Running an effective trust
Monitoring your trust's performance
Trusts and other governance structures need to regularly monitor their performance to ensure they stay on track and deliver on their owners' aspirations.
Why monitor
It's important for trusts to monitor the performance of both the trust and trustees, to:
- provide accountability to owners
- transparency for owners
- identify areas of excellence and areas to work on.
This helps to ensure the trust is working on the right mahi and that the mahi is for the benefit of trust and all of the owners.
What to monitor
There are 2 areas trusts should be assessing regularly:
- how the trustees are performing as a governance board
- how the trust is performing against its kaupapa and strategy, including reviews of the CEO's performance.
The management team should also be monitoring its own performance and regularly reporting to trustees on progress against the business plan, including financial reporting and risk management.
How to monitor
To monitor trustees' performance, you can use simple self assessment tools or you can get in an external expert to help you.
Monitoring of the trust's performance against the strategic plan should be done by trustees and reported on to owners.
Check how well your trust is doing
Monitoring trustees' performance
Trustees can do a regular self-check to ensure they're performing effectively as a team.
Consider whether the trustees as a group are:
- future-focused
- taking an external view rather than being inwardly focused
- proactive, not reactive
- concentrating on strategic leadership
- meeting all legal obligations
- using committees efficiently
- enabling all board members to contribute with their skills
- unified and responsible for all decisions
- being led by a competent chairperson
- consistent in keeping governance and management separate
- getting on with owners, beneficiaries and other stakeholders.
Monitoring strategy and kaupapa
Your trust's strategic plan and/or business plan should include a monitoring and measurement plan — a plan for when and how you will check how actions are progressing and measure success.
Monitoring and measuring success
Reporting on progress
You should be reporting the trust's progress to owners regularly — the trust order will state what to report, how to report and how often to report to them. This is the minimum requirement, so the more you can bring whānau along with you on the journey the better.