recognize the benefits of both AI and technology in streamlining and future-proofing their board management. While it’s true that not all board management software is created equal, the right solution can transform your boardroom for the better.
Diligent Boards, part of the Diligent One Platform, can help you run your board confidently, minimize admin and manual processes and create a more secure, robust environment for your board.
Ready to implement these best practices to accelerate your board management?
Board management is an evolving craft; however rigorous your approach, occasionally revisiting best practices is a good discipline. While board portal technology can streamline your approach to board management, it’s your norms and behaviors that dictate whether your board will perform its best.
To truly excel in board management, it's crucial to continually refine your approach and integrate innovative practices. For an in-depth exploration of essential board management steps and actionable tips to enhance your board's effectiveness, download our comprehensive guide today.
Take the next step toward empowering your board to meet the challenges of a dynamic corporate landscape with confidence and agility.
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