Tuesday, May 5, 2020

The Corporate Board with Fundamental Responsibilities

The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles, overseeing a performance management system and monitoring business performance, management performance, as well as their own performance continuously.

The modern digital board has many responsibilities, and also gets a lot of distractions. It needs to laser focus on the most critical perspectives to steer the business in the right direction.

In practice, the corporate board directors are able to guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and assessment of strategic management and performance, as well as the overall organizational maturity. Ultimately, the corporate board takes the praise or blame depending largely on their ability to take fundamental responsibilities and influence the business outcomes.


Deciding what the expectations of management are: The business world has shifted from industrial age to information age, now in the digital era, the fundamental of management concept is still the same - craft the art out of necessity to address the current business relationship between the employee and organization and produce the premium business outcome. Whereby the BoD assumes the dual role of guidance and governance steering, whilst leaving the day-to-day leadership/management processes and practices in the hands of the C-level executives and holding them accountable and supporting the management team in achieving performance outcomes and ensuring the business is on the right track to reach well-defined business goals. Instead of simply saying that an assigned work was completed successfully, but giving time for evaluating how the work was achieved in terms of planning, use of available resources, clarity of direction, how teamwork was achieved (not only within a project but in using the knowledge/experience of other people). Keep in mind, performance measures are numbers in context, results related to your strategy. It's not only about the performance now, but also about the future performance with a long-term perspective.

In fact, the governance and management disciplines go hand in glove, and the corporate board decides what the expectations of management are. Instead of simply saying that an assigned work was completed successfully, the management should spend time on evaluating how the work was achieved in terms of planning, use of available resources, clarity of direction, capital investment, how teamwork was achieved (not only within a project but in using the knowledge/experience of other people). The corporate board’s strategic oversight helps the management clarify how each part of the organization, including all of the key functions must "put it all together" to be successful in implementing the strategy, bringing tangible business results, and reaching the business vision ultimately.

Deciding whether management is achieving expectations: Corporate boards oversee the performance of the management team and the performance of the business. The challenge of digital management is to set the priority right in strategy execution and manage the tactics with efficiency to drive high-performance business results. The board’s business performance monitoring is not limited to financial performance only, but also to the firm’s performance in creating value for employees and customers.


 In achieving the role of the performance monitor, the board needs to decide whether management is achieving expectations, gain an in-depth understanding of what’s blocking business achievements, targets, and advise the management on the maximization of the business capital allocation and improvement of the multidimensional shareholder’s value.

The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles, overseeing a performance management system that encourages responsible communication, enforces accountability, improves decision-making effectiveness, harnesses process transparency, and monitoring business performance, management performance, as well as their own performance continuously.

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