Private club boards ask a great deal of the volunteers who serve on them. Directors are expected to fulfill significant fiduciary and leadership responsibilities, including setting policy, overseeing finances, safeguarding the club’s culture, and partnering with the general manager, often with little formal governance training and relatively short board tenures. Given those stakes, it’s striking how few clubs formally evaluate the people doing the governing. Most clubs track General Manager/COO performance closely. Far fewer turn that same discipline inward, toward the board itself.

To acknowledge this important situation, industry leaders are spending significant time rallying together to formalize private club governance best practices that include regular board self-evaluation as a core value.

Why Board Evaluation Matters

Most private clubs are comfortable with organizational-level assessments: financial benchmarking, member satisfaction surveys, strategic plan and KPI check-ins. Board reflection and self-evaluation is a different, more sensitive layer. It asks directors to consider and assess how well the elected group functions as a board:

• Do we prepare for and facilitate efficient meetings?
• Does the board communicate with members in a transparent manner?
• Does the board think and act strategically?
• Do we respect management boundaries and avoid operational meddling?
• Do we bring a club-wide perspective rather than representing a single faction or amenity?

Skipping this layer has real costs. A board can be financially sound and strategically well-directed while still being dysfunctional, dominated by one or two strong personalities, spending too much time on topics that come up outside of the confirmed agenda, or populated by directors who are not accountable to the club’s strategic plan and agreed-upon master goals.

Directors complete a structured questionnaire rating board connectivity to the membership, strategic direction, structure and process, and relationship with club management. Board evaluation is the lowest-friction entry point for private clubs new to the practice, and it works best paired with another method like a governance best practice session or annual board orientation for both new and returning board members. Ongoing education and structured onboarding for new board members strengthens alignment, improves decision-making, and fosters more effective partnerships between governance and management.

Board evaluation also serves a quieter but equally important function: it protects the General Manager/COO. When a board has no formal mechanism for reflecting on its own performance, dissatisfaction with governance often gets redirected at staff, or expressed informally through second-guessing and scope creep. A structured self-evaluation gives directors a legitimate outlet for raising governance concerns with each other, rather than working around the General Manager/COO or the club’s chain of command.

What the Industry Recommends

NCA and CMAA’s governance competencies for club managers explicitly list board self-evaluation alongside General Manager/COO performance reviews, orientation, and succession planning as core areas club managers should help boards address. Treating board evaluations as a standing governance function rather than an occasional exercise promotes long-term alignment and continuity across turnover and transitions. CMAA and NCA jointly publish Private Club Governance: A Handbook of Principles and Best Practices, now in its second edition, which devotes a chapter to board and committee evaluation and includes sample instruments clubs can adapt directly rather than build from scratch.

Boards benefit from using a structured governance framework that clearly defines director roles, responsibilities, and expected behaviors. Establishing these standards creates a meaningful basis for board evaluation, helping assessments focus on performance and governance effectiveness rather than subjective personality judgments. Widely adopted governance models in the private club sector have demonstrated the value of this approach by providing boards with a common language for accountability, collaboration, and leadership development.

A Best-In-Class Approach

A strong model for a club introducing or enhancing its board evaluation process looks something like this:

1. Start with role clarity. Evaluation is meaningless without an agreed standard. Before implementing, adopt board policy manual complete with written charters, a roles and responsibilities matrix, and an approvals matrix. Train boards in strategic governance and clarify roles between management and governance to foster collaboration and consistency.
2. Anonymize and aggregate results. Whether conducted internally or facilitated by an outside consultant, evaluation results should be shared with the board in aggregate form. Presenting results in aggregate keeps the discussion focused on board performance as a collective responsibility rather than turning the process into an assessment of individual personalities.
3. Tie results to action, not just filing. A board evaluation should be viewed as a governance improvement tool. Findings should translate into concrete actions that strengthen board effectiveness over the coming year. Evaluation results can help refine board orientation and onboarding programs, identify development needs, shape committee assignments, and clarify expectations for board service. Where a nominating or leadership development committee exists, the evaluation can also inform decisions regarding director renomination, succession planning, and future recruitment priorities. A well-designed evaluation process creates accountability by ensuring that insights lead to measurable improvements rather than being reviewed once and forgotten.
4. Benchmark externally. Comparing evaluation results against industry data or peer organizations provides valuable context that internal discussions alone cannot offer. Benchmarking helps boards distinguish between challenges that are unique to their organization and those that are common across the sector. For example, concerns about strategic focus, meeting length, recruitment of qualified directors, or committee workload may be more widespread than directors realize. Understanding how the board compares with peers can reduce unnecessary concern, validate existing strengths, and highlight areas where improvement efforts should be prioritized. External benchmarks also provide an objective reference point for tracking governance progress over time.
5. Revisit annually. Like General Manager/COO evaluations, board evaluations deliver the greatest value when they become part of a recurring governance cycle. A one-time assessment may generate useful observations, but it rarely produces lasting organizational change. Conducting evaluations annually creates an opportunity to measure progress, identify emerging challenges, and reinforce a culture of continuous improvement. Many organizations schedule evaluations to align with the fiscal year, strategic planning process, or director rotation cycle so that findings can inform upcoming governance decisions. When the process is repeated consistently, board evaluation becomes an embedded governance practice rather than a symbolic exercise undertaken only when concerns arise.
6. Close the loop with the membership. Directors are accountable to the members who elected them, so the evaluation process shouldn’t end as an internal-only exercise. Boards don’t need to publish raw results, but a brief report at an annual meeting or in a member communication noting that a self-evaluation was conducted and summarizing the resulting governance priorities reinforces the transparency the evaluation itself is meant to measure.

The Role of the General Manager/COO

While the evaluation is meant to assess the board rather than staff, the General Manager/COO typically plays a supporting role in the process rather than staying entirely apart from it. Many clubs have the General Manager/COO help select or administer the instrument, provide operational context that informs the questions asked, and receive a summary of the results, since several evaluation items (i.e. the board’s respect for management boundaries, the clarity of its direction to staff) describe the General Manager/COO relationship directly. The General Manager/COO’s involvement should stop short of shaping how directors are scored, both to preserve candor and to keep the evaluation focused on governance rather than becoming, in effect, a referendum on staff performance.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Clubs that get less value from board evaluation often fall into one of a few patterns:

1. Treating it as a compliance exercise. When a survey is distributed and filed away without discussion, directors quickly learn the process doesn’t matter and engage with it less honestly the next time around.
2. Skipping the follow-up conversation. The questionnaire itself surfaces information; the facilitated discussion afterward is what turns it into a shared understanding of priorities.
3. Making it personal. Without clear ground rules, an evaluation intended to assess collective board performance can devolve into airing individual grievances, which discourages candid participation in future cycles.
4. Starting without a governance baseline. Asking directors to rate the board’s effectiveness against standards that were never written down invites inconsistent, subjective answers.

The purpose of evaluation should be to promote continuous improvement, not to find fault. Because most volunteer directors enter their roles with limited formal governance training, boards benefit from a structured process that helps members understand the expectations of effective board service and assess their performance against those standards. When evaluation is treated as a routine component of good governance, it can strengthen board effectiveness, improve collaboration with management, and reduce the interpersonal conflicts that can undermine organizational stability and member confidence over time.

NCA Club Governance – August 2026

Richard M. Kopplin, Kurt D. Kuebler and Thomas B. Wallace III are partners at KOPPLIN KEUBLER & WALLACE. Richard can be reached at dick@kkandw.com. Kurt can be reached at kurt@kkandw.com. Tom can be reached at tom@kkandw.com.