Cutting Through The Grey

Buying Board Advice

In difficult trading times, one might expect board advisors to ‘go the extra mile’ in providing the value they promise.  Recent stories shared by board members and their secretariats seem to imply that this is not always the case. Of course providers have overheads to cover, margins to make and targets to deliver. The best ensure this is not done at the expense of client service.

 

The best advisors challenge constructively, they focus on the outcomes to be achieved before considering the options available. They bring imagination and original thought to your deliberations. They add value through partnering successfully with you. You are able to identify the individual or team working on your behalf and they are accessible.

 

Board advisors describe the top three ways in which their clients can enable success:

Firstly, clear channels of communication and regular dialogue provide an essential foundation for all board advisory work:

Secondly, the provision of honest and comprehensive information early in the process will inform choices and help to add perspective on the real issues to be addressed. 

Thirdly, reaching agreement on a realistic timeframe which recognises the board rhythm and availability will create and sustain focus and momentum through any board advisory process.

 

So when commissioning board advisors, it is reasonable to expect they will enable you to build your organisation and board capability through the transfer of their knowledge and expertise. In the face of experts, it is easy to abdicate but at
the end of the day, it is your organisation, your decisions. The critical questions to ask are:

 

What are we trying to achieve?

What do we already know?

Who can best provide the services we need in our specific situation?

How can we best partner with them to realise the value we expect?

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Organisational Agility

For centuries we have been reminded that if we travel down the same path we cannot expect to arrive at a new destination.  Searching for new paths will require business leaders to think in different ways. This new thinking is required at board level in order to make sense of a complex business world which is impacted by a number of economic, social and geo-political megatrends. This new thinking will also enable boards to design and lead agile organisation models which perform effectively in the rapidly changing business environment. This new thinking recognises that the globally, instantly connected world places leaders in the spotlight and their reputations are continuously on the line. We call this new way of thinking ‘Situational Intelligence™’.

 

We acknowledge that it is difficult to accommodate different thinking in those boardrooms where tried and tested approaches predominate and behaviour is conditioned by past successes.  Governance codes warn against the dangers of complacent boards and ‘Groupthink’.

 

There is no universal template for determining the diverse insights required to enable a board to lead its organisation into the future. Every organisation is different. Strategic resourcing uses Situational Intelligence™ to determine the insights which will be needed, how they can best be provided and by whom.

 

By deliberately attracting a diverse pool of candidates and ensuring you have a robust, coherent and transparent appointments process you optimise the chances of bringing the required insights to the boardroom. The Chairman is responsible for ensuring that these insights inform debate and board decision making and that different thinking and voices are not filtered out. Regular board reviews and effective succession planning will ensure that the structure and composition of the board remains relevant through time.

View Articles to Download - Fit for the Future