Corporate board leaders should be able to envision and determine what the future needs to look like, scrutinize current people, processes, and organizational structure, advocate necessary changes and innovation for leading a seamless paradigm shift.
Leadership influence at the board level is important because the board directors play a significant role in setting good policies, advocating innovation and people-centricity, and improving organizational effectiveness and maturity.
Innovation advocacy: Innovation differentiates the leader from followers at the corporate level. Innovation cannot be separated from a specific business purpose and in a broad context. Innovation needs a level of guidance, it has to deliver business goals and objectives. Corporations need effective business processes and cultures to sustain cross-boundary engagement to discover external ideas, as well as interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise to manage those ideas to achieve business values. The corporate board’s oversight is critical for meaningful innovation as often corporate board leaders are interdisciplinary outliers who can think out of the box, advocate, steer and sustain innovation, update guidelines, optimize processes, develop and scale governance best and next practices.
In practice, there are both opportunities and risks for every innovation investment. The differentiation between a good innovation and bad innovation is the people’s attitude toward risk, and the management’s ability to ensure risk management cohesiveness. The BoDs should wear the venture capitalist’s mindset, work closely with business executives, continually evaluate individual and aggregate investments in terms of value, risk, and reward, and oversee portfolios of innovation investments for achieving high ROIs. Without the corporate board’s oversight, the management without the right dose of innovation appetite often cannot ensure they would get expected return on investment
People-centricity advocacy: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity, the senior leadership such as corporate boards set the tone and expectation throughout the organization. There is a symbiotic relationship between various teams across organizations which leads to realization of higher goals of people-centric efforts. The BoDs can sense emergent opportunities and predict potential risks, provide an insightful outlook about what the future of the organization should be and what the existing problems and challenges are, in order to build a people-centric organization. The affinity or advocacy state from the top down starting at the board level is definitely imperative for improving people-centricity. Exceptional people-centricity takes a holistic approach with the "horizontal" coordination approach and vertical permeation, as well as the need for clearly designated cross-functional collaboration and interaction in building true customer-centric organizations.
Autonomy is the tone in running a high-mature people-centric organization. However, overly control management discipline or ineffective governance practices perhaps take away liberties that are essential to people doing their jobs in a creative way. People-centricity means humans are the focal point from a cross-functional perspective, and customer delight moves from customer service to customer experience optimization. Exceptional corporate board leadership requires visionary leadership that builds and rewards an organizational culture focused on putting people at the center of every employees' short and long term business purpose. Corporate board advocates personalization as it is a holistic business management effort that starts with strategic intention to put everything you do to fit customers’ needs, with structural alignment, empathetic design, research and strategic insights.
Innovative governance advocacy: In the real world, too many boards get sucked into reviewing quarterly financials, and analyst opinions, being compliance-based rather than performance-driven. Predictive, proactive, and performance-led boardroom governance practices should lead the way. To predict is to control; to co-create is to influence what you would like to bring to the table. Corporate board takes a strategic oversight of business principle, planning, prioritization, process, performance, practice of business management. To improve corporate board leadership effectiveness, it’s important to shift from reactive to predictive and proactive. It helps the organization align their business reality with digital strategy, develop the future perspective, bring people together in a common and committed effort, and move people in the right direction.
Some trends are more significant than others in their impact on business growth. Some corrections require more drastic paradigm shifts with corresponding economic impacts or predictable business challenges. Thus, insightful boards need to set a good governance standard that provides a common corporate "language" and work instructions to decide and take actions for either grasping opportunities or managing risks. Being proactive definitely means keeping abreast of standards and auditing to all regulations that may affect the company. It is a continuous process that keeps you current and diminishes the outcomes of not being compliant. Vision and strategy are the ongoing conversations in the boardroom. Board, shareholders, management and the stakeholders, all these parties would perform to the vision and mission of the organization, it would increase the performance and maximize business benefits.
When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” normality, unpredictability and the probability of surprising emergent properties bring both unprecedented opportunities and risks to organizations across industrial sectors today. Corporate board leaders should be able to envision and determine what the future needs to look like, scrutinize current people, processes, and organizational structure, advocate necessary changes and innovation for leading a seamless paradigm shift.
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