Guest Bio

Gabrielle Schroder

Group director for coaching and leadership at Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership.

Gabrielle leads a practice that specializes in developing human potential. Gabrielle has had a successful business career spanning 25 years, most recently in a variety of leadership roles with the Australian Institute of Company Directors or AICD. As an experienced director and practice lead, she has advised boards and executive teams, helping companies govern for growth, drive performance, and achieve sustained value.

Immediately prior to joining IECL Gabrielle was the head of the AICDs board advisory practice, a practice she built from the ground up. Fellow and graduate of AICD, fellow of the National Heart Foundation of Australia, chair of the New South Wales Cardiovascular Research Network and a committee member of the 30% Club in Australia, an international working group dedicated to improving diversity on boards.

SHOW NOTESDirectors are human beings like the rest of us. Coaching plays a significant role in helping them see themselves more fully and therefore show up differently around the board room table.In times of crisis the impact and the toll that is taken on directors when they find themselves in the firing line can be devastating.What we have responsibility for, as institutions that educate at that level, is to make sure that we’re building resilience, capability and capacity so that those situations are preventedThe Royal Commission, particularly the Hayne Royal Commission has brought to the fore some real expectations on the part of consumers regarding the board’s role in governing for culture and behaviours and the decisions that employees make in their organization.Boards are struggling to reorient around what is becoming a much greater level of understanding and knowledge in our community on what good governance is and should be. Boards are having to really respond to rising community expectations around that role.If you think about the role of the board, the board is supposed to be independent of management and the organization. It can be very difficult to grasp how boards might actually execute on controlling for behaviours in an organization. Marrying the worlds of governance and coaching has a significant role to play in helping boards to navigate that quite paradoxical challenge.A research piece by AICD with hundred chairmen on “when does good governance lead to better organizational performance?” highlighted some interrelating findings:good governance is situationalgovernance was perceived by the chairmen as a team activity.individuals, directors and executives all need to bring an independence of mind to decision making.good decision making benefits from different perspectives, different lenses.There is a need to maintain openness to alternative views: a genuine ability to be able to suspend judgment and to be able to change one’s views in light of a better alternative. For boards today, these traits coupled with how the board builds its relationship with the executive maintaining independence, but equally building high levels of trust is really critical, particularly in times of high change.A recent gender diversity report by AICD highlighted a drop in the number of women on boards. In some respects this may well have been an unconscious outcome. We need to continue to be very vigilant to make sure that boards are critically assessing who is around the table, the skill set that is needed today and into the future and making sure that board decisions are best supported through a clear diversity of views and perspectives.It wasn’t really until the notion of what a good board looks like, and what the best makeup of a board might be for best decision making, was challenged that the perspective