The post pandemic board - a new collaborative endeavour PR File - Flipbook - Page 18
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The post pandemic board: a new collaborative endeavour
Valued attributes such as sound judgement and
wisdom are here to stay; some believe that these
are best refined in chair roles where the need to
work with continual nuance and ambiguity sharpens
intuition. Chairs are growing, where they can, those
who will follow in their footsteps: “It’s made me
more driven to put people from a wider range of
backgrounds on, for example, my committees, my
advisory boards, where I can develop them and
help them to mature. I am making it work for new
people.”
Finally, vulnerability fosters openness. At least one
chair we heard of routinely asked the Board at the
end of every meeting “so, how are you feeling? Who
wants to give feedback?” As a member of that board,
our contributor said that they at first rolled their
eyes before really thinking about what was going
on in the room. Their conclusion was that, although
it seemed counter-instinctive at first, there was a
major benefit in allowing people to open up and talk
about their frustrations. The key to doing this well,
they said, was authenticity.
“Be open without being walked over. You need
humour, sensitivity, to know your brief.”
“The organisation’s future is more important
than the serenity of the board.”
Divergent thinking requires a different style of
chairing. Chairs are willing to be open about the
challenges they have personally faced in the course
of diversifying their boards while also attempting
to maintain consensus, sometimes in highly
pressurised conditions.
The ability that boards have to connect with
their audiences and communities directly is
game-changing; yet many chairs have learned that
induction and onboarding is now more important
than it was before, and that each person on the
Board has to be reminded about their individual and
collective accountabilities. No longer can this simply
be an assumption.
Challenges with chairing boards that have had on
them a very wide variety of perspectives and thinking
styles range from managing potential for conflict
– “conflict starts when you fail to explore or give
due credit to those opposed to a view” – to fronting
up individual board members who use negative
behaviours to claim ground or take a representative
stance that undermines collegiality: “diversity
can create friction due the ways in which people
interpret information. What then happens is that
fissures left unchecked can turn into deeper grooves
and affect relationships … What is interesting is
how profoundly we come from our professional
experience: our analytical frameworks are borne
from different professional conditioning”.
In their pre-pandemic and earlier ‘performance
managing’ role, boards were good at holding
their executives to account; holding a mirror up
to themselves has been a newer and sometimes
uncomfortable requirement. In 2022, board
development, including frequent reviews of
composition, skills development and team dynamics,
is regarded as essential and set to become a more
substantial part of the chairing role across all
sectors.
As one participant put it: “not everyone is coming
with you to that obvious place anymore”. Chairs
are finding that they need to invest far more time
and energy in creating the culture they need, and
conditions for consensus and progress. “Good board
members must now be able to listen to, and take
account of, a new diversity of views which they
might once simply have dismissed with a shrug.
A good chair may or may not be able to guarantee
consensus, but they absolutely have to enable and
encourage the expression of contrary views provided
that they are expressed rationally and reasonably,
and must ensure that other colleagues reflect
upon them and give them due weight in reaching
decisions.”
However, consensus is a means to an end for the
post pandemic board; but it’s not the end in itself:
“My personal challenge has been to ensure that
consensus building does not become a race to find
the lowest common denominator”. Another said:
“I enjoy building a consensus, but that doesn’t
mean that I’m happy to compromise on matters
of principle simply to keep everyone on board.
Consensus isn’t the main objective. I would rather
a board takes a decision that is effective than one
which is anodyne but keeps everyone around the
table relatively happy. One consequence of boards
with a greater breadth of life experience is that easy
consensus is less likely than once it was. By and
large that’s a good thing.”