The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Corporate Board's Responsibility and Accountability May 2020

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.

Here are the multiple perspectives of the responsibilities and accountabilities of the strategic boardroom.

The Corporate Board's Responsibility and Accountability

The Corporate Board with Fundamental Responsibilities 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.

An Accountable Corporate Board Due to the complexity of today’s business, faster-paced changes, and continuous disruptions and distractions, there is a multitude of organizational gaps existing in today’s organization. It is important to articulate the strategic rationale behind the business venture, make leaders accountable for implementing the strategy.

Is Reputation the responsibility of the Board The organizations across the globe face more pressure and ambiguity these days, as media continue to report " reputational ‘surprises from some prestigious companies, and more organizations work hard to sustain their brand, but how to manage organizational reputation, and is the reputation the responsibility of Board?

The Digital Corporate Board’s Top Priorities and Responsibilities The corporate directorship is the leadership discipline to steer the organization in the right direction. Whereby the BoD assumes the dual role of guidance and governance steering, whilst leaving the day-to-day leadership/management process in the hands of the C-level executives. The new breed of BoD as the directorial role should be able to think outside the box, bring a fresh viewpoint to pinpoint the possible blind spots, and improve leadership maturity. Here is a set of digital corporate board’s top priorities and responsibilities.

An Accountability Mind Accountability is “the obligation of an individual or organization to account for its activities, accept responsibility for them, and to disclose the results in a transparent manner.” (business dictionary.com). Self-accountability and collective accountability are that we each are creating knowingly or unknowingly the world, environment, culture that we find ourselves in, and we take responsibility and we grow with it.

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