Should Board Members be excluded from a good experience?

Tips on how to apply customer-centricity methods to your board meetings.

CXB HUB recently had a board meeting, which we prepped for like any other meeting with our clients and our team – using basic recipes like a warm welcome, bottom-up management and co-construction, creativity and a little touch of emotion.

Two of our members gave us a surprising feedback: they’d been happily surprised by how engaging and entertaining the meeting was. Considering their long experience as board members, they thought it was testimony to our long experience in CX.

My co-founder Alexis Grabar has a very long experience of board meetings, and we brainstormed together to give some tips on how to turn your board meetings into something more exciting for everyone, and more efficient. Here is our 4 ingredients recipe:

1.   A warm welcome

With remote media becoming a norm, it is more than essential to carefully prepare the kind of welcome you want to offer. Coffees and snacks will not be enough if part of your audience is not physically present. Turn the tables and focus on them: ask a few questions to introduce the participants, their motivations and feelings.

2.   Bottom-up approach and Co-construction

Even if the goal of a board meeting is to do a presentation from the company Management Team and Executive Directors  to the Non Executive Directors and Board Members representing the shareholders, it doesn’t mean that you can’t play the bottom-up angle. Why not let one of your staff members contribute and introduce a field situation, or bring to the table a topic that has been prepared by a group of staff.

3.   Creativity

How could you push yourself and board members to think differently? Could you invite a philosopher or an artist for an introductory 15-minutes speech? Could you make people express their point of view in a different way? I recommend using apps like Klaxoon to boost creativity and efficiency.

4.   A little touch of emotion

We probably should have started with this: your board members are human beings first. Probably the most important advice we can give you is to explore in advance what they are expecting from this meeting, for themselves as individuals, and/or for the company they represent. Find a way to contact them individually beforehand. Emotion cannot be planned for, but if you have carefully listened to your audience’s expectations you will be in a position to be authentic and find the little touch of personalisation that will make the difference.

As it happens, this last ingredient should also be a part of your customer-centric business, and is a very big part of our method.  Design thinking methods can also be applied in this case. Never assume your customer’s expectations, select the your differentiation points, innovate and focus on the results you want to achieve!

Claire Bonniol, CEO & Co-founder, CXB HUB