ABOUT THE REAP GOVERNANCE REVIEWS

Below you will find KEY INFORMATION ABOUT THE COMPONENTS OF OUR GOVERNANCE REVIEW PROCESS

Overview:

Over the past eight years, Te Whare Hukahuka (TWH) has worked with more than 140 community organisations across Aotearoa to help strengthen their governance and strategy so they can have even greater social impact and sustainability. As a result, we identified a number of commonly governance issues and themes.

TWH developed a structured approach, based on research and experience, to address the key issues facing community organisation governance. This approach includes the MRS & MR C framework, focusing on six key areas of governance that determine the health and success of a board. These areas are:

- (M1)        Meetings

- (R1)         Roles and Responsibilities

- (S)           Strategic Thinking

- (M2)       Measuring and Monitoring

- (R2)        Risk Management

- (C)          Communications

The Governance Review process that we are engaging in together assesses more than 100 different data points around your board’s governance. This provides a strong foundation to see how your governance board thinks, behaves and operates.

Once we aggregate all your board members contributions, we will then send you a report that summarises the areas of your governance that are being done well, and the areas that could be improved.  

Governance Diagnostic Survey:

The Governance Diagnostic Survey is the first part of our TWH Governance Review.
It allows all board members to share their thoughts about how governance is being carried out in your organisation. The survey dives into detail, unpacking 90 data points of governance. It generally takes 40-60 minutes to complete.
We ask that all board members complete this so that we can aggregate your feedback and identify the trends.

Three tips to completing the survey:

1. Please answer as many of the questions as you can.
   - If you are unsure about one of the questions, you can write ‘Unsure’, or just leave that question blank.

2. Complete the whole survey without closing/refreshing your internet browser.
   - If your browser closes or your computer restarts without completing it, you will lose your responses and will have to start again!

3. There are comment boxes at the end of each section
   - These are where you can record any notes or comments for us as you go.

Governance Quiz:

The Governance Quiz helps us take the pulse of where your board members' knowledge and perceptions are around governance.
Getting a feel for this helps us to then tailor the capability development aspects of the training accordingly.
The quiz consists consists of 46 multi-choice questions. It generally takes 45-60 minutes to complete.
Individual results will be kept confidential, and the aggregated results will be summarised and shared with the board.

Tips for completing the governance quiz:

1. We are seeking your 'first reaction' to the questions - so no Googling answers. We want to see how you intuitively respond to different governance concepts.

2. Most questions have multiple correct responses, so for each question, select responses that you think are correct.

3. The quiz is designed to apply to many types of governance boards. Answer the questions in relation to the governance board style that you feel most comfortable with.

4. We use the term 'board member' throughout the quiz to refer to governance roles across all types of entities (whether trustees, directors, or committee members). Sometimes we may refer to a specific one (e.g. director).

5. Under each question is a text box, where you can note any queries, comments or improvements for us.

6. Keep your internet browser open so that you don’t lose progress before completing the quiz.

7. Once you have finished, if you’re curious about the answers, you can click a button to view the responses that we think are correct for each question.

8. If you would like to know your individual score, email us and we will share it with you. Individual scores with not be shared with others unless we have received consent first.

Personality Assessment:

This helps us identify your board members’ individual personalities, which provides an insight into how you each behave, react and communicate.

Together this creates a board personality which can be helpful to understand in identifying how to stimulate strong collective decision-making.

There are many different ways of assessing personalities. Each culture looks at it differently, and there are dozens of tools. We use the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) assessment to unpack this because it is easy to understand and outputs one of 16 personality profiles, expressed as a four letter code (such as ESFJ or INTP).

No one personality type is better or worse than any other - they are all different, and all personalities are valuable as part of a governance board. Because each personality type naturally behaves differently and wants to be treated differently, learning about them can help us adapt the way we relate and communicate with other board members.

Tips for completing the Personality Assessment:

1. It should take roughly 20-30 minutes to complete this personality assessment.
   - Try doing so in one sitting (or without closing your internet browser so that you don’t lose progress)

2. You need to complete the personality test, AND THEN fill in the form to record your results for us at TWH.
   - The link to the response form can be found in the email we sent you.
   - The link to the Personality Test will then be found in that form, and the MBTI personality test will open in a new tab.
   - A screenshot of the MBTI personality test is shown here…

3. Once you have completed the test and have your personality result, fill in the questions in the form.

To learn more about the 16 personality types of the MBTI test, click the button below:

Governance Review Report:

Once we have consolidated and analysed your board members’ feedback and results to the three parts of the Governance Review, we will compile a summary report, with a visual traffic light to show how your governance is doing and where the opportunities are to improve.

This generally takes us three weeks to write from the time we have all of your feedback and results.

If you need to get in touch with our team about any parts of the Governance Review, contact Shay Wright on:

e. shay@twh.co.nz

m. 027 523 1560