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Risk – the forgotten axis

Almost every week another building, usually in Wellington, is evacuated because it’s deemed ‘Earthquake Prone’ and either covered in plastic sheeting or left to rot, while the hapless owners consider how they’ll afford the repairs and strengthening that the engineers have mandated. This week for a change it was the turn of the South Island’s largest high school Burnside High in Christchurch.The Wellington City Council’s 2027 deadline for remediation is approaching...

Three things they don’t teach you at ‘Board Boot Camp’

Nobody’s born a director. We don’t grow into being a governor, the way we do with walking, talking, parenting and even, to some degree, making a success of a job. All of these are essentially skills we learn as individuals.Becoming an effective director requires a range of technical, social and communication skills, where we learn to contribute as one of a group, rather than with individual authority.When a new member joins your board, you want them to contribute as soon as possible. This is...

Before the main course –

Do you recognise this board? Directors arrive shortly before the scheduled start; you take your places, open your board packs and work your way through the agenda, item by item; as the chair closes the meeting, you shut your pack, gather your iPad and phone, and head to the taxi. Other than exchanging a few pleasantries when you take a break for coffee, you barely make eye contact with the other directors, let alone speak to them individually.Perhaps you’ve had some good discussion and made so...

The shift we’ve been expecting in Air New Zealand’s strategy?

Has Air New Zealand’s market strategy changed – or is it simply now more obvious?I’ll start by saying that I have been a relatively frequent, usually satisfied, flyer with Air New Zealand for a long time (my Frequent Flyer number has five digits and I’ve accumulated 14 ‘banked years’ of membership).In the last three years, every airline in the world has faced challenging headwinds and has had to make tough choices. A couple of stories about our national airline in the last fortnight ...

No such thing as ‘Invisible Leadership’

Photo: RNZ / Katie Todd...

Four times twice as much: how the Chair’s job has grown

The latest edition of the Australian Company Director magazine quotes a senior board chair describing how the role has evolved in recent years:‘Where once the rule of thumb was that the chair did three times the work of a non-executive director (NED), they now do four times the work of NEDs, who in turn are working twice as hard as they used to.’For the mathematically challenged, I think she’s saying that a board chair today has about eight times the typical workload an NED had, only a few...

Ten minutes that will transform your (Zoom) board meetings

I’d guess that most of us have held more board meetings virtually than in person over the last 18 months. Remote meetings, still a rarity two years ago, are business as usual and here to stay.We’re learning how to make the most of them: To interpret non-verbal signals (aka body language) from only our colleagues’ faces; To stop people talking over each other, most of the time;And to manage the unusual constraint that everything we say and every facial gesture is seen by everyone ...

The three levels of medalling, in board diversity

Over that inspiring fortnight of distraction, the Tokyo Olympics, two new verbs have joined the mainstream, as in ‘I can’t believe we’ve medalled... we were only aiming to podium at the next Games.’  As those verbs have entrenched themselves in the sports lexicon, so ‘diversity’ has become possibly the most discussed, most abused and most poorly understood term in board vocabulary. Let’s look at diversity in the language of the last few weeks:    ...

When your board member is the subject expert: three hidden traps

How often do we hear boards discussing the type of skills they’d like to attract … ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had an engineer/micro-biologist/blockchain expert on the board?’I’m fully in favour of making sure our boards have people with the right skills and experience for the business. We’ve all heard of corporate train-wrecks where their absence has been a factor: insurance companies with no insurance or risk experience; building companies with no construction experience; ev...

When the Chair wants to become the Boss

Last week the New Zealand Herald revealed that, among candidates for the chief executive’s role at Greater Wellington Regional Council, the current Council Chair Daran Ponter had thrown his hat into the ring.It’s far from the first time that this has happened, not only in local government, and it can work perfectly well – as long as the process is handled fairly and impartially. The first problem the Council faces, of course, is that the Chair is the person most likely to have be...

The (other) Rule of Six – and the mistake we make in using it

Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced the ‘Rule of Six,’ limiting gatherings to six people, in order to slow the spread of Covid-19. This brought to mind the older ‘Six Block Rule’ that directors have used to guide them on their capacity to accept new roles. The ‘Rule’ proposes that, in general, a competent director can manage up to six full board positions (blocks) at any time, with a chair role counting as two blocks, and a committee chair as one-and-a-half. It...

The Four Levels of Board Maturity … and what you need to do about yours

Some people tower over their profession: Albert Einstein – physical sciences, Chuck Yeager – test flying, Florence Nightingale – nursing (and statistics – check her out). In corporate governance, few are as respected as Professor Bob Garratt, author of ‘The Fish Rots from the Head’. It’s an excellent metaphor to illustrate his discussion of board leadership, albeit, as a marine biologist once advised me, biologically incorrect. Professor Garratt is one of the western worl...

Who saw that coming? The A.R.T. of Risk Governance

I don’t suppose any of us fully anticipated what we, and the rest of the world, have experienced in these last few months.  Most of our boards have well considered and often colourful risk registers, which they review regularly. So why was this coronavirus such an ambush? How many registers contained something like: ‘Global pandemic, forcing us to close our business, and generate zero revenue for several weeks’? Perhaps many Chief Risk Officers were too nervous to present an...