Category: Thought Leadership

A Board is only as strong as the judgment it can hear

Consider an imagined village gathering. A drum calls everyone together and announces the decisions. Its sound commands attention, and people remember it long after the gathering ends.
But before the drum sounded, a spider had been weaving connections between people, carrying ideas and shaping opinions. The drum was audible; the spider’s influence was less visible. The loudest voice is not always the one that moves the community.
Boardrooms can work in much the same way. Airtime and influence are not the same thing. To understand the quality of a board’s judgment, we must examine both what happens during the discussion and what has already shaped it.
A board can have the right skills around the table and still fail to use them. Its members may collectively understand finance, operations, people, technology, risk and the organisation’s wider environment, resulting in a board that looks well composed on paper. Yet, it may not see what is actually shaping its most material decisions.

When Pressure Enters the Boardroom

Those moments, when the tension is so thick in the Boardroom that you can cut it with a knife, tend to sneak up more often when the organisation is under pressure. They arrive without being calculated into the room.

I prefer to the called in prior to cultures becoming toxic, but I generally find myself called in when tension runs high between the NEDs and the executives – and most of the time both have legitimate reasons to be tense. Frustration is palpable and, before you know it, an us-versus-them atmosphere is created. I am often amazed at how a group of good people divides itself into camps where each considers the other not worthy of their trust. And often the cost of the tension to the organisation is not calculated or even acknowledged. Especially not when the organisation is in crisis.

When People Doing the Right Thing Stand Alone

As we grow older, experience bends and reshapes the things we believe. Sometimes we see the reshaping and are consciously aware of where it takes us. Sometimes we only realise long after the fact that the bending happened. I have a long list of items that have been bent and reshaped in my consciousness. I am pretty sure that some of them are not yet in my conscious mind. I was recently reminded of one of my reshaped opinions when I was asked to speak at the University of Johannesburg’s annual Corruption Summit.
There was a time in my career when a younger version of me stood before professionals and told them that they must do the right thing—even when they had to stand alone. I said it with conviction, because it was the right thing to say. But, with more life experience under my belt, I now understand that I had a too narrow view back then.

Culture Before Catastrophe

Growth does not simply make an organisation bigger. It changes the social system through which work gets done.

Recent work with a client in a growth phase reminded me how important it is to be intentional about shaping the right culture for the organization as early as possible. To the credit of the founders of the organization, they did not wait until the culture had become toxic before they recognized that they needed to work on the culture of the organization. They saw the signs of a growing company reshaping itself as new people entered, and immediately reached out for assistance. That was a refreshing experience for me. Normally I get called in when the organization is already in trouble, and when it is far more challenging to turn a dysfunctional or toxic culture around.

When Ethics and Compliance Cast a Shadow

Some topics are not easy to write about. Not because we do not know what our views are about them, but because we know how easily the views may be misunderstood—especially by those who prefer a version of pristine ethics and compliance that does not allow for shadows.
I know. Ethics and compliance shadows? That is where you land when you take the liberty—perhaps a little audaciously—of borrowing a concept from one discipline and applying it to another. I have borrowed from psychology and found the result illuminating enough to risk a few furrowed brows.

Menopause Is a Leadership Issue

Since it has become clear that organisations that are deliberate about ensuring diversity in leadership tend to be more successful, many organisations have been trying to strengthen the pipeline of women into senior leadership. They invest in development programmes targeting women, are intentional around targets and succession plans, as well as mentoring of women in the leadership pipeline. Then, just as many women reach the point at which their experience, judgement and influence are at their most valuable they hit a wall. A natural biological transition suddenly makes remaining at work considerably harder – and the organisation is often entirely unprepared for it.

When Leadership Wounds the Conscience

The last thing I expected that day was an apology. For a few seconds that felt like an eternity, I was at a loss for words. The young man sitting opposite me had just admitted that he had helped fabricate stories about me because his boss had instructed him to do so. I remember my anger. What I did not understand then was the injury he had suffered himself.

When reputational damage penetrates the skin of an organisation

That conversation fundamentally changed the way I think about organisational reputation…
There are two stories about organisational reputation that occasionally surface in my memory. They stuck with me primarily because I was somehow in the thick of things. These stories are stark reminders of how negative organizational reputation has an impact on the innocents in the organisation. Reputation is never confined to the boardroom, and ethical failure always creates collateral damage.