Based on the Helia Library article The Performance Review Your CEO Deserves, from a coffee chat with Nancy Fournier.
Evaluating your CEO or ED is one of the few things a board actually has to do — AND, done well, it’s a gift: real, specific feedback that tells your leader you see them, you value them, and you’re investing in them. Nancy Fournier has built her whole practice around doing this well. These are the actual tools she uses — the process, the template, the dashboard, and the competency menu behind them — plus a self-assessment and a full real-world example to round it out. Take what’s helpful, build it together with your leader (never to them), and make it your own.
What’s Inside
- Nancy’s Evaluation System — The whole instrument in one place: her 7-step process, the domains/goals/measures template you fill in, and the green/yellow/red dashboard it becomes. Start here.
- Leadership Competencies — Nancy’s menu of nonprofit leadership skills by category. Pull from it to fill the Competency column of your template and to educate your board on what strong leadership actually looks like.
- The CEO Self-Assessment — The leader’s own reflection, so the review is a two-way conversation from the start (adapted from the National Council of Nonprofits).
- A Real Example — An anonymized version of the full CEO & board assessment framework Jess built for her own board — a starting point to build on, not a template to copy.
When these resources aren’t enough
These tools will get you a long way on your own — especially in later years, after you’ve run the process the first time. But the first time through, most boards end up doing a well-intended but half-finished job on something that really matters. That’s usually where it helps to bring in someone objective who isn’t scared of the data and can build the domains, goals, and measures with you.
Nancy builds and runs CEO/ED evaluations start to finish, and it’s the work she loves most. She scales it to your size — many boards can cobble together roughly $5–10K for a strong first round; for larger orgs she works from about 10% of the ED’s salary. A one-time investment for something you’ll reuse every year.
Connect with Nancy!
Not sure Nancy’s the right fit? Book 30 minutes with Helia and we’ll help you figure out who in our Collective might be.
About Nancy
Before she was a nonprofit leadership coach, Nancy Fournier ran a bed and breakfast in New Orleans and did weddings — which she says was surprisingly good training for coaching executive directors (“your job is to focus on the marriage, not the wedding”). She’s spent 30+ years working with hundreds of EDs, mostly women, and she’s a self-described data nerd who does crossword puzzles for fun and genuinely loves a good funding formula. She’s been practicing radical candor since before it had a name — because if she cares about you, she’s going to tell you about the spinach.
Work with Nancy
