BoardFocus provides bespoke Board and C-Suite advisory services that focus strategic direction, optimise team fit and function, enhance leadership capability, and implement leading governance practice to add genuine value and create greater impact.
WHO DIRECTS YOUR DIRECTORS?
Do your directors clearly understand their roles and responsibilities? Are they straying into operational issues or are they just going through the motions? Do they work well as a board and with your executive team? Does the board truly add value to the business?
Just as performance reviews are an essential part of any elite sport, there are always opportunities to enhance performance; the boardroom is no different. We deliver practical guidance to support chairs, directors, boards and leadership teams make value contributions that make a difference to their organisation.
We partner with you and guide you through the maze of challenges boards and leadership teams are confronted with our increasingly uncertain world, to make contributions that count, long-term.
SUPPORTING YOU TO
MAKE A POSITIVE IMPACT
CONTRIBUTING VALUE & EFFECTIVENESS
Customised Board Effectiveness Reviews
We support boards to make value contributions that count in creating organisational environments that drive ethical, sustainable business performance, whilst managing risk. We take a holistic approach to board effectiveness, considering the explicit elements such as composition, processes, systems and policies, AND the implicit factors that are often difficult to identify, such as group dynamics, decision making and leadership.
Our decades of experience, supported by academic rigour enables us to provide distinct insights on the board’s strengths and opportunities for improvement. We recognise the functions of the board both in the boardroom and how that impacts stakeholders beyond the boardroom. Our goal is to provide practical guidance, and at times constructive challenge, to enable continuous learning and improvement, the hallmark of leading organisations.
WHY CONDUCT A BOARD REVIEW?
It is what most leading practice boards do
Provides an opportunity to focus on strategy
Highlights where the board can add most value
It sets positive tone at the top
Assures stakeholders there is a culture of continuous improvement
It provides an independent circuit breaker for conflict and other challenges
It can enhance board ‘teamwork’, often highlighting expertise and experience otherwise unknown
Highlights opportunities for development
Professional, prudent and in some industries required by regulators (e.g. APRA regulated entities)
With an emphasis on objective and evidence-based analysis, perspectives and data are triangulated. Together with face-to-face interviews, customised measurement, informed by world-class research, can be undertaken anonymously, online. These integrated sources of input lead to rich reporting on “where the organisation is at”, both its success and opportunities for improvement that are practical and achievable. The process is efficient, effective and a wise use of directors’ time, optimising results.
Reviews can be conducted of the whole board, including important key stakeholders such as the chief executive, the executive team and company secretary, and even external stakeholders where relevant.
As every board is unique, our highly customised approach to Board Evaluation is differentiated by:
Focusing on the key issues that the board needs to address, not an ‘audit-style’ approach which focuses on a myriad of small, but relatively unimportant concerns
Confidentially interviewing each board member and key members of the management team who interact with the board. The purpose is to deeply understand directors’ implicit and explicit concerns, ensuring the review focuses on what will best enable the board to add value
A research-based, customised questionnaire that is relevant for directors and their issues. This provides for quantitative responses and analysis, whilst enabling directors to add confidential comments to ensure nuances are captured on all questions
A high level of personal contact with directors, to give them confidence in how their concerns will be raised with the rest of the board, and the process for resolving them
Detailed, customised quantitative and qualitative report with clear accountabilities, supported by comprehensive resources, templates and other support material
Follow up support to assist implementation as requested.
LEADING PRACTICE IMPLEMENTATION
Governance Advisory Services
BoardFocus is regularly requested to support the board address specific issues the board faces related to effective board functioning. Issues might relate to board dynamics, succession planning, organisational culture issues, through to review of structures, systems and processes.
MAXIMISING CONTRIBUTION & IMPACT
Governance Coaching
The underlying philosophy that informs BoardFocus is that the key to exemplary, world-class boards is not only structural, it is social. What distinguishes exemplary boards is that they are robust, effective social systems that optimise individual board members capabilities and work together as a highly functioning group.
Boards ‘set the tone’ at the top of their organisations not only through the decisions they make, but how they make decisions. ‘Wise’ decisions are made with credible information and sound governance, as well as moral awareness, ‘cognitive’ diversity and constructive professional conflict. A board that is a highly functioning group is one that makes decisions by trusting and challenging one another as well as engaging constructively with senior leadership on critical issues. Research consistently shows that the highest performing boards recognise their ‘obligation to dissent’. This requires board members to display high interpersonal awareness and alignment with the organisation’s vision and values, characteristics that go well beyond CVs and expert technical skills.
WHAT IS GOVERNANCE COACHING?
Governance Coaching is specifically focused on providing a sounding board, guidance and support to those at the top who can often feel isolated. With only episodic contact, Directors and Chairs lack the ongoing connection provided by an executive role. For Chairs and/or individual board members it involves a series of one-to-one conversations that address individual concerns and any skills gaps. For the board as a whole BoardFocus provides real time, in-the-moment feedback and coaching to enable relationships that build a robust social system.
WHY USE GOVERNANCE COACHING?
Enhance board performance and dynamics by improving communication and relationships inside and outside the boardroom.
Provide a sounding board for board members and ‘C’ suite leaders.
Increase ‘wise’ decision making through a deeper understanding of moral awareness, EQ and SQ (social intelligence).
Cultivate the art and science of difficult conversations.
Onboard new members and fast track their value contribution.
Develop political savvy in the boardroom.
CLARIFYING & ALIGNING STRATEGIC DIRECTION
Strategic Planning & Risk Appetite
In a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world that is constantly confronted with disruption, an annual planning session where management presents a strategic plan to the board for sign off is no longer desirable, viable or feasible. The board needs more regular engagement with management so together both groups can contribute and add ‘generative’ value from their different perspectives. This includes practical tools to leverage the board’s strategic capacity at every board meeting – often simple mechanisms that unlock the high value contributions from directors. BoardFocus consultants are experts in helping individual directors and boards fully utilise these capacities.
At the same time, periodically a third party should facilitate a session to stretch and test the strategic thinking and ‘taken for granted’ assumptions.
A facilitated approach focuses board and key leadership team contributions. As well as unlocking untapped resources and ideas, the synergy created significantly enhances the relationship between the board and management as they generate untapped ideas (and resources) to realise the agreed vision and mission. Depending on where the organisation is on its strategy journey, the output can include an agreed Vision, Mission, Purpose, statement with aligned values and strategic pillars, including foundations to collect dynamic measures of ‘what success looks like’ – both from an organisational point of view (KPIs) and key stakeholder point of view (SPIs).
With post-workshop refinement, this work contributes to creating a One Page Vision, Purpose, Strategy and Values against which board discussion and decisions can be calibrated, and provides the backbone of board reports.
LEVERAGING RISK FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Is your board leveraging Risk Appetite as a core enabler of strategy, innovation and opportunity for value differentiation, or just red tape? The Board’s role in setting and leveraging risk appetite to encourage innovation (within agreed parameters) goes hand in hand with strategic planning. Risks should not be just mitigated. Risk identification should be used to uncover opportunities for competitive advantage. Through facilitating practical understanding of risk appetite related directly to your organisation and its challenges, we can assist your board approaching risk as an enabler of value creation and competitive advantage.
BOARD REPORTING
DEVELOPING SKILLS & BUILDING COHESION
Tailored Individual & Group Development Sessions
The key to highly effective boards is the contribution of individuals and how they work together. Board effectiveness depends upon the behavioural dynamics of a board, and how the web of interpersonal and group relationships between executive and non-executives is developed in a particular company context. The foundation to effective dynamics is both composition and quality reporting. The BoardFocus team are experts in individual and organisational behaviour with decades of experience to support the functioning of the board – at the board, senior leadership team and individual level.
We offer customised development sessions on topics such as:
Enhancing (Wise) Decision Making in the Boardroom
Advanced Boardroom Conversations
The Governance Ecosystem
Effective Engagement with the Board through optimised Reports
Governance Roles and Responsibilities.
Other specialised topics such as:
The Board’s role in overseeing Cyber Risk
How a Board should engage in CSR
What does the Board need to know about Big Data.
This can all be organised for your board with highly regarded facilitators engaging participants in practical, interactive sessions, supporting real and practical understanding and identify action requirements.
GOVERNING CULTURE
Governance & Organisational Culture
Based on decades of globally recognised research on organisational culture, we offer specialist guidance around governing organisational culture. Take the quick quiz to identify ‘cultural red flags’.
DO YOU SPOT ANY OF THESE CULTURAL RED FLAGS IN YOUR BOARDROOM?
BOARD PROCESS
Skills sets around your board table are low/outdated
Director profiles are homogeneous
Succession planning ‘just in time’
Risk is poorly understood
Policies are approached in a ‘tick and flick’ manner
Board and committee accountabilities are unclear
Board meetings are rushed
Agendas are inflexible
BOARD REPORTING
Goals are unclear, reports lack transparency
There is a strict letter-of-the-law focus
There is little cross silo integration of reporting
Reporting is narrowly focused and dominated by financials
No calibration of reporting against benchmarks or over time
Actions discussed in the boardroom are not followed up
Unclear, long, technical or operationally focused board papers
Management rarely attend board meetings
BOARD DYNAMICS
Excessive collegiality
Short-term, detailed, operational discussion
Small rule breaches are tolerated
Insufficient constructive challenge
Board member(s) display ‘poor’ behaviour – overly courteous, silent, obnoxious
Priorities are driven more by management than the board
Alignment of decisions with values or purpose rarely discussed
Boardroom factions
Decision making paralysis
The relationship between the CEO and Chair and/or the CEO and the Board is problematic.
ENGAGING THE BOARD
Reporting for Quality, not Quantity
Supporting the board to contribute value to the organisation in turn depends on high quality reporting, not operational volume. Effective reporting, both written and presented, are the central communication channels between operations and governance. Leading practice reporting should enable board members to discharge their duties in an appropriate fashion while also providing a mechanism for generative outcomes. If the reporting is inadequate, good governance is not possible. Both the board and the executive team first need to understand what leading governance is, and then there are the skills of effective board reporting.
Supporting governance is effective reporting, which is not just a technical skill. Effective reporting is a strategic extension of operational activity and information-gathering, where information is converted to insights that enable the board to make more effective decisions. This requires management to develop a strategic governance mindset and a capacity to challenge their own assumptions, anticipate board member responses and think strategically (not just summarise operational inputs).
We offer customised workshops for those key to report writing followed by personalised coaching to support value adding governance reporting. As boards are ultimately responsible for the quality of reporting, some of the issues that boards want in enhanced reporting include:
Consistency across all authors
Strategic governance issues rather than operational detail (and jargon)
Quality papers that provide succinct insight rather than unprocessed information and data
Papers that are directed towards “what does the board need to know,” not an outline of all activity
Executive team enabled to present (in person) strategic and meaningful content in dialogue not PowerPoint
Committee reports are distinguished from board reports.
Our Work
We’re working with leading organisations to elevate the role and impact of governance… for greater impact.