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Welcome to The Boardroom Path, the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career.
[00:00:03] Ralph Grayson: Welcome to The Boardroom Path by Sainty Hird & Partners. I'm your host, Ralph Grayson, a partner in the board practice. In this series, we'll offer practical steps and useful perspectives for aspiring and newly appointed NEDs. Throughout its 30 year history, Sainty Hird has recruited senior board members across the City, Industry, the Public Sector and NGOs.
We're now also evaluating those boards, as well as coaching and mentoring those seeking to transition from an executive career into the boardroom. So we'll be speaking to some leading figures in the board advisory and NED world. Specifically, we'll seek their counsel about how and where to spend time and energy to make an effective transition into the boardroom. The goal is to equip recent and aspiring NEDs with tips, tactics and strategies to be most effective and build a successful career as a board director. In the process, we aim to help you to think more about who you are, how you operate and how you can make this work in the boardroom.
My guest today is Fiona Hathorn, the CEO of Women on Boards UK, now part of Nurole. Fiona leads a purpose-led business working to increase diversity in executive and non-executive leadership. As a network, WB supports individuals to join boards and to see board roles as part of a strategic career path. While supporting women into non-executive roles remains at their core, WB have evolved to work extensively with multiple corporate partners supporting diverse talent to reach their potential, and helping organizations build inclusive cultures, as well as working directly with boards to source diverse, high quality candidates and optimize their performance.
Fiona has personally served on a number of boards, sitting on both marketing and audit and finance committees. Over the years, Fiona has advised startup boards, investment committees and chair nominations committees, where she is known for a sharp eye on capability, culture, and succession. Earlier in her career, Fiona spent over a decade in asset management as a director at Old Mutual Asset Management and Hill Samuel Asset Management, running the global equities and emerging markets desks, respectively.
Fiona has also advised the board of the Thai Euro Fund, a listed investment trust, the Financial Reporting Council, and several pension funds, which shapes how Fiona thinks about board composition, stewardship, and long-term strategy. Fiona also sits on the advisory board for King's College London's Global Institute for Women, championing evidence-based approaches to inclusive leadership and the pipeline of women into senior roles.
Fiona, welcome.
[00:03:07] Fiona Hathorn: Delighted to be here. Thank you for asking me.
[00:03:10] Ralph Grayson: Perhaps we just start a little bit with your career history and maybe how asset management and your experience of the asset management industry shaped your thoughts around boards.
[00:03:22] Fiona Hathorn: Oh, luck plays a part in life and when I was at college, I knew I wanted to join the City. I didn't have a family that were from the City at all, but for some reason reading the FT, and in fact it was my boyfriend at the time who kept picking up the FT, so I was really interested in this sort of pinky salmon paper and I started reading it and I just became fascinated with stocks and shares.
And it takes you back to the importance of schools. because actually my school in Market Harborough in Leicestershire did a school trip to the Stock Exchange. So I would've been about 12 at the time, and that really gripped me. So you combine that with being at college and starting to read about stocks and shares, I joined the City, but actually my first job out of college was PWC in Windsor. I felt that I needed a professional qualification in accounts something, and I was natural with numbers, but very, very quickly I became bored of being an auditor. I loved working for PWC and I was at a party, as you do, and I chatted to a headhunter, and the headhunter was recruiting for Hill Samuel, not for a graduate, and I was given the opportunity to be introduced to the Head of HR and I joined the City and I joined their Japanese Asian desk and I absolutely loved it. Again, luck plays a part in life. The Asian markets were going gangbusters. You had negative real interest rates, their exchanges were linked to the dollar, the property boom, foreigners were being allowed to invest for the first time. It was just a great place to be, and again, I'm was privileged with the people I worked with.
[00:04:54] Ralph Grayson: Fiona, we both share an interest and commitment to help boards raise their game on governance, regulation and talent development, enabling better long-term decisions and sustainable value creation.
I began this podcast as a way to help aspiring and new board members both think about their fit on the board, and encourage as diverse a pool of people to think about board membership, and get access to as many opportunities as possible.
Perhaps we can best start then with your personal mission and your purpose to establish WB.
[00:05:31] Fiona Hathorn: Well, one of the things that you've just mentioned there is access to opportunities and I'm a firm believer in choice and options. Unless you know the choices available to you, you can't make the right decisions. I'm relatively privileged because my father sat on quite a few community boards, so he sat on the Police Authority Board, he sat on charity boards and because my mother was working and we didn't have childcare, he would take me to the boardroom from the age of four or five. So I was very aware of what governance looked like. I was very aware of chairing a good committee. I was even aware of what minutes were without actually being at the table at the age of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
So I always was fascinated in the boardroom, and I do think the boardroom matters. But the reason I launched WB Directors, formally known as Women on Boards, was to tell people about all the boards out there. There are sports boards, there are housing associations, there's theater boards, there's pension boards, there's government boards, there's startup boards, college boards, you know, it goes on and on and on.
And of course, when I was in the City, I was investing in very large companies on the Asian markets or global markets, but it's not all about those FTSE listed boards, no matter where you are in the world. Understanding good governance really matters for our society, and I wanted to give people the options and you and I know that 95% of board roles are not transparently advertised, and the vast majority of boards don't use headhunters. So if you engage with your favorite passion, and that might be your local tennis club, it could be your local theatre, it might be a little art center. If you start engaging with that, you can really help shape those organizations.
But if you don't know, you don't know, and my privilege was that I knew. Being involved in the City and buying and selling shares, I was lucky enough to be talking to Chairs and Chief Executives all of the time, and I wanted to make boards available to people and give them the knowledge of how to sell themselves into the boardroom for those boards that weren't advertised and skill is one part of being in the boardroom. But so is the process of the way you make decisions, the style of how you operate is important and your thinking to actually help shape those organizations. So that's what I, why I got involved in this movement and why I started Women on Boards up in the first place.
[00:07:50] Ralph Grayson: Fantastic. I had no idea until I started doing a bit of research for this podcast just how broad and how deep WB runs in terms of its engagement.
Not just as the title may say Women and Boards, but actually in the C-suite actually, with corporate advice and training. Perhaps you could just develop a little bit more the platform, the different service offerings and how all that comes together.
[00:08:18] Fiona Hathorn: Well, we're very much a membership organization. So for any individual that wants to better understand their board value add, look at vacancies that are transparently advertised, they would join our organization and they tend to join as an individual because they think the only thing they need is access to our vacancy boards. So we have a vacancy board. But actually what makes us really unique is the board CV course that's free for them in the cloud and the fact that we hold the hand at the point they have an interview. So if you had six interviews a year, we'll give you six mentoring little sessions because it's hard enough getting the interview.
If you want to join a board where people don't know you, and we all talk about diversity and we want diverse individuals, cognitive diversity, gender diversity, ethnic diversity, disability. There's so, so many forms of diversity. We're still frightened of people we don't know. So you need to be able to articulate your board value add. So that was the sort of primary reason and we had a website that enabled that platform. So it's a community. We run events as well. Many people have heard me say this, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than run events. But when you do run an event, whether it's a virtual event or a live event, you're connecting people and bringing people together. So I very much view ourselves as a tribe supporting people.
But very early on, because I'd worked in the corporate side, I realized we needed income. We have 15 employees. You know, that's quite a large salary bill that we are responsible for. We act like a not-for-profit, technically, we are not a not-for-profit, but we try and make the price for membership to be as affordable as possible. So it's accessible to all.
So I realized we needed to work with corporates. So we started running workshops with corporates, virtually within the second week that we launched. I was lucky enough to have connection with PWC and funnily enough, not related to my original crew, PWC a different one, also Thomson Reuters, UBS and Berwin Leighton Paisner now as was they've renamed their law firm and we promised to give them workshops on the role of the board. How to get on boards. So we did it for retiring partners. We also had a workshop called On Track for Success, which is career tips as well as planting those board seeds.
Now we do all sorts of things. We have skills courses called Steps for Success. It might be on Influence. We also do boards courses for organizations like BlackRock. We've done them for Visa to support their employees going on subsidiary boards. So we do a whole range of things. In addition to that, we actually popped up a course called Getting To The C-Suite. So we are looking at why do change programmes fail, strategic thinking and a sort of toolkit on how to manage a say a strategic awayday. We did that for members, but where we have a very good reputation and relationship with the corporate, they'll often bring us in and say, will you be a popup within our Leadership Development Programme?
And some of the popups we do in CEO succession, for some of the largest companies in the world, we're actually just doing a popup mostly on boards, but occasionally we'd be brought in to do something else. So we do actually quite a range. I think we've got 29 different workshops and we tailor them obviously to the client needs. So there's more than that. But we've got flyers for all 29 and more.
[00:11:24] Ralph Grayson: So an interesting combination of tactical and strategic, if you like. So tactical, helping people find that board seat, how to present themselves, but also strategic in terms of thought leadership and what does good look like.
[00:11:35] Fiona Hathorn: Yeah, and I think what's interesting, you and I had lunch just before we started recording this podcast and one of the things I said to you then was that 15 years ago when we launched people below the CEO and the sort of actual board didn't really know about the boardroom in large companies across the UK.
Now they nearly all do, but you go one tier below that and they just don't know anything about the boardroom and they don't imagine it's for them. So that planting board seeds, our only route to get what I describe as stage zero people is via the corporates. And I believe you're never too young to be on a board. You're never too old. And I also say this, not just because you're a man, you're never too male to be on a board either. There's nothing gender specific about anything we do. So actually right from the start, JP Morgan, we've done quite a bit of work for we've done workshops for men as well as women.
It's the reason why we've rebranded from Women on Boards to WB Directors because telling men in a corporate environment that they're coming to a workshop run by Women on Board, sometimes it puts them off. So we've rebranded.
[00:12:37] Ralph Grayson: I think it's so refreshing that we've moved away from very simplistic optics around diversity to really think how behavior changes outcomes rather than looking at the external and the overt characteristics of diversity and it sounds really interesting how you've evolved WB to move with the times.
So exciting news from your side. Part of Nurole now.
[00:13:03] Fiona Hathorn: Y
es, so we've joined forces with Nurole. As you know, they're a headhunter and they only work on the Non-exec director side. I think it's a natural fit. They're about better boards. We're about better leadership and optionality to go into the boardroom. So I'm absolutely delighted to be working alongside them.
We've also lost our first mover advantage to a degree. We were the first vacancy board. We advertised vacancies for free. We're not a headhunter. We work for them via the corporate individual employees, or the individual members.Whereas now all headhunters tend to have a vacancy board.
There are other competing vacancy boards out there, so we really needed to do something to make sure we stayed relevant. Lots of headhunters are doing corporate advisory work. Nurole I think we're vaguely interested in that, but didn't really do the in-house workshops of corporates. I view those as stage zero candidates who haven't had board roles before and I'm sure you and I will talk about age diversity in the boardroom, the deep technical skills that you need, and I think we have access to know which are the top executives working with the top corporates that are about to go portfolio or are going to be allowed to go take one role alongside the day job.
So it was just timing's right and it was a perfect fit.
[00:14:17] Ralph Grayson: I think it's incumbent in all of us in the industry just to do the best we can to raise the level of knowledge about what good looks like and how we attract the best people into boardrooms and certainly I've got the greatest respect for Nurole. I think I mentioned, Fiona earlier, Ollie's Enter the Boardroom podcast is my compulsory listening on a Saturday morning on my dog walks. So if anybody doesn't listen to that, Enter the Boardroom, you will find on Spotify or your media outlet of choice and I highly encourage it. Let's just step back and go back to basics.
So I've heard you talk in the past about seven reasons to be on a board and why being on a board is good for your career. So maybe let's start there.
[00:14:58] Fiona Hathorn: Oh, I just love the seven reasons and in fact the lady who inspired me to set up WB directors, Women on Boards in the UK, it was a lady called Claire Braund, and she came up with these seven reasons and I think they're so important. I'll fly through them because it's a lot. One of the things that people don't realize is a directorship gives you a point of difference on your CV. So even if you're working for a large company, it's really going to differentiate you, within your company, because it shows that you are, which is the second reason, you're a leader in your community and it just changes the nature of who you are. I think the other thing it can do is can develop your skills and your leadership skills. Organizations are so compartmentalized and large today, you can get lost in an organization and you sometimes don't fully understand the budgets within your division, the strategy within your division. The minute you join a community board, you are responsible for that organization strategy. You are responsible for signing off the P&L and accounts. So to me, it's like a mini MBA in leadership. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I think one of the things that's very relevant, if you have an aspiration as an individual and you are full on in your day job to go portfolio at any stage in your life, it's a very competitive place getting what I describe as competitive boards. And a competitive boards might be a national charity, a large government, big university, or it could be a commercial listed or private equity backed board. If you can't demonstrate that you understand the role of the board and understand your value in the boardroom, joining a small charity board is not going to make, you know, a PE company or a listed organization say, yes, we must haveso and so on our board. But actually it will help you sell yourself onto that board and really understand how you contribute.
You mentioned earlier, in my bio, that I sat on marketing committees. I've sat on a marketing committee, for the charity Fight For Sight. I had no idea I was a digital marketing expert, but I was for that charity. So you don't really know how you're going to contribute because the role of the board as a non-exec trustee and a governor is very, very different from being an executive.
So there are many reasons. If you type seven reasons, type my name, type WB directors, you'll get them all. But I use the seven reasons and lots of stories of individuals and how it's changed them and their options for life and I think it's really important that people are aware. I actually don't care whether people go on a board or not. I just want to know that they could.
[00:17:29] Ralph Grayson: I think it's so interesting how conversation is developing now around effectively the board apprentice idea. IE If somebody's sitting in a C-suite, they should be encouraged by their current employer to go and sit on an external board because when they come back into their own C-suite, they're so much better from having seen both sides of that table.
Let's just turn that on its head though. Why shouldn't somebody be a NED and how might they change their mindset to actually be in a position where they can add value in a board?
[00:18:01] Fiona Hathorn: Boards actually only do two things, performance, strategy, and stargazing, and conformance, which is abiding by the law and filing your accounts. Now it's a little bit more complicated than that. So I think if you are going to join a board, you have to know whether you are more strategy, performance, and business orientated in terms of your oversight or your more conformance. And some people cannot operate at what I describe as the helicopter level. You and I were chatting earlier. I'm mildly dyslexic and I love pictures and my favorite picture of the boardroom is a picture of a helicopter. If you're sitting on a board, unless it's a tiny organization with no staff, in which case you will be rolling out the turf on the village green, that's okay. But if you're on a board, you are not there to do, you are there to oversee. The helicopter shouldn't land. If the helicopter's landing and all the non-executive directors are running around the organization running the show, that's actually a boardroom crisis.
So some individuals do find it difficult to not be a doer and that's why if you do have aspirations to go on boards later on and you see them as a status symbol for yourself. The chances are you are not going to be an effective board director if you cannot get your fingers out. And actually quite a few CEOs of big global organizations, they don't do very well in their first, second, or third interviews when they interview as a non-exec, because they just can't help themselves telling people what to do. You are not there to tell the executives what to do. You should be there to supporting the executives making better decisions and changing the CEO if necessary.
That's actually the conformance side, so not everybody can do it well. When we are running workshops explaining this to anybody about to apply for boards, we use four words. You are there to scrutinize, challenge, support, and advise and how you do that really, really matters. So those people who aren't successful in the boardroom, they haven't got the skill to do those four words.
[00:20:11] Ralph Grayson: I think it's interesting that somebody, I can't remember who it was, but somebody once said to me that a really effective NED is like a bird of prey.You hover at 20,000 feet and then you know when to swoop in, deal with an issue, but then swoop out again. Whether that's ultimately having to change the CEO. So it's not noses in fingers out all the time. It's knowing when to put those fingers in and when to get them out very quickly.
[00:20:35] Fiona Hathorn: I mean that, I think that's a great description. It's a bit like if you're very high up, you can see the whole landscape and executives are so into the detail of delivering sometimes they're not seeing the bigger picture and I think the bird of prey is a good example of that.
[00:20:48] Ralph Grayson: Interesting, so what else from the workshops what are the bordering myths perhaps that you've heard the most, and any that you particularly would like to debunk.
I mean, let's start with you can't be a NED until you've been a NED.
[00:21:00] Fiona Hathorn: That's always an interesting one, isn't it? You need to be able to understand the role of the board, and we've talked about that a minute ago. But understanding your board value add is important and you can understand your board value add if you talk to somebody who's been in the boardroom and get a sense of how you might operate.
So most boards today want to know what your deep technical skill is. Your deep technical skill, it might be culture, it might be risk, it might be strategy, and it might be strategy in a particular industry. So you know you're recruiting them for that. But actually it's your breadth and depth that actually means that you can be at the table, you know when to speak and you won't know when not to speak, and then you can contribute to problem solving. So I think in terms of the myth in the boardroom, we all talk about diversity, but we're scared of people we don't know and therefore if you are being interviewed, having not been a board director before, you have to articulate your understanding of the boardroom at a much, much higher level because you won't have the same examples how you've added value in the boardroom in a previous board. You are not that trusted, safe pair of hands.
So one of the reasons we were talking about earlier about working with corporates. I talked to individuals about how exposed and closer you as an executive to your own company's board because I do find that a lot of individuals have got board experience. They've got proxy board experience reporting into a board. So actually they often know a lot more about the boardroom than they know that they know and often they're answering the question, have you got board experience? They're answering it technically, were they or weren't they a registered board director? So they'll often say no to that question, and it's why the tribe that we've created is really important and those pre-interview questions are important because one of the things we always ask is, have you got board experience? And I'm just waiting for them to say no because I've already looked at their LinkedIn portfolio and I know they have had board experience and they'll often not mention a school governing role because they don't associate the word non-exec with governor or trustee.
And I like to remove the word just. I'm just a charity trustee. It's nobody else's business as to whether you were paid or not. You are personally liable and you will have seen the same issues in the boardroom, a strong chief executive hiding information, a poor chair, a relationship with a chair and a non-exec is not going well, and actually the hardest thing in the boardroom is the dynamics of the boardroom, which at the end of the day is people.
So I think, it is a myth that you cannot add value in the boardroom. Clearly wisdom and experience of how you challenge. There's an experience of that. You are not running the company on a day job, but you can learn that and you can interview better. But we won't get anywhere in terms of diversity, unless we challenge that.
And we've certainly done that very successfully on the Women on Boards movement where we've got to 40% and many of those individuals who'd not had board experience before.
[00:24:11] Ralph Grayson: I think that segues brilliantly into the traditional issue that I'm sure you and I both find when we're talking to aspirant NEDs who just want to regurgitate their CV and their executive background and personally, with a bit of a reputation for being a blunt Yorkshireman, I fold my hands and I say, yes, but what do you solve for? Any perspective on that?
[00:24:33] Fiona Hathorn: Well, one of the things that we do, in fact I'm running a session on Thursday, we've got a workshop called NED Branded Masterclass. I have to say, I don't particularly like the brand me, brand you name. But at the end of the day when you apply to join boards, you're not selling your executive life, you're selling your board value add.
And one of the things that we talk about when we unpick the board CV, which is different because it's about you as a board member, not you as an executive, is we ask the "So what" question? What you did, what was the business benefit and what was the outcome? And it's demonstrating how you added value in a mergers and acquisition, how you added value to strategy, how you added value to risk situation, and it could be something you did 15 to 20 years ago. And it's unpacking all of those stories and putting labels behind it, which makes it a lot easier for you or another board member to explain why they're recruiting you, particularly if you haven't got board experience. So I think, yeah, I totally agree with you on that.
[00:25:29] Ralph Grayson: I think goes to the heart of explaining and telling the story behind the job title and the role that you had on your CV. It may be as much about recruitment or leadership of a team as a fact of you've been head of X, Y, and Z. It's not the CV, the boardroom experience is completely different.
[00:25:52] Fiona Hathorn: I mean, interesting enough, you mentioned Head of. I meet lots of Head ofs at investment banks, even large tech companies, and actually they're running a business. But they'll often tell you they're not the CEO. They are actually the CEO of that business, and it is unpicking that so that you can get it right.
And a lot of people say, well, we don't need your brand course anymore. We don't need your CV course anymore. We've got ChatGPT to do with it, and my answer that is, good luck with that project. Because unless you put the right information into ChatGPT, they don't know what you've done, they don't know how you contributed and what you say is going to be very different to what's on your executive CV. So it's just shoving your executive CV and say, spit that out the other side, it's really not going to be helpful. You might be lucky, but in general you need to sit down and do the deep amount of thinking and asking somebody else to write your CV, again, you've still got to spend a lot of time with them to give them the information, to get the absolute nuggets of your skill and then of course there's fit, which is another subject altogether.
[00:26:55] Ralph Grayson: So let's just touch on the current board landscape then. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? Both in terms of demand for the right people on the board and the issues that board members are seeking to confront?
[00:27:07] Fiona Hathorn: I've got so many things to say on that. I need to try and keep it brief. But the current board landscape is undergoing a significant transformation driven by a whole series of factors. Whether it's technology, diversity, governance expectations, which were either going up or down depending on which side of the pond you're on, and I think the other thing is the agility of decision making. So, in terms of diversity now, it's not just about gender, it's about generational diversity, socioeconomic and neurological diversity. I particularly like shadow boards, youth councils, pop-up boards. There's many ways to bring the diverse voice in without growing the size of the board. So I think a lot of boards are looking at that.
I think agility in decision making, I've mentioned it, but I'm a big fan of Patrick Dunne. You've probably interviewed Patrick Dunne. We all know about his Boards book. But he's written another one on Five Generations in the Workforce, and he talks about maps, not sat navs. And it's all about how you make the decisions and how you make them quickly and I think some of old type school boards, they're not used to that. I think private equity boards are used to that. But listed boards have got to adopt to that. Technology, AI and digital, there are many board members who don't have the expertise into that area and you have to bring younger people into the boardroom and consider how you support executives there. I myself have struggled with culture and wellbeing and looking after employees, their expectations of the working environment. So you can actually go on and on and on. But I think there's so many things changing.
I think the other thing is the geopolitical risk. You talked about me working in the asset management industry, and I talked about it being a fantastic environment. Everything was going up. We were taking cost out of the supply chain. We were moving manufacturing to Asia, India, Indonesia. Now we've done that. We've sweated everything we possibly can out and now life is very different. We've got an aging population, we've got political instability, we've got wars coming about, and I think the ability for boardrooms to deal with that, it's tough and the skill today of being a good chair. Diverse teams, the research is very, very clear. They do perform better. But if you don't know how to manage a diverse team, you will go backwards before you go forwards. So the ability of you as a team leader within the business, or in the boardroom, to lead a diverse team, it's a skill. I'm not entirely convinced that all boardrooms have got that covered.
[00:29:40] Ralph Grayson: We could spend a long time debating that. Let's just a word- I'd like to just bring out there is dexterity.
Society at large and stakeholders as a generic group ie those external influences on the board. How do you think they're impacting the way the board is conducting itself?
[00:30:01] Fiona Hathorn: I think it's challenging because we're all requiring transparency. We're all expecting accountability. The stakeholders, it used to be very simple, who our stakeholders were, shareholders, owners of the business. But now it's the environment, the employees, there's so much going on. If you think about sitting on a board, when the Russian-Ukraine war started, managing that situation. Where if you had businesses in Russia, you had employees in Russia, then there was the brand risk. It's very, very different and I think it's particularly complex at the moment.
I'm thinking, from the diversity perspective, we've all seen Trump moving in and being very hard on companies in regard to their diversity strategies. You can't win business now in America if you have certain words on your website and you don't think the consequence of that to your other stakeholders, your purchasers, if you're not winning government contracts. We've all got voices and things move very quickly. If you get it wrong with your stakeholder at speed. The brand risk is enormous. So I think it's very, very challenging. You mentioned Nuroles "Enter the Boardroom" podcast. There's a great one, I think it was Rita Clifton. She talks about brands in the boardroom and brand is part of your business and thinking it's not for a discussion in the boardroom, your brand can be changed by getting your AI strategy wrong overnight, getting transparency wrong overnight, and thinking about it holistically as a business strategy is really important.
[00:31:50] Ralph Grayson: Yeah, I think we've got to move away from the words that are being politically generated at the moment and stay focused on the purpose of the board to define the mission and purpose of the company. Why are we here and what do we want to solve for? Back to my, what does the individual board member and the collective, what is the purpose of the board? I think is a fascinating area, which is maybe a subject for another day.
How do you think that's going to change the way we think about the future skills needed on a board to tackle tomorrow's challenges rather than yesterday's challenges?
[00:32:34] Fiona Hathorn: Well, we've touched on already technology literacy and the need to understand that. Lord Davis, Lord Mervin Davis has talked out a few times, I've heard a couple of podcasts that he's done, about the voracious appetite for learning about technology and the need to remain relevant. So I think boards will challenge that.
One of the things that I think is even more important than it ever was, and it's related to technology, is adaptability, we've talked about that, but curiosity. I think we have to be careful at hiring leaders for what they've done rather than what they could do and the difference between being average and exponentially first class. It's not a multiple of one or two, it's 20 times. You are curious. You are listening. You are engaging all of the time. And I think that's one thing that speed of change is moving so quickly. Boards need to be really on top of do they have the right leadership team? How are they recruiting leaders? And it comes back to emotional intelligence and collaboration and the ability to lead diverse teams as well.
So I think the complexities of what makes a good leader is so different today than it ever was, and I think tackling that is going to be tough.
[00:33:53] Ralph Grayson: I think just before we leave diversity, there's a lady called Helle Bank Jorgensen has just published a book called "The Future Boardroom" and she envisages a typical board of 12 that if it really reflected society, it would have six men and six women, three quarters of them would be younger than 50, two would have disabilities, one would have a mental health issue, three would be below the poverty line, and one from a place directly affected by climate change.
Just going back to your comment about, Patrick Dunne, who has been a previous guest. He was brilliant when he was talking about five generations, and he talked about how the young can learn from the old and the old can learn from the young.
Just before we leave this,how do you think that shapes what a board should look like?
[00:34:41] Fiona Hathorn: I remember listening to a lecturer at Insead from one of their professors.and he argues that the minute you go over 10, it becomes almost unmanageable. So I think that's one of the issues. So quite a lot of our university boards are 12, 13, 14, 15.
So I think the future of boards, and if you look at Patrick Dunne's book when he talks about shadow boards, youth councils, advisory boards, how you bring those voices in matters because I do think you need to have quite a lot of that covered. I think, diversity and socioeconomic diversity, you know, how you are living your life and how you are servicing your customers, and the diverse nature and the richness of the United Kingdom to start off with, you can't have all of those voices in the boardroom. But actually talking about diversity and quotes, Helena Morrisey, she talks about diversity should be a strategy day discussion, and having different brains. No one has a monopoly on great ideas, and those ideas can come from all sorts of places, and it's really important not to have group think, but managing that's difficult. So I'm not particularly in favour of large boards.
[00:35:55] Ralph Grayson: I think that's such an interesting issue. Certainly in a number of the board conversations we're having at the moment the world is becoming so complex, geopolitics, inflation, tariffs, the list goes on, and the natural inclination is just to add yet another board member who solves for AI, who solves for cyber, who solves for geopolitics. The role of popup boards, which is an Ollie at Nurole expression, which I think is great, the role of committees, subsidiary boards, I think can solve for this in a long way.
But what we need to go alongside, or a number of people write about the T-shaped board now. Which needs a breadth and depth. Key word is resilience, I think, and that's the word that's coming up again and again and again in my conversations with chairs. How does a board ensure it remains resilient and adaptive in this uniquely changing time? You referenced in the past, I think I'm going to mispronounce it, butthe VUCA matrix?
[00:36:57] Fiona Hathorn: VUCA. Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It's really, really difficult and I think when you are working in a VUCA environment, which we all sort of understand from COVID. Deciding your strategy, and we used to think of our strategy might be a five year strategy, might be a one year, two year strategy now, because things are moving so fast. Once you've decided where you are going,you had A, B, and C, you've decided to go to C. But actually on your pathway to C there's about 20, 30 different routes to C. So you've got to be constantly agile to is there any new information? And as a leader in a VUCA environment, your job is to make a decision, and you might need to make a decision without all the information. And it's your confidence to say, I got that wrong, and I now need to do this. That I think is the hardest thing in terms of resilience.
You know, whereas we used to have, our strategy is to do this, and we're doing that, and it's a 10 year plan. It's not like that anymore. So I think the confident, curious leader is not an arrogant leader "my way or the highway". Global organizations are too complex to have one person, but it's a skill in the ability to delegate and actually allow people to make mistakes. Because in a VUCA environment, you are going to make mistakes because it's changing so fast.
[00:38:22] Ralph Grayson: And the key to that, to a large extent, is going to be the quality, depth, and breadth of the data.
So the elephant in the room, AI, how should a board best integrate AI into its decision making process and is there a better way a board can prepare and be more efficient in the board meeting?
[00:38:42] Fiona Hathorn: Now, as you know, I'm a massive podcast listener. and I read this wasn't a podcast, I read an article recently by, Arnaud Bertrand and he just reminded us that AI is just a gifted parrot. It needs the data to make the decisions if it hasn't seen it before. Apple have just used their machine learning research department to look at the illusion of thinking and understanding the strengths and limitations of reasoning models and they identified that their top model was unable to solve the three men in a boat crossing a river. Apparently, if you can remember, it's about 11 different moves that you have to do. Now they teach children to do that at school. AI couldn't do it. Why couldn't AI do it? Because it hadn't seen it before enough times to actually come up with a view. If AI is going to be used well, we need to know when to use statistics to make a decision based on the data, when AI is appropriate and just remind ourself it's a gifted parrot. I would suggest everyone read that article just to remind them that it's not an intelligent thing at the moment. So the data in is relevant, but you need to know when it's relevant and when it isn't relevant. So I think it's a complicated thing.
[00:40:05] Ralph Grayson: AI as master or servant in the boardroom. I think the upside is the ability to synthesize all that data to really focus on, from a strategic perspective, what should the board be focusing on? But to the same extent, seeing it as a risk within the risk management committee and how it can perpetuate or exacerbate group think. Where are our blind spots? Is AI going to make that worse or is it going to make it better? AndScarlet Brown on Board Intelligence did a great podcast with me a couple of weeks ago where she looked at how technology can both be a savior but also a sin in that respect.
[00:40:46] Fiona Hathorn: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do know, and in a VUCA environment this is also important, is most change programmes fail. Why do change programmes fail? because they fail to get the hearts and minds of people. So if you are going to change the way you do business, whether you interact with your clients or you are changing the nature of the work of your employees. You have to work really, really hard in getting buy-in and people feel very vulnerable and nervous of the effect of AI and what it's going to do.
[00:41:13] Ralph Grayson: I think this brings us back to the essence of leadership in the boardroom. What I heard the other day was the difference between sitting on a board and serving on a board.
So how do you think board members demonstrate leadership and in that influence, not management, how do they add value to the executive team?
[00:41:32] Fiona Hathorn: I've been lucky enough as you have been, to meet many, many fascinating leaders and board members in the past. I recently did an event, we have a Director Circle community, which is for people on established boards and we were lucky enough to get Alison Rose to come and join us as she stepped down as CEO of NatWest.
We asked her what's she looking for in a good board member and one of the things that she pointed out is I need my board to know that when I come to them to tell them about a problem, I've got it covered and to trust me. So that relationship of trust between the board and the executive team is crucial. When that gets broken, it's really, really difficult. I would like a board, and I'd like the board members to add value to me by challenging the things that I'm not so confident of. Where I do need to be challenged, my strategy, and question, I want them to help me solve problems and how they solve problems and how they contribute to that discussion really matters.
So I like to meet on an equal basis in terms of curiosity and intellect to challenge. And one of the things that she said that was quite interesting is, we talked about earlier about, we don't want board members who haven't been board members before. A lot of people will say, particularly in private equity, they'll say, well, we need somebody who's been in private equity before. What we want are diverse people, but they must have been in private equity before and we also want people with industry expertise in this particular industry. But actually, Alison Rose was saying the reverse, saying, I don't want to listen to a load of people from finance.
I want to know how Nike are doing it. I want to know how Google are doing it. I want to know how other industries are doing it. Because that might challenge my thinking to change the way I think to remove me from group think and I think that's one of the things that you can improve and really add value to the board.
[00:43:21] Ralph Grayson: Murray Steele in an earlier podcast talks about the importance of creating a safe space in the board. In which, on the one hand you can have critical thinking. But on the other hand, constructive criticism. So that everybody challenges themselves commercially, intellectually, but they do it in such a way that it doesn't become confrontational. So I think Alison makes a great point there and absolutely agree with it. Hopefully we haven't put anybody off going on a board yet.
So let's just touch on creating a career plan then, which I think you've talked on in the past as part of WB. The idea of a board value proposition, the personal brand, back to my, what do you solve for and how do you add value?
How do you get people to focus on that?
[00:44:13] Fiona Hathorn: So when we are supporting people in our NED Branding Masterclass, we talk to people about what knowledge do they have, what can they access based on their executive career. What do they know? What could they use? So that's what they can access. Then there's what they can exploit, there's what they can develop in the boardroom, and it's what they can avoid. And it's okay not to know everything. But you do need to know your deep technical skill, how you could exploit it in this environment if it's a university environment and you're not from the university sector. We talked at, before we started this podcast, about continuous professional development. So there are areas that you might not be an expert in. So for example, environmental risk. You can develop that. But it's about being confident about what you know and what you don't know. Now, Francesca Ecsary, who you may know, who's a portfolio non-executive director at the sort of FTSE level. She really struggled with selling herself into the boardroom right at the start. One of the things that she said is, I wasn't your obvious CEO, but actually I was a divisional CEO. But she described herself as an executive, as a fire starter and a change agent. If you went into the boardroom and said that people would be running for cover. So she really realized that she needed to transform the way she described herself and talk about guiding, mentoring, having a collegiate approach to helping boards solve problems.
So if you want to create a value proposition for the board. You need to practice it out loud until you own it. Once you've been in a board, that's fine. And I often, I don't like this elevator pitch concept, but you do need to be an opportunity where you've bumped into somebody at a dinner party. They say, oh, hi, how are you? What are you up to now? And you said, well, do you know, I'm actually moving portfolio. I'm considering a board career. I think my value add would be this, but tell me about yourself. And you're starting a conversation in a completely different way, and there's a skill to doing it. Until you've done it, you don't own it, you don't feel it. So what I like to do is give people the feeling so that when they meet you, Ralph, they can own that story and it is creating that bank of story. But it's really, really important to know your deep T and your breadth and depth we mentioned that earlier. But you don't have to know everything. The boardroom should have the skills audit and they should have it covered.
One of the things that you mentioned earlier is board evaluation. I went on the INSEAD International Director's Diploma, and one of the things they talked about was fair process and at the end of every board meeting, you should be brave enough to say, what did we do well today and what did we not do so well?
And quite a lot of boards are not good on evaluating themselves or giving themselves feedback and unless you create that trusting environment in the boardroom, you tend to get quite a difficult environment. And if you listen to any of the podcasts from anybody talking about the boardroom, well the one thing they hate is overtalking. If you don't have anything to say, don't say it. It's not a status arena.
[00:47:19] Ralph Grayson: Yes, and don't feel that you have to say something to justify your seat at the table and the same is true when you are trying to market yourself as a potential candidate. Even today, the vast majority of board seats are offered through personal networks, not through search firms, not through a formal process. We can debate the rights and wrongs of that and other time. But it does bring to the fore the importance of building visibility and networking. So beyond joining WB and similar platforms, Nurole. How should somebody go about that?
[00:47:58] Fiona Hathorn: I think you need a plan and it's the same with your career. You need to know who you are, where you're going, and how you're going to get there. You shouldn't just be a member of WB, of Nurole of Inclusive Boards, you should be going to everything you possibly can to meet other board directors.
I remember meeting Nick Pink, who is an established board director many years ago, and I remember saying to Nick Pink, he was at UBS at the time, UBS are a corporate member, we've done many workshops, and he came to our Get on Board workshop and he said, I think I'm going to find it difficult to sell my board value add.
And I said, well today individual board members can't put their mates on boards. Nick, you are enormously connected, but you are going to have to broker your board value add, you're going to have to put a board CV together and the world is a much better place, and Nick wholeheartedly agreed. That's one of the reasons he came to our workshop. But I remember interviewing Nick and he very proudly showed me his spreadsheet. He said, after I met you, I put a spreadsheet together of everyone I'd worked with five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and I had a strategy for how many of those I was going to meet and connect with every week and the other point is don't assume that they know you.
Just because they worked with you 15 years ago, they don't know who you are now. So give them your boards pitch and write it in the third person as if I'd written it so that if I happen to bump into Ralph and Ralph says, oh,I'm broking for somebody on a you know, a private equity company board in power, I can say, oh, I know exactly who the person is and I can get their little thing in the third person. I can say, and this is who they are, I don't have to rewrite it. And there's a nuance to doing that and making it easy for people. But you're absolutely right, it's that fit. And I always say to people, it's hard enough getting the interview when you get to the interview, it's now a personality contest.
Do they think they can work with you? So less is more sometimes in those interviews, listening and also interviewing them, as well as them interviewing you. It's not the same as these executive. And then you're starting to behave like a board director in your interview. And if they don't know you, they'll get a sense of who you are by doing that.
So there is a nuance to doing it well.
[00:50:20] Ralph Grayson: And keep practicing and just maybe I need to invite Nick on to a podcast because he's a great case study that because he beat his way to my door and we talked about the transferable skills that he had as the ex-director of research and how that would fit in the board and I can't remember the boards he's subsequently on. I know through Nurole, he went on the board of Redburn,and he's built a really good plural career. So, so fantastic case study there.
So let's finish it off. Time is gosh running on. Top tips and takeaways that listeners to this podcast should really focus in on.
[00:50:55] Fiona Hathorn: I think the first thing I would say is don't be grateful. If you are invited to join a board don't take the first board role. Make sure that you've done your due diligence. So don't be grateful. Remember that 95% of board roles don't advertise and don't use headhunters. So just because you've joined one platform doesn't mean to say job done. You need to do that work.
We've touched on it already. Know your board value add, and for me, own that pitch. Own that pitch of who you are and don't assume anything. I meet people, as you do Ralph, day in, day out. How many people do I bump into at one of our events, at somebody else's events, and they assume I know them. I recognize their face. They should remind me every time I meet them. Hi, if you remember, I am looking for, and be very, very clear about what they're looking for. That would be my top tip. Julie Ashworth, who's the Chair of Aberdeen University, she runs the NED Brand Masterclass with me and Alison Thorn. She says, it's a bit like going to see an estate agent. When you see a headhunter, when the headhunter said, what are you looking for? Well, I don't know really. I'm looking for this, maybe that, maybe the other. Land a message, whether it's your brand, but also what are you looking for crucial that you own that.
[00:52:11] Ralph Grayson: I'm going to really reinforce this as well. People underestimate just how thorough, forensic, and detailed reference taking is for a prospective board member. If you join the wrong board and it fails, that will haunt you for years and will damage your reputation. So don't take the first one that's come along and to Fiona's point, the consistency of your language and message, when you say, this is what I solve for. So when I ring Fiona and say, hi, do you remember Saphia, you worked with her a couple of years ago. The importance of that reference to say, yep, she's really clear on what she solve for, she's really clear on why she wants to do it. That consistency is crucial.
If you are wishy-washy, you don't know the answer or it's thought, you haven't thought it through. The reference is just going to say, yeah, I don't think they've really thought this one through.
[00:53:08] Fiona Hathorn: I'll just add something onto the reference. Top tip for women who are giving references. The research is quite clear on that, Men are usually very, very positive. Women tend to give feedback in the round. So I just caution women on making sure they're focused when they reply to a headhunter's reference. Because there's unintended consequences of, I don't mean not being honest, you need the feedback, but keep it focused.
[00:53:30] Ralph Grayson: Yeah, that's absolutely true. So, last question, how do people follow up with you? How do they stay in touch? How do they track what you've got to say?
[00:53:38] Fiona Hathorn: I think for me, I love LinkedIn, so I would just connect with me on LinkedIn. Do consider becoming a member of WB Directors. We are your tribe, we are there to support you. We may have joined forces with Nurole, but Nurole is a headhunter, we are not. So I'm delighted to continue to work with you and if you are looking for a working and improving your leadership development work do consider working for us corporates. But just get in touch. Send me an email. But I love it when people tell me where they've met me, where they've heard about me. So just reference this podcast and I nearly always reply.
[00:54:10] Ralph Grayson: Great final advice. Fiona, thank you so much.
[00:54:13] Fiona Hathorn: Thank you.
[00:54:14] Ralph Grayson: I hope that you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and have found it helpful when thinking about how to approach your own path to the boardroom. If you would like to push this a little bit further, Sainty Hird runs a bespoke one to one Programmeme designed specifically to this end. For more information, please visit our website, saintyhird.com, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the Boardroom Path to receive new episodes. Thank you for listening.