When association CEOs get together, talk inevitably turns to the state of their Board and their relationship to it. As with any boss and employee relationship, the stories range from great experiences to horror stories. If you are new to your role as CEO, your relationship with your Board is one that needs to be established quickly and nurtured. I have already written about some of the early conversations you should hold to get to know your Board members.

It is critical to assess the state of your Board early so you can adapt to their culture. You may also need to help them grow their capacity so they can become a high-performing board. There are a lot of board assessment tools out there, but here are some behaviors I look for in the boardroom:

1. Does the agenda include time for generative, strategic, and operational items, or does it lean too hard into one area? Hint: that one area is almost always operational.
2. Are discussions among Board members balanced, or do meetings get dominated by a few loud voices?
3. Does the Board disagree productively, or does it drift toward one of two extremes: no disagreement on the surface but tension that never gets vocalized, or disagreement that turns personal and tears the group apart?
4. Do they use a strategic plan to guide their work, or is the plan something they wrote two years ago and never opened again?
5. What forms the basis of their decisions: data, their own experience, or the latest complaint to come in?

Once I have a sense of where the Board falls, I can adjust my approach and start working with the President to create conditions where the Board balances generative, strategic, and operational work, where savvy facilitation helps every voice get heard, and where the strategic plan is impossible to ignore. I have found it more challenging to build productive disagreement and data-informed decision-making, so I am open to suggestions on how to do that better.o do that better.