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What Happens in Board Meetings and the Boardroom?

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Nina Lyons
What Happens in Board Meetings and the Boardroom?

Before, being just a normal employee, a sometimes wonder what goes on in the upper echelons of my organizations. I was curious on what my bosses or the top people managing our company were actually doing in their day to day tasks.

Of course, after being now in a middle manager position and being able to directly interact with the bosses of the company, did I now realize that they would hold a lot of high-level meetings in a boardrooom. Their focus was controlling and governing the company and be the big vision advocate of the company's strategy and goals for the next few months.

To my luck, one of my bosses directly invited meeting into one of these high-level meetings just to sit in and really see what happens during their discussions. Of course, I was a bit intimitated as in these executive and board meetings, I would be with executives and directors who are experts in their areas and probably receive a bigger paycheck than I do.

an empty boardroom where board directors would go to hold their board meetings

Going into the boardroom, I meekly sat by in the corner to watch the coming proceedings and observe the discussion that was going to take place. Immediately, one of the things that I noticed was that all of the executive leadership and the board directors took out their tablet and mobile devices.

"What were they doing," I asked myself. It was then I quickly got out my phone and googled what they were doing. It was then I knew that they were using something called a board portal.

Essentially, a board portal is a software that helps board directors during their board meetings. It allows these directors and leaders to receive board packets through their mobile devices instead of using physical board documents. I hadn't realize that this type of digital technology even existed.

To be fair, all I knew about the boardroom was what I saw in movies. It was incredible how far things have come these days. Doing some quick researching while the rest of the meeting participants were starting to discuss their agenda for the meeting, I found out that board portals are being used by at least the top organization across the world like Tesco, P&G, and Bank of America.

It was real fascinating stuff. I couldn't imagine that the boardroom itself has now transitioned towards using these paperless meetings. Looking at the movement of the board directors, I could tell they were already proficient in using this software on their devices.

As the meeting went on, a lot of topics were covered by these directors. It was interesting how for every agenda, most of the directors discussed each point. It was intimidating to say the least as you tell from their conversations that they were very experienced and knew what they were saying. Funnily, during some heated points of the meeting where two of the directors had opposing views on a topic, they would go on a full blown debate using facts, past experiences, and data they have in their board portal to start proving their arguements. They even started to using jargon that I honestly didn't quite understand. Guess I really needed to be in a position of power to have fully understood what they were saying.

I myself, could never envision myself being in such a hotseat. Nevetheless, I could see though that after reaching a conclusion of the debate or discussion, these directors would then just hold a vote on their course of action. No matter the result, the meeting moves to the next agenda point.

The board meeting went on like that for around 2 to 3 hours. By the end, I was already tired because of the many points that was discussed. However, it was an experience to behold as I got a glimspe of what it means to be a top ranking member within an organization.

I don't know if I would really aspire to be like them, but I could say that I will do what I can to persevere to be that director, using that cool software technology for their meetings.

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Nina Lyons
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