Getting feedback from your Board

After a Clio Board Meeting last week I received the following email from Jack Newton, the company's amazing co-founder & CEO.

Hi everyone,

I'd like to experiment with requesting some 1:1 feedback on our board meetings. Please take 5 minutes and provide feedback through this Typeform:

https://xxx.typeform.com/xxx...

Cheers,

Jack

I thought this was a really great idea and worth sharing here. I removed the URL from Jack's Typeform but rebuilt it quickly so that you can check it out:

powered by Typeform

If you're not getting feedback from your Board members you're missing out on something. Preparing and holding Board meetings is a big time investment, and making them really effective isn't easy. So you should try to get as much value out of them as possible.

Sending out a post-meeting Typeform is, of course, not the only way to get feedback: In some Boards that I'm a member of we sometimes do an executive session between the CEO and the directors. Sometimes I try to summarize my thoughts at the end of the meeting, sometimes I do it in a followup email after the meeting.

But doing it with a Typeform might help you ensure that you'll be getting feedback more consistently: after each Board meeting, from each director. I think this format might also help you get more candid feedback because not everyone is good at delivering honest feedback in a meeting. As a side benefit, you'll start building an archive of feedback that you can revisit later. No rocket science, but sometimes little things can make a difference, and I'm curious to see how this one will pan out.

Thanks to Jack for giving me permission to share this here (and thanks Fred Wilson, who, as I've learned from Jack, inspired Jack on this topic).