Top 3 Skills that Board of Directors are missing to achieve high-performance.
Are your Board Meetings boring, unproductive and long?
Whether you are a large public body or a family owned business, board meetings are unavoidable.
Board Meeting are a must-do legal requirement and also demonstrate good governance to your funders, investors, customers and shareholders.
In your role as a Board Member, are you facing challenges with how the board or business is performing?
Are you getting frustrated with:
How the board is guiding or providing input into the overall business strategy and goals?
Following your board duties
Discussing and balancing risk and opportunity.
These can be very hard tasks especially as board meetings are infrequent and now due to Covid-19 many of them are done remotely.
Has the business transformation from in-person to online Board Meetings created an even wider skills and communications gap between your Board Members or strengthened it?
In this blog, Boards123 looks at the top 3 skills that that Board of Directors are missing to achieve high-performance.
Skill 1 - Purpose-driven Leadership
Teamwork is one of the most important skills a Board of Directors can have, but just as important as that is good leadership.
Purpose-driven leadership is defined as creating a clarity of purpose to gain and sustain employee engagement, motivation and discretionary effort. (Source: Collingwood)
This can help the organisation to be more focused on core values and beliefs it also follows the leadership model that prioritises purpose, character and integrity.
Here is what you can do to be a high-performance board of directors with purpose-driven leadership.
The chairperson can improve their interactions with other members by consulting with each member well ahead of the time to identify agenda items.
This will provide structure as issues and important talking points can be researched in advance to provide the board with the most up to date information.
Preparation is key for board meetings it shows that the chairperson cares and everyone can make informed decisions.
A simple tip for good leadership in a board is equal airtime, board members listen more if you listen to them!
Leadership does not end in the boardroom, it's important to follow up with minutes, notes, reports, and phone calls to reinforce the decisions and make members stadisfied and informed.
Skill 2 - Boardroom Culture
Everyone knows how meetings can go, someone is checking his or her emails or glancing at a news story during a board meeting.
Bad boardroom practices can damage relationships with members and managers due to the culture of the board.
A board’s culture is defined by the unwritten rules that influence directors’ interactions and decisions. These include the mindsets, hidden assumptions, group norms, beliefs and values. (Source: Spencer Stuart)
Research has shown that managers become reluctant to send bad news up the line to boards.
This is where organisation transparency suffers and a divide with the board can occur.
This is the opposite of what a high-performance board looks like.
If a director looks like they do not want to be at the meeting, the boardroom has a poor culture, there’s a high chance that other board members will project a similar attitude and hence culture.
There are fundamental behaviours that you can work into the boardroom to develop and nurture boardroom culture, such as;
establishing mutual support
respect among board members
fostering a board that is open to change
encouraging director preparation
bolstering the active listening skills of directors.
(Source: Ivey Publishing)
Skill 3 - Open Dialogue versus Conflict
We all know that a little conflict starts the best discussions.
Boardrooms would be far less effective places without a degree of constructive tension.
Research shows that managers spend as much as 25 to 40 percent of their time working to resolve conflict in the workplace. (Source: Crestcom)
There are 2 types of conflict in a workplace:
real professional differences
power struggles and personality issues
To achieve a high-performance boardroom both types of conflicts need solutions.
The best defenses against conflict often involve preparing thoroughly before the meeting, and chairing strongly during the meeting.
Providing a measurable good agenda makes it easier to recognize that the group is going off course.
To prevent the meeting rules such as ‘If an issue takes more than 20min to resolve it will be moved to a separate or next meeting’.
One of the best ways to prevent conflicts is knowing how to spot the first sign which us body language.
A good board will make sure that members have the opportunity to express disagreement as soon as possible, so that issues can be resolved and the discussion can proceed on a correct basis.
Exchanging information with an open dialogue can reduce likeliness of conflict.
This can be done by board members if they:
establish a safe environment for dialogue
develop a common base of knowledge-conceptual
explore questions
moving from dialogue to action
Effective boards should be places of harmony and collaboration as well as challenge and independence
About the Author
This blog was written by Zuzanna Deska
Release Date: 26 March 2021
About Boards123
Boards123 provides software and services to Boards of Directors.
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