Roberta has been a CEO, a founder-entrepreneur, and a corporate executive as well as a highly experienced board member who has served in executive and board leadership positions on a variety of private, public and non-profit boards.  In this episode, we talk about the vital importance of board governance – and how valuable it can be to any company or organization.

 

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Links

 

Roberta Sydney LinkedIn

National Association of Corporate Directors

Private Directors Association

American College of Corporate Directors

Women Corporate Directors

Extraordinary Women on Boards

 

 

Quotes

 

Most important issues facing boards today

The first and second issue facing boards today revolves around human capital. I would say top of mind is still employees and employee safety.  Who are we hiring? How are we making sure that they can get their work done productively, safely? How do we onboard new people in this remote environment? How do we develop people? That's number one, and I would say is number two is employee retention.

 

Then third is around culture and strategy because, culture will eat strategy for breakfast.  And so, boards need to ask--how do you create, enhance, grow the culture that you want and how can you be sure that that is the lived culture when people aren't together as much as they used to be.

 

 

 

Big Ideas/Thoughts

The pandemic has exposed many warts on strategy. What kind of preparedness did we have in place to handle a crisis? Was there sufficient succession planning? Where have we created risk by not acting?

 

The pandemic to a great extent has also exposed the warts on the governance practices of many private company boards. For example, boards have needed to ask--who do we have on our board now that can help guide us in ways that are going to make a difference? The first step is often updating or developing a skills matrix, to evaluate board composition annually and answer the question--what skills do we need on our Board for the next three to five years?

 

Good governance is good governance and there are best practices even though they still must be tailored to company stage,  company size, and industry complexity.  If you lack basic governance structures and procedures, it's very difficult to be effective.

 

On the boards on which I am privileged to serve, we develop what we call a decision matrix. It's helps define the “swim lanes.” What are the decisions management makes? What are the decision that need to come to the board? What are the decisions that owners should make? Getting clear on these swim lane issues has been very, very helpful in setting the ground rules for how we can all engage together and move this business from where it is today to something even better

 

Board education is particularly important. There's no substitute for directors, especially those that might be less familiar with board practice, to learn and be open to learning about what a good board agenda or a what a good committee agenda looks like. What kind of risk management should the board be doing? What would be an enterprise risk framework look like for a business like ours?

 

Almost anything becomes possible if you open your mind to say: “we're going to make better decisions and get better results because of the governance that we're putting in place here.”

 

Stakeholder Capitalism

The mission of the organization matters now more than ever. Employees want to do something that matters, and they want to be somewhere where they're solving problems or delivering a service that that is helping meaningfully. Every company today is trying to figure out a way to make sure that it has a mission that resonates with both its employee base and its customer base. 

 

Long-term financial viability relates to ESG - environmental, social, and governance - and big institutional investors are giving that message to the companies in which they might invest – that message is an important catalyst in driving this agenda forward.

 

When consumers boycott Uber because of business practices or when consumers say I don't want to own the stock of Exxon - these are signals, strong, strong signals that companies need to heed and re-engineer how they're conducting business.