Skills of Governance the Verb (not boring Boards!)
This short article gives you practical mapping of the main essential skills that you need to try and make sure you recruit and keep active in your Board. It is part of my series of articles about de-mystifying being part of Boards, whether that is as Charity Trustees, Company Non-Executive and Executive Directors, or Public Appointees, (appointed by Scottish Ministers to Govern the businesses that the Scottish Government directly control - Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, NHS etc).
What we don’t want is boring Boards! - We want alive, diverse humans.
The skills of governance is dynamic and better understood as a verb.
I am a technical expert in many of the areas of specialism to do with Governance. This includes the legal forms, the way that founding documents work in practice, the training of Chairs and the reviewing of governance structures. However more than that, I am passionate about the potential leadership and power that good governance can contribute to making sure all businesses become and remain to be a force for good.
The other related articles are Code Red for Humanity, Logical Family and Systems Theory, Ethics in the Board Room and other articles searchable under terms like ‘Ethical Leadership’ on my website.
What are the key skills of Governance that we need to govern this organisation well?
One of the things I regularly work on with CEO’s, Chairs of Boards and with Scottish Government’s sponsorship (funding) of Public Bodies is this core question. What are the key skill mixes that we need in order to govern this organisation well?
Most often, this is reduced to… ‘can we have a lawyer?’ ‘can we have an accountant?’ ‘can we have someone who Chairs well?’ and ‘oh and what about someone who represents service users or the community?’
My point of writing this article and putting up a drop-down menu of key skills is to demystify the reality of being a board member and to enable all of you to think about who you know who could be contributing to governance.
The core of all effective businesses is diversity of thinking at the top level - we know this and the core to all successful businesses is diversity of thought.
Diversity of Skills of Governance enables organisational resilience.
The thing about diversity of thinking is that, thankfully, humans are all different and that you need a decent group of people who are all different in order to be your critical friends to your business. The various reviews of the FTSE 100 type companies that have looked at who is on their board and how well-performing they are in single bottom-line thinking. The research shows simply about business success. Namely that, time after time, that those with more diverse boards perform better on the FTSE 100. You can read this latest Institute of Directors article talking about the business benefits shown by McKinsey research.
However, to understand more about the true benefits of Diversity of Thinking in organisational resilience and triple bottom line performance measures you will need to work a bit harder to understand the types of diversity of skills that are needed.
A good start on this is to read the 6 in depth case studies about harnessing diversity of thought that I helped research and write as part of my work with the Ethical Standards Commission. These show the tactics and strategies that government ministers have employed (via the Chairs of public bodies and the sponsorship teams within Scottish Government) to ensure that a positive culture and practice is co-created to make good use of the diversity that is sitting around the board room tables. These case studies show the impact of saving significant sums of taxpayers money, the political benefits of less institutional mistakes creating U-Turns in policy and the constant building of systems of trust with the people and communities that the public sector serves. Which when I think about the context of the toxic culture of the leadership of the UK parliament's cabinet, gives us all a sense of how hard it can be to co-create the right culture in public boards with all the media scrutiny.
Where you can learn more about the Skills of Governance
Imposter syndrome - also known as ‘how do I make sure I’m Appropriate in this culture?’
There is also a lot more on the Ethical Standards Commission website about Diversity in Governance, you can read long range reports here and note that the ESC publish to Parliament every year the progress being made as it is a declared goal of the Scottish Parliament to have public boards that are reflective (not representative) of the public diversity they serve.
Yet, at the same time, it is also true that most people who serve on boards experience some levels of ‘imposter syndrome’. Research shows that even when you have all the skills and are recruited through proper warm processes, you will find it can take you a year to fully find your role in the group experience of being part of a Board. This is just part of the timescales of how long it takes to reap the benefits of the talent that is within Non-Executive members of your board. The same in voluntary boards, trustees of charities, Non-Executive Directors of private companies and Public Appointees.
Diversity of thought takes time to bring out well. Yet the business, sustainability and resilience benefits are massive.
What do I think are the skills that make up a good, diverse board?
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Seeing the bigger picture is definitely an essential ingredient for any good governance as a verb.
Your governance connects you to the outer world. It helps you look at the context within which your business your organisation your social enterprise needs to operate.
Your governance is not your internal world, it is not your executive.
One of the fundamental differences between governance as a verb and internal operations is that governance as a verb is about outward looking thinking, it's about thinking about the world that we exist in and what it needs.
So, seeing the bigger picture involves things like considering the issues and topics that may affect the organisation strategy.
Thinking about where planning and timeframes come from, and how urgent issues really are, and whether the world really needs what your organisation is about.
At an extreme level of skill, seeing the bigger picture means people who keep abreast with the developments. People who don't just listen to the normal news cycles, but actually have sources of information that they check and they verify about what society really needs. The people who can look at the implications of those things and be analytical about the contribution that your organisation makes.
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At the lowest level, this is about understanding that things change and what creates successful change?
At the highest level, it would be people who really have embedded successful change programmes and understand how difficult culture change is, but have seen it and have put in place policies to support change.
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‘Governance as a verb’ involves good, appropriate support and supervision of the organisation, so:
Good enough scrutiny
Good enough due diligence
Asking questions and waiting and insisting on answers
Being able to check things
Being able to then support the organisation to do better
Provide the kind of support that enables better performance.
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This might be obvious to some people, but actually, you do need people on your board who will be critical friends, and their ability to be critical is the important part.
Their ability to communicate it in a friendly and constructive way is also important, but actually, their ability to drive and enable quality decisions to be made with the executive, with the rest of the board is about driving decision making.
But that actually comes from an ability to be objective, to have integrity of data, to be measured and proportionate and to have accounted for one's own biases in order to seek to analyse what is needed.
Very often, on an average board - be it a big organisation or a small - you find that the information that comes to the Board is either too much or too little. It doesn't matter whether it's a hugely analytical piece of paper with a lot of graphics on it, it still might not tell you what you really need and want to know.
Therefore the ability to know what you need to know as well as what you want to know whilst also being able to separate out your wants from your needs is a highly desirable set of skills.
Because the impact of this skill is to enable the business to make evidence based analytical decisions.
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Although you might flush out the data about the information needed. The Boards ability to actually analyse depends on the quality of debate in the board, not on the skill of any single expert.
I often find myself explaining analysis and decision-making to people who think that they wouldn't be good on a Board unless they had experts status in X or Y or Z.
Therefore you need to be able to ask your questions, say your points and use your presence in the Board room to help everyone else in decision making.
It can be a very powerful influencing tactic to listen well, listen again, and then ask a gentle, yet open question that draws out the truth and the right decisions to come forward.
Very often, Boards don't need experts, in fact, experts can be the worst thing to have on your Board. Experts can take the dynamic away from operating as ‘Governance as a verb’ (collective liability). Governance as a verb is about humility and wisdom which I would call expertise rather than expert status.
N.B. a footnote about definitions of Expert as opposed to Expertise. When you've worked as an administrator in an organisation for five or 20 years, you begin to have expertise about how organisations are organised, but when you've only worked there for two or three years, you probably just have expert status in how to do filing cabinets - that's not the same thing.
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Because you need to work collaboratively with the executive and the Board and your partners, and your ability to summarise to enable other people to think, the ability to communicate the purpose and the strategy are all important in Board members.
They represent the organisation on paper, in practice at AGMs, at conferences, in the badges that they wear on their lapel, and they are very much part of your brand.
So, their ability to communicate about what the organisation does, why it does it, what its purpose is, the ambassadorial aspect of being a Board member is very important to the smallest organisation all the way up to the large ones.
A word for Chairs in relation to Skills of Governance.
Lastly, if you're the Chair of the organisation, then you are doing what I call Chairing, which is a verb - when you are about enhancing everybody else to be governing and operating.
The Chair is not the Fat Controller or the white, male, pale, stale man at the top of the Board, Organisations that believe that are the organisations are yester year. In my opinion those organisations are dinosaurs, they are part of the unconscious patriarchy of how our society can so easily think.
Making Governance a Verb
A good Chair is a conductor of an orchestra and that is actually a big skill, as we know from going and seeing concerts, where you have a conductor or going to see a play or a musical or something.
Further to that, the other skills that you're looking for will include some of the specialist areas.
Everybody needs to be a team worker, everybody needs to be able to knuckle down and help when help is needed.
Everybody needs to be having the heart - the central purpose - the reason for getting out of bed in the morning needs to be in their blood.
Chairing is a verb, not just a noun.
If you have Board members for whom the cause is not their cause, they will just do something boring like manage it, or treat it like governance is a noun rather than a verb.
Developing your Board members takes time though. They can feel like the empty raincoat analogy so easily. It can be a year or more before a Board member truly gets a full sense of their real role because they have to learn what the organisation is like and their role is deliberately distant from the day to day operations. Therefore the Chair’s role is to develop each and every member of their Board with good supervision and annual appraisal type activity. Even if that is just an annual cup of coffee with each board member.
If you would like me to come and do succession planning with your organisation or Board away days, that develop the way your Board work, then please feel free to get in touch. I have been doing Board development work since I was 18 years old.
Other Insights that inform my practice about Governance the Verb.
As you can see in my other articles about Governance, I also work as a Public Appointment Advisor with The Ethical Standards Commission regulating and enabling the Scottish Government to follow good practice in Board recruitment. I do this so that we can achieve the ambition of the Scottish Parliament in having public body boards that are made up of people who are reflective (collectively) of the society that they serve.
I look forward to hearing from you.