Case Study
Board Assessment and Renewal
“We need to hire additional skilled directors.
We have dominant shareholders and their representatives on our board. Their skills are not aligned to what the company ideally needs and they do not want to rotate out.
Can you help us navigate a sensitive situation with professionalism? And please, we want a pragmatic approach.”
Our Actions
- We set ourselves a task to achieve two outcomes: Ensure all directors felt they owned the journey and ensure a value added commercial outcome.
- Our starting point was the company’s updated strategy.
- We partnered with the board to review the skills matrix relative to the strategy.
- We designed a smart assessment that negated the impact of inflated self assessment.
- We included insight from KMP, investors and proxy advisors.
- Qualitative interviews are usually insightful around board culture and communication. In this situation, the quantitative assessment would provide sufficient pragmatism to make some key changes during this phase.
Results
- All directors agreed on a clear, future focused skills matrix.
- We moved a contentious board dynamic to a pragmatic, positive and phased approach to board renewal.
- In collaboration with the board, we identified that the board missed critical skills in technology governance and supply chain management.
- Two directors agreed to rotate off the board in support of focusing on the company’s future growth.