Good Boards Inform, Great boards Innovate

Good boards inform, great boards innovate.

The Corporate Board's role is to oversee business strategy, monitor performance, and pull management out of the trees to see the forest. Great boards consist of independent directors who are “rowing together in the boat.” They see the development of strategy as a collective effort between themselves and management, rather than a question of “us versus them.” They spend more time on strategy development, innovation enhancement and improve their leadership maturity, Ultimately, they become the proficient and profound mastermind behind digital transformation:

Envisioning: The corporate board of directors as top directorial roles need to envision and lead the organization towards its future. They are responsible for authorizing and monitoring business strategy, developing good policies offering further constraint/guidance to implementation of strategy, monitoring performance, and managing risks across all domains of interest. Thus, the corporate board directors need to be able to guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and making an assessment of the business strategy and the organization's strategy execution.

The Board of Directors can direct management effectively and appropriately by establishing objectives and defining operational and management parameters limiting management authority. They should be mindful, and insightful, understand the difference between being a Director and the Operator of the business. They need to be able to guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and assessment of the business strategy and organization's execution of the same.

Advising: Corporate board directors as the top business advisor role should build solid thinking blocks; have sufficient knowledge and unique insight to understand the business ecosystem and sense that the digital transformation is multifaceted. So, they can make good policies to ensure a smooth digital paradigm shift, awaken the ecosystem consciousness, start thinking about ways to influence their ecosystems and create new revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative.

Understand the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens, then makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions, develop the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional lens such as the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, organizational and communication sciences, etc, understand, adapt to, and purposefully plan and orchestrate a hyperconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Delegation: The BoD as the governing body must define the management’s job, which is embraced in the purpose, objectives, strategy, and policy of the organization, and must monitor the management’s performance and conformance in order to verify that what was specified is what is actually happening. the Board of Directors monitor and evaluate management and operational performance to ensure efficient and effective progress toward objectives and compliance with operational and management parameters.

To some degree, conformance is inherent within the value-driven performance. In practice, corporate board meetings can be intense with the much more in-depth questioning of management, plans, results, etc, accompanied by much higher levels of holding management accountable. In essence, it is about savvy business people digging in to make the business the best and most valuable it can be. There is no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on performance, both corporate performance and their own performance.

Good boards inform, great boards innovate. The “elephant in the room” question for directors, corporate boards and directors' institutes is authenticity. Many directors are aware of “how time should be prioritized,” but in the heart of the engagement, a different pattern emerges, or so it seems. Ultimately, the corporate board takes the praise or blame depending largely on their ability to influence the business outcomes and drive transformative changes.

Posted in: Board Room,Future of Leadership,Leadership Master