The post pandemic board - a new collaborative endeavour PR File - Flipbook - Page 21
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The post pandemic board: a new collaborative endeavour
“Sometimes my role is to support the CEO;
sometimes it’s to put the brakes on my CEO. But I
do think that CEOs now want to work more closely
with their chairs.” The closer working relationship
between the Chair and Chief Executive (and by
extension Board and executive team) also requires
greater investment by most chairs as the Board and
Executive work together to shape strategy and make
key decisions about the organisation’s direction,
relevance and longer-term sustainability.
One contributor referred to “parity of esteem with
the CEO”. Far more than a mark of respect, their
point was that the Chair and CEO hold equally
weighted roles in the current climate, and that
the Chair needs to understand what is going to be
important for the organisation and the underlying
causal factors: “part of working in an unstable
environment means you have to be present in
the marketplace with the overarching purpose of
listening, absorbing and understanding.”
A number of chairs who engaged with us hold the
view that the relationship with the CEO should be far
more Mentor / Mentee than it has been historically,
albeit with a healthy regard for the accountability
inherent in the Chair role.
Some chairs point to specific issues they have
needed to deal with on their boards as a direct result
of the 2020-2022 period. “Legacy lingers” said one,
who had been chairing a board which had entrenched
legacy issues, further compounded by the pandemic.
Their experience had been that no matter how
brightly they painted the picture of the future, or
wanted to instigate their change and reform agenda,
they had needed to pay attention to legacies that
needed careful and sensitive unpicking first.
Another referred to the pandemic period as having
revealed fault lines in governance procedures in
one of their organisations which they had needed
to invest significant personal time in addressing:
“We’ve had to pay much more attention to good
governance: the finance just hasn’t been there since
the pandemic and we’ve still got big issues with that.
All the things that bubbled up in the public space
that made me think ‘are our governance procedures
what they should be?’ … I’ve also had to be much
more politically astute and to be able to consider
risks to reputation”.
Not all chairs said that the actual amount of time
they were spending in their roles had increased. Yet
there seemed to be consensus that, in 2022, the way
the chair role is being carried out is necessarily more
applied, intense and personally involved than in the
years leading up to 2020.