The post pandemic board - a new collaborative endeavour PR File - Flipbook - Page 17
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The post pandemic board: a new collaborative endeavour
“The era of the all-powerful chairman is for the
birds.”
Boards from 2022 are more likely to be chaired by
people who regard themselves as convenors and
facilitators rather than outright leaders and torch
bearers in the traditional sense. “It’s all about
trust-building to underpin challenge and support,
where we are using governance as a tool but not as
an end in itself.” People who feel they are successful
chairing boards in the current context seem to
accept their personal accountability (after all, it is
they who are ultimately carrying the can) while being
very good at managing a collective process that
brings issues to a decision.
While chair roles frequently carry very high levels
of accountability and personal risk, the task of
influencing requires a different skillset to the past
and chairs therefore need to adapt quickly from one
way of thinking and looking at a problem to another.
Influencing skills were already prioritised prior
to 2020, yet this aspect of the role is likely to have
assumed a new significance because of the need to
take a much wider range of people, (board members,
staff and stakeholders) on the journey.
Many chairs we spoke to talked about the
fundamental role of trust: about how they had
invested in earning the trust of their boards and the
vitally important role that trust now plays in their
board room. Trust and mutual respect are familiar
concepts in the context of the Chair / Chief Executive
relationship, yet a safe space is needed within the
board room itself to “build genuine trust within the
team and collective trust in the process.”
On a much more fundamental level, organisations
need to be trusted simply to survive: their boards
need to give confidence by presenting a membership
that reflects the communities served; they need to
live their values rather than simply publishing them
on the website, and they need to build trust by being
good at what they do.
Effective chairs know how to give people their voice
and their space. In the safe space they are creating
for their boards to function well and give of their
best, their board members are encouraged to be
more open, more personally flexible and tolerant
of contributions that may previously have been
considered leftfield.
The same safe space provides the conditions in
which the Executive can also be fully open with
regard to its assurance role.
Chairs say they are now spending more time
with individual board members outside of the
boardroom than previously. However, they also
seem to be taking a more analytical approach to
board members, being curious about how they can
best add value, wanting to invest in understanding
their strengths and in pre-empting their stance on
complex or contentious issues: “No one gets out of
bed to do a bad job. Analyse why people behave or
respond in certain ways. Dehumanise at your peril.”
Chairs who lead their boards by convening and
facilitating typically take more of a back seat in
discussions, spend more of their time listening and
reflecting while concentrating on the dynamics of
a much more varied group as they facilitate and
summarise debate. As one chair we talked to said,
“as Chair you quite often have to focus more on what
you don’t say…”. Another wondered whether this shift
in style and personal impact in meetings had led
their board members to underestimate the amount
they actually did in their role, particularly where
those people perceived a model chair as someone
who voiced their opinions and would lead from the
front.
Coaching skills (“Insight, reflective practice and
other coaching skills are increasingly useful.”) and
emotional intelligence are rising to the top of list
when it comes to chairing today’s organisations.
Experience of having chaired organisations
previously is seen as particularly valuable in the
current climate, yet how a chair works, how they
think and how they relate to the world around them
is more likely to determine their success than their
career achievements alone.
Participants pointed to many attributes that
they consider to be important now, and that they
expect to rise in importance in future, such as
having the energy to maintain networks, being
hungry to keep learning, and having a high changeorientation and active interest in the future. It is
likely that chairs will increasingly benefit from
multi-sector experiences which have proven their
versatility. Capacity to influence and to build trust
and credibility by tuning into agendas, perceptions
and risks may soon outweigh the value of senior
accomplishment alone.