Influential Characteristics of Corporate BoDs

And the toughest challenge of all is to have fresh insight, courage, and diplomacy to make the appropriate changes that meet the expectations of shareholders, employees and the financial community alike.

Business ecosystem environment becomes more dynamic, organizations need to hunt for qualified and independent Board members who are aware of their responsibilities and duty to the shareholders and have a good understanding of the organization's strategic direction and its business alternatives. 

Corporate boards as one of the critical top leadership pillars should have a clear vision on how to steer the organization forward, set the right tone and develop high-quality profiles for exemplifying digital leadership.

Strategic insight: Many organizations are inundated with tactical tasks and daily operational duties, they don’t spend enough time on scrutinizing the long term vision, and strategy. Analogically, the corporate board's role is about pulling management out of the trees to see the forest. The top seasoned corporate board of directors with decades of experience should clarify the vision and share invaluable lessons in the past from time to time insightfully. BoDs can contribute a unique viewpoint as the business outlier to examine strategy management meta-process because they don’t evolve in everyday business.

Business transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement, organizational management and corporate boards need to do the regular review to ensure that the business has and continues to build a set of cohesive digital capabilities with a right level of competency to improve strategy management effectiveness. In a world of rapid changes and high levels of uncertainty, great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, and innovative. They make a better influence on improving strategic decision effectiveness over volatility, oversee a variety of business success factors and key leverages, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity, and resolve ambiguity in guiding the organization toward the right direction.

Risk Intelligence: Both businesses and the world become over-complex, hyper-connected. Assuming the risk is highly likely to occur, most of today's risk management is reserved for costly endeavors. The problem with this is that poor decision-making and lack of risk awareness creates more blind spots uncovered and gaps unfilled. In many organizations, much of GRC is reactive in the sense that there is a lot of rushing around trying to fix problems instead of preventing risks. Business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy;

BoDs with risk intelligence are able to bring profound insight in transforming the business up to the next level of business maturity. They play an important role in dealing with uncertainty, enhancing resilience, improving reputation, and increasing flexibility. They can enforce a healthy information based feedback-feedforward cycle to reduce ambiguity and manage uncertainty. They encourage the culture of risk-intelligence and enforce strong GRC disciplines that help executives and management perform a risk analysis, raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization.

Innovative leadership: The corporate boards as one of the top leadership pillars should practice open-minded leadership, make commitment to support innovation initiatives, create the space for cross-boundary communication and collaboration, Because innovation is one of the crucial digital capabilities which are underpinned by varying business elements. The corporate board can help to oversee innovation agenda by asking tough questions to evaluate innovation effectiveness. The corporate board needs to review executive level innovation scoreboard with important KPIs, to keep track of innovation progress and provide invaluable feedback, to justify the initial investment in the past. Once corporate boards are aware of how an innovative culture can be important to the overall health of an organization, they should be asking the "right" questions, offering insights, and encouraging top management participation.

Ideally, an innovative board sets the right tone for the culture of innovation. They are able to reimagine the competitive landscape, find competitive partners that can help their organizations succeed, demonstrate benefits to the global ecosystem in ways at a much faster rate with much broader impact. And the corporate Board clearly has a role to play in all the major essential elements of making an enterprise successful that must include innovation excellence. They experiment with the new structures and procedures, practice innovation leadership persistently.

The Corporate Board is to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, it needs to be more than a rubber stamp. And the toughest challenge of all is to have fresh insight, courage, and diplomacy to make the appropriate changes that meet the expectations of shareholders, employees and the financial community alike. Accountability and oversight are all part of the game changes that boards must address.

Posted in: Board Room,Innovation