Director Onboarding Series: Onboarding Education (Installment 5 of 5)

MFDF has encountered various onboarding practices in discussions with fund directors that are newer or may be less common across fund boards. Consider these ideas as more of a menu than a plan, it is not necessary for a board to employ all of these approaches, but one or more may be combined according to board culture, priority, and need.

In this final section of the Director Onboarding Series, we will discuss creating onboarding education that sticks. Director onboarding is often described as “like drinking from a firehose,” where only so much of the content is actually retained. The techniques described here reduce the content, spread it out over time, and/or establish a method by which directors can get another pass at the information after having earned additional context through participation in a meeting cycle.

• Onboarding session structured like a board meeting with a book – A unique approach to a traditional onboarding day had new directors on site with the Nom/Gov Chair and the Chair of the board with an agenda for the session that was an abbreviated version of a typical board meeting agenda. At the appropriate places on the agenda, the people who would typically present joined the onboarding session by Zoom to introduce themselves and give an overview of how they typically use their time in a regular board meeting. In this way, the new directors had the opportunity to meet all the relevant individuals ahead of their first board meeting, and to get a sense of the flow of a typical meeting. Materials were also provided to the new directors in the format of their typical board book, but instead of the reports that they would typically get, each presenter provided a brief summary of what would typically be included in that section of the book. During those sections of the onboarding session, those presenters (including committee chairs, members of management, etc) could explain those reports and address questions from the new directors on what they would see there and how to use it.

• Including all board members in onboarding – Depending on the structure of the onboarding offered to new directors, it may be possible to allow longer-tenured members of the board to choose to participate as well, if interested. One director shared that attending director onboarding sessions brought to light helpful insights, context and background on the funds’ activities. Often, onboarding involves such a large volume of information that it can be difficult to absorb all of it. Revisiting that information after a few years on the board can be enlightening.

• Revisit onboarding – After a period of time (often a year), the Nominating Chair or Chair of the board may set aside a time with a new director to re-visit onboarding again. Having experienced a full meeting cycle, the new director may have better perspectives and new questions to ask about content and materials covered in the initial onboarding session.

Fund management and/or counsel to the independent directors may run sessions introducing new directors to the fund complex, etc. which can be instead of or in addition to any of the approaches we have included in the series. Look for other posts on:

• Utilizing a mentor/buddy program (click here to view the post);
• How board leadership can facilitate onboarding (click here to view the post);
• Building a Board Culture (click here to view the post); and,
• Setting new board members up for success (click here to view the post).