Is Your Board Fit for Purpose?

Our Approach

NACD's Benchmarking Service offers a targeted comparison of your board governance practices against a selected peer group. Supported by data that NACD collects annually from its membership, our tailored analysis and insights help inform your board strategy by comparing both core governance attributes and oversight practices in areas such as risk and cybersecurity to your peers.

Past clients have used our detailed findings to validate current practices, identify where they are outliers and learn about specific improvements to enhance their value to the organization, and satisfy heightened investor expectations.

What We Benchmark

Selected Client Questions We Help Answer

• Should we split the CEO and board chair roles?
• Is the oversight of our cybersecurity program rigorous enough? What practices are other boards applying that we may not have thought about?
• Is our board engagement with the strategy development process appropriate? What approaches have we overlooked in strengthening our engagement?
• Is our board evaluation process robust enough? Are we employing leading practices in assessing the performance of our full board and individual directors?

Our Scope

• We work closely with your board representatives to understand specific benchmarking objectives and determine your peer group parameters.
• The depth and breadth of our governance data allow us to compare your practices against:
• Similar company types, including public companies as well family-owned and investor-owned enterprises
• Industry peers. We have wide representation across major business sectors.
• Companies of similar revenue size or market capitalization
• Aspirational peers, for example larger or more regulated companies depending on your projected growth or expansion into different industries.

1. Validation of Governance Practices

Boards seek affirmation that their overall set of governance practices is effective. In this environment of heightened investor expectations, boards are anxious about not being perceived as outliers.

2. Improved Board Evaluation Process

Benchmarking can spotlight opportunities for improvement during the board evaluation process by comparing practices against those of peers.

3. The Business Case for Specific Decisions

Boards use our benchmarks to inform specific decisions about structural governance changes. For example, our data often help build the business case for separation of the CEO and board chair roles.