Biography executive director evaluation survey

Better align expectations and goals for your nonprofit and your executive.

In the last issue of Blue Avocado, we discussed how board evaluations of executive directors (CEOs) are different from all other performance evaluations in the organization.

These differences — including the limited ability of board members to observe the executive — are also among the reasons why 45% of executives have not had a review in the last year (CompassPoint’s Daring to Lead 2011 study).

In this article, we draw on that discussion and on the submissions of dozens of Blue Avocado readers to propose a process and an evaluation instrument.

At multiple points in this article are links to download the survey form in Word to make it easy for you to modify.

When we reviewed various the dozens of evaluation instruments sent in by Blue Avocado readers, we found that nearly all of them had these attributes in common:

• Most reviews used a checklist form (rather than narrative)
• Most focused on ED