Many of the board meetings I attend include discussion that could be described as a fight between courage and fear. Sometimes the fearful decision gets approved as the leadership team seeks to protect the organisation.
However organisations cannot have what they are not willing to become. That requires courage. Leadership teams do not attract things to their organisation – rather they get what they radiate. Radiating fear invites more fear in a self-fulfilling cycle.
When you strip it back to basics – the purpose of your organisation is to bring the vision for its product or service to life. Then the job of the Board and the executive team put all the other components around it – finance, HR, marketing, sales and so on. When the board knows what it is trying to attain it is less likely to focus attention on what it wants to avoid.
Another critical success factor for organisations is the extent to which their board of directors acts as a community, integrating interests and putting aside differences – to be individually and collectively obsessed with what is good for the company.
This requires strong mechanisms for resolving conflicts and making decisions. Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a bad decision. To find a way forward it is useful to focus on principles. You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone will already have agreed upon them.
A virtuous cycle of respect, trust, and candour is what makes great boards great. But there can be tremendous tension in effective boards. This tension is a good thing; without it the organisation is likely to fade into irrelevance. For example, there is always a natural tension between creativity and operational efficiency.
However, this tension makes it harder to cultivate a community and community is necessary to cultivate success. Helping leaders find this delicate path between courage and fear – between tension and community is the job of an executive coach.
The individuals on the board should be smart people with business expertise, who care deeply about the organisation and who are genuinely interested in helping and supporting the CEO and executive team. A bad board member is typically someone who wants to be the smartest guy in the room and talks too much. Success also depends on having the best board team and the best teams are diversity teams. Gender is just one component of diversity.
Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you a better board member. A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see so that you can be who you always knew you could be. An important part of the coach’s skill and service is to never wait to give feedback – a great coach coaches in the moment.
Contact me to discuss the relevance of these ideas to your organisation.
Read here about how to help your organisation to become more agile.
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