Following its launch on September 23, the response to the NCEO’s members-only board excellence toolkit and candidate directory has been wonderful. If you haven’t taken a look yet, the toolkit has best practices, data, and sample documents to help your company build or maintain a high-achieving board of directors, especially with regard to independent directors.

The toolkit covers seven areas of board performance, and the NCEO will continue adding new resources. The most recent update includes:

• Our Voices of Experience document, in which directors of ESOP companies share their hard-won lessons in the form of one-paragraph observations, covering ideas from onboarding new independent directors to ideas about how to prioritize the various areas of expertise an outside director can bring.
• A set of checklists for boards to select, monitor, and work productively with the ESOP trustee, as well as an article specifically on the role of the board in monitoring the appraisal process.
• A great article—Is Your Board Playing Offense or Defense?—also in the current newsletter, about leadership stages of an ESOP board and the key role of the board chair.

In addition to the toolkit, the NCEO can help you identify candidates for your board, either through organizations we collaborate with or, especially for those seeking directors with ESOP experience, through our candidate directory, which is primarily composed of people with experience on the boards of NCEO member companies.

If you have a resource you’d like us to provide (or one to share!), or if you would like to be listed in the directory, please contact the NCEO’s membership director, Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks. If you are not an NCEO member, you can join today to access the board excellence toolkit, the candidate directory, and our other member benefits.