How would you know if your board lacked an important perspective? Is your board room overflowing with finance experts with hardly a lawyer in sight?
Identifying your boards strengths and weaknesses is vital to developing well-rounded governance that drives long-term value.
Discover how tracking your boards skills will help inform your succession planning while helping you forge a more thoughtful and diverse board of directors.
The Group-Think Challenge
The Harvard Business Review observes that “the problem is how boards get formed and how you fill vacancies. It might be unconscious bias. Sometimes, it’s laziness. ‘Oh, we have an opening, who do we know?’ He shared that many times board members only knew people like them.”
That’s led to an emerging consensus that boards must possess a broad range of knowledge, experience, and skills.
Improving Your Diversity of Thought
HBR looked at how firms are tackling this challenge through the use of “assessment where you periodically look at the skill sets that you would ideally want on the board, given the business it’s in, and then the skill sets you have, and you identify any missing. That gives you an opening to say, ‘Oh, okay, we need to look for somebody who understands manufacturing abroad.’”
Diversity That Drives Value
One interviewee didn’t mince words, “Having a diversity on the board does not just mean having a bunch of CEOs or a bunch of capitalists….Having board members with different roles whether it’s a CIO or a CTO or you know independent board directors that come from a different background is really good. You know you might have somebody from HR on the board. People coming from that diverse role I think really does help a board to get better results.”
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