Board Search & Board Effectiveness Review
NED recruitment and evaluation of Board effectiveness
Boards matter! The sustainability and success of a company depends on its ability to conceive appropriate business strategies, to plan for the future and to attract capable leadership talent – and this depends on the quality of its governance. The key to ensuring good governance is to have an effectively staffed and functioning Board.
Board Search
The value a Board generates for the company is highly influenced by its composition. Being a Board member is a challenging, potentially inspiring and fulfilling, but above all a demanding, sophisticated task. Board members have to be individually suitable to this task, and collectively capable to act as a team so as to bring the members’ abilities to bear for the benefit of the company and its stakeholders. We help Boards to choose their members well, on multiple dimensions:
- Relevant Experience – which can be function, industry or topic-based, or simply as business leaders.
- Analytical Strength – Board members have to process large amounts of complex and sometimes ambiguous information.
- Judgment – being able to take good decisions based on limited facts (no “analysis paralysis”).
- Motivation (and time commitment) – wanting to really make a difference, not just collecting prestigious titles or feeling obliged to someone they know.
- Integrity – above all, the highest degree of honesty, integrity, and independence. And, allied to this, an ability to work in groups (being able to listen to and value differing points of view, wanting to contribute to group results without looking for personal recognition or benefit).
Board Effectiveness Review
Best-in-class Boards undergo periodic evaluations of their performance. We help Boards understand and improve the way they operate, focusing on several key dynamics, including:
- Composition and diversity.
- Critical competencies.
- Benchmarketing
- Clarity of purpose.
- The role of the Chair.
- Regularity, type and content of exchange.
- Decision-making process.
- Reporting & output.
Our approach differs from many “standard” Board evaluations in that we do not limit ourselves to the formal, compliance-focused aspects but emphasise the effectiveness of the work of the Board and the objective of creating “High-Performance Boards”. We believe that based on a thorough first assessment this should be regarded as a longer-term development process with regular reviews, in order to ensure continuous improvement of the Board over the years. A high-performance Board integrates the group dynamics and the personal dimension at the service of a better institutional functioning; it creates greater space for those dimensions by being more transparent, more interactive, and therefore more effective.