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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.
It's my great pleasure today to talk to Dr. Scarlett Brown, Director of the Think Tank at Board Intelligence, where she leads Board Intelligence events for business leaders, board members, and governance professionals. Board Intelligence is Europe's largest board technology and advisory firm with a mission to supercharge boards with the science of board effectiveness. Her expertise is in best practice, corporate governance and board effectiveness with a particular focus on AI and technology in the boardroom, responsible business, board reporting and sustainability. Scarlett is a regular speaker and panelist, including appearances on BBC Radio Four and Radio Two.
In 2023, Scarlett was recognised as one of HRs most influential thinkers for her research with Professor Veronica Hope Haley on leadership through the COVID Crisis. Scarlett's book, Gender and Corporate Boards: The Route to a Seat at the Table was published in 2022 based on her PhD research on the obstacles to achieving boardroom diversity.
Since then, Scarlett has led research into leadership, boards and corporate governance for many organisations, including Tomorrow's Company, Grant Thornton, the CIPD, the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, the University of Oxford and the Forward Institute.
Scarlett, thank you for appearing on this podcast.
It would be great to hear a little about your backstory, your journey into the world of corporate governance and your path to Board Intelligence.
[00:02:56] Scarlett Brown: Thank you so much Ralph, a pleasure to be here. So I can tell you a long version or a short version, but, the interest in corporate governance and in board effectiveness started life as for many of us it did sort of by accident.
I accidentally did a PhD looking at how there are barriers to boardroom diversity In about 2012. You may remember it was a time when we were really fascinated in, how do we get more women onto boards, women on boards was the thing at the time and I came up into the ranks a young sort of feminist sociologist really interested in those barriers to gender diversity and sort of week one of my research the question was, you know, I was sitting there on my laptop going, what is a board? Why would anybody want to be on a board? Why do we care if there's enough women on boards? Why would diversity make a difference?
And all of those questions led me to having to, over the course of several years, very quickly go from being a researcher to being what I now like to refer to myself as is a professional corporate governance nerd and the career came from that really. So I've had the privilege to work with some amazing organisations over that time, many of them you've already mentioned. But I became really interested in the role that the board plays in wider society, of course, in the way that businesses are run and particularly, I think over the years, over the sort of last decade, the changes to the way that we approach boards and corporate governance in this country have been really fascinating.
So we've seen the rise of things like expectation that board members should have oversight of culture, should be driving better purpose, should be trusted by the wider world. All while there's been, you know, major corporate governance failings happening. So it's been a kind of a fascinating journey, that led me, as you say to the door of Board Intelligence a little over four years ago.
[00:04:42] Ralph Grayson: Fascinating, a lot of the listeners to this podcast are new and aspiring non-executives, maybe some aren't familiar with Board Intelligence.
So perhaps we could just spend a minute on how Board Intelligence was set up, what its mission, its purpose was, and maybe how that's evolved over the last few years.
[00:04:59] Scarlett Brown: Yeah, absolutely. so Board Intelligence is a boutique consultancy. The founders were sitting in the back of boardrooms. They were strategy consultants initially and looking at how the organisation could be more effective and they sat in this boardroom, and I think many of us will have had this experience sort of that first day that you're going to be either in a board meeting or being in it for the first time and having this expectation about what a board will be and what they won't be.
Pippa and Jen who founded the organisation, were really excited about listening in and hearing this, it was a very big, well-known organisation with some very big, well-known non-executive directors sitting around the table, and it was an organisation that was going through a really, really big challenge, at the time. One that was very much in the public eye and there was this kind of, you know, excitement about the meeting, and then they got in, and watched these incredibly interesting, brilliant, wise board members have an incredibly dull conversation about the backward looking information that was in front of them, and this realisation that actually a lot of what board members do when they're sitting in a board meeting is to review past performance and approve some updates.
This felt like such a missed opportunity when you speak to board members about the value that they bring. The things that they want to talk about are the strategy, are where the organisation is going, what's going on out there in the world, how can we avoid these big risks that are maybe coming down the track and one of the biggest barriers to that is the information that boards have in front of them. That when you are reviewing mountains of past performance, you don't have a conversation that really matters. And that's what led to the formation of Board Intelligence as it is and as an organisation we now have a much broader remit. We look at almost every part of board effectiveness. But really at our core we are kind of fascinated with the way that the information that board members have at their fingertips. How that drives the kind of conversations they have and the kind of decisions they're able to make and that's a challenge that has kept us busy for the last two decades, and I'm sure we'll continue to keep us busy looking forward.
[00:07:06] Ralph Grayson: Brilliant, and as head of the Think Tank, what's your particular role in that dynamic and what should our listeners perhaps take from that? You published some really good thought leadership, and I would encourage everybody thinking about, a board and their role on a board to look at the website and look at some of the content that you've written. But maybe you can just talk about your personal mission in that respect.
[00:07:28] Scarlett Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So as head of the Think Tank, I have many aspects to that, but I have the privilege of running many of our event series and of working with the team on the thought leadership that we pulled together. So we are always kind of looking to answer that question around, how can we really understand the science of board effectiveness and how can we support our clients and those in our wider audience as well to be the best directors they can be?
The main thing that I do as part of the Think Tank is to run our engagement and our community of thousands of board members, and of governance professionals, of those that support boards, and to really try and bring what we know about what makes boards run really well into the hands of people who are really trying to be brilliant board members and make boards run well.
So it's not a small mission just, you know, try and improve the effectiveness of every board that we work with and also every board globally. I like to say, you know, compared to some of my colleagues, you know, my job is changing the world and their job is just, you know, working with a handful of clients.
But yeah, trying to make sure that every business that has a board is doing the best that it can for that board to drive value for the organisation is key.
[00:08:37] Ralph Grayson: So the front page of the websiteclearly states that Board Intelligence thinks that board effectiveness is a science, not an art. So what's the particular approach to that thinking and why do boards need this science?
[00:08:53] Scarlett Brown: It's a really great question and we've toyed with it lots,stating that board effectiveness is a science is not an insignificant statement. Many people feel it to be an art. I think, you know, there's a real love of boards and boardrooms, feeling like it's an artful place and of course there's a place for that too.
But, there's been an incredible professionalisation of the role. The expectation now that a board should be delivering value for its organisation has really increased. Board members, and I know many of your listeners will feel this way, part of the reason they'll listen to this podcast is because they feel that kind of personal responsibility,to be adding value, and we are a long way away from the past where perhaps, you know, the only people that sat on boards were retired chief execs who were given it as a sort of a nice little retirement treat to be taken out for lunch every so often and to offer some wisdom and we've just seen such a change in the world of boards since then over the last, two or three decades.
So I think there's a kind of an appetite from boards and from the organisations that they lead to be driving more value from the organisation and a desire for the board members themselves to be doing that, and of course we have seen a total shift in the way that boards are run in a practical sense.
So, a really basic one is now it's much more likely that the board member will receive their information through a iPad or an email. Which I know sounds really basic to say, but when we started as a business, the team were sitting in the corner of an office with a ring binding machine.I'm just about old enough to remember making magazines when I was in primary school that were made out of this ring binder. But many of the people in our team are not old enough to remember a ring binding machine. There was a time when we would send, you know, an enormous stack of papers to a chair on a Friday afternoon, and it would, you know, get UPS to them. Technology has fundamentally changed every aspect of the way that boards run. Even in organisations that are perhaps a little bit more tech phobic. There's this real kind of access to data, and I suppose that's the final point around what we've seen the need for a kind of scientific approach to this is we used to say,that, you know, a lot of the work that we would do would be helping boards get access to information. Now the problem is too much data. We can't see the wood for the trees. We are drowning in data, and board packs, and board information has got longer, and longer and longer. So there's a need to also, you know, to make sense of the data that we have. Which means that you can take a much more scientific approach to how the board runs and how it improves itself.
[00:11:30] Ralph Grayson: I think what's so great about hearing that is having somebody in the room who's young and relevant and leading board thought leadership. I think this is just fantastic and itharks back to previous guests I've had Patrick Dunne talking about five generations in the workforce, Graham Duggan, who founded the Non-Executive Director Association talking about Christmas tree lights that NEDs are just there to look pretty and now you are bringing this absolutely as a function into the 21st century and up to today.
So let's go right to the heart of that with AI. Because it is totally disrupting the world of corporate governance. I'd love to hear what you think the impact of AI is on the function of good governance and how you see that evolving.
[00:12:20] Scarlett Brown: It's interesting, isn't it? It feels like we can't move for a conversation without it coming back to AI at the moment in the business world, and your listeners would be forgiven for being a bit tired of talking about AI.
But it is a big part of what we're thinking about at Board Intelligence. I suppose there's kind of two areas that I think are really interesting when it comes to AI. So first is, what do boards themselves do about the challenge of AI within their business? And this is not a question limited to boards.
There is something like 85% of leaders were saying that it was one of a top three priority for them, and that will have grown, I think. Certainly to be considering about how AI is transforming businesses and I think that's a challenge that probably every organisation is grappling with at the moment. Is AI a priority for us? What problems does it help us solve? But at the same time, really interesting research that came out earlier this year, which found that something like 75% of businesses who are using AI in some way are not seeing a return on investment on that use of AI. So at the moment, we've got lots of people holding a hammer, looking for a nail, right? We've got loads of people going, right, let's do AI. Let's use AI. Let's get excited about it, but not really knowing how to deal with it.
And then when we speak to boards, we have a framework we use when we are looking at kind of, driving a better conversation within the boardroom, that we call the six conversations model. Which I won't go into lots of detail now, partly cause it's better if I've got the visual in front of me. The key thing that gets drawn out by the six conversations model is that often boards get pulled into talking about risk management and tracking performance. It's like what I said about earlier. We get very, very good at talking about the risks within AI, how we should govern it, what are the ethical challenges that it presents, and getting very nervous about it, and then boards switch off a little bit.
So, we ran some research earlier in the year that found that, 83% of directors felt ill-equipped to harness the opportunities of AI. So we've got a real nervousness around that and a lack of conversation about the strategic benefits that AI can have for our businesses, and I think, you know, that's something thatperhaps we'll come back onto it a little bit later, around how boards can kind of feel comfortable talking about AI and knowing how to make good decisions about it. I think there's a real nervousness among leadership whilst at the same time being very outwardly, you know, enthusiastic. We need to change everything. It's an interesting debate topic happening within boardrooms at the moment.
The second interesting area around AI, which is where we get really obsessed about it, is what role can AI play in the way that the board does its day-to-day? Technology has transformed boardrooms and AI is doing the same and one of the things that we've really observed is that, again, we've got this kind of, everybody's got a hammer and they're looking for a nail problem. There are loads of wizzy tools out there and lots of things claiming that they can make a really big difference, and actually, partly what we need to do when it comes to AI is we need to understand some of the problems or the challenges that boards are facing, and we need to point AI at those problems with a tool that it's actually designed to solve those problems.
So I'll give you an example of what I mean. I've already emphasised that one of the biggest barriers to boards being effective is they are drowning in information. They're, you know, sent 800 pages on a Friday evening and the board meeting is on Monday morning and they're going to spend their Sunday afternoon digesting all of that information. So we know we have a problem with board packs. Board information has been getting weaker in quality for years, and an obvious start point for AI would be, and we've seen some board members do this, and please listeners don't do this, running their board pack through ChatGPT and getting it to summarise the information for them. Or at the other end, somebody has to write a paper for the board and they're using ChatGPT to help them write it.
Apart from there being some challenges about confidentiality of information or that kind of thing. The problem with both of those things is that ChatGPT or Copilot or Gemini, are one of those equivalents, is not imbued with the knowledge about what drives a really effective boardroom conversation. So what you need to use AI for in this context is either to have a tool that will act as a critical friend and be able to tell you how to write a really good board information that will drive a good board conversation. So we'll sit next to the CEO while she's writing for the board and say, oh, by the way, CEO, you do realise that your paper is 80% optimistic and only 20% pessimistic, and we know that you've got, you know, a very, very pessimistic ex CFO on your board and we think that she might notice that. So why don't you tweak it? Are you really sure that's the right balance? So tools that can act as a critical friend that really understand what the board paper needs to have in it.
Or you have tools that on the director side, for example, would be able tofeed it the information that you've got from the board pack. So again, in a safe, secure way, part of the reason, you know, we do a lot of thinking around this is how do you make it safe and secure? But that something that could, again, sit next to it and help you bring in all the things that you need to drive a good conversation.
Board meetings are typically that we don't have enough conversation within them about the external factors. So actually wouldn't be great if you could have a board pack that not only has the papers that are produced by the organisation, but also brings in other external research factors that says what else is going on in the market. Things like that. There's something that could bring up all of the papers where, a particular issue was discussed. Something that could point out to you and point out gaps in thinking or could act as a reader of a different kind that could, you know, put on a cynical hat or put on a forward looking hat and tell you what kind of what may be questions you want to ask.
So those are the kind of use cases we're thinking about with AI. There's some really kind of standard approaches right now. There's some kind of basic things coming out, people using the kind of the generic tools. But actually what we are really excited about is how much better could you make a board if you took the understanding of what drives brilliant board effectiveness and the power that AI has. Bring them together and that's what's going to make the difference.
Gosh, huge amount of time unravel there. A long answer to a short question.
[00:18:42] Ralph Grayson: Well, no, I think it was a great, great answer to a hugely complex question. If anybody's interested in exploring this a little bit further, there is a brilliant Harvard Business Reviewpost on the use of AI. Particularly around the need for better scenario planning for all boards at the moment. Let's just step back a little bit and think a bit more about board effectiveness as a concept.
So you recently published the Board Value Index. That highlights the challenges boards have in adding value to their organisation and in particular, what I found very interesting reading it was what Board Intelligence called the blockers of board effectiveness and what boards can do to improve.
So I'd love you to dive into that a little bit more and maybe just give us some of the key findings.
[00:19:29] Scarlett Brown: So the Board Value Index, as you say, launched early this year. We've often been kind of looking at what are the inputs that drive board effectiveness, but we sort of wanted to start from the point of view of how do board members feel about the way that they are adding value? And there's some, you know, little bit nerve wracking statistics. So we found that 41% of board members feel that they're not adding enough value to their organisations. 33% said they add no value at all and half of them said that they were actively holding the organisation back from creating value.
Sobering statistics. We found, and again, this is self-report, right? These are directors talking about the way that they feel about the value that they add. So we kind of have these sort of,these blockades, I guess to board members adding value, and we are always really keen to start from the point of view that generally speaking, even where we are seeing what we might call kind of failings of boards or failing of corporate governance in the vast majority of cases, board members want to add value. They want to do well. They want their organisations to succeed, right? I think we can probably say that about the absolute vast majority.
But that actually we are not setting board members up for success. Partly that's to do with the way that they work, and partly that's to do with the way that their organisations work. So we've been really trying to think about some of the ways that we could kind of unblock that.
So again, I'll give a couple of little examples. The first I've already mentioned is around board information. Board papers are too long. They come too late. Sometimes, literally the night before a board meeting. If I could sort of advise everybody listening in, if you're going to make a couple of really key differences, making some consistency across the information, using things like executive summaries and cover sheets, making sure your board have the information a week before the meeting. These seemingly small areas can make a massive, massive difference.
Couple of maybe bigger things that we're looking at the moment is we need a new way of evaluating the extent to which our boards are effective. So we started thinking a lot more about the role of innovation in the boardroom. The role that the board has in driving innovation. So some really interesting, wider research, which again, if you're interested, it's worth having a dig into about the kind of the need that we have as businesses to be, I hate the phrase innovate or die, but it's always the one that comes up across my mind when we talk about it. But the number of businesses now that longevity as a business becomes less and less expected and that is partly because the pace of change within the business world is so fast. We see it a lot with the kind of, you know, the examples like tech businesses. We would never have been able to think about the transformation that things like Airbnb or Uber or, you know, would make to businesses.
But actually the transformation that's needed by almost every organisation just to stand still, even if you are not disrupting a whole market, is massive. How do you as a board help your business be more innovative? But it's not about saying, right, we're going to be the Uber of something. It's about testing, experimenting, encouraging the organisations you work with to try new things, to test whether or not those things work and to keep going on things that are and stop doing things that aren't. And it's amazing how afraid we've become within business of doing that and actually as a board just being able to say, right, we're going to give you space to try things, this kind of psychological safety and safe space to try new things, experiment and see where it goes.
And we've got some amazing examples of where actually businesses have really, really flown when they've had that approach. So yeah, that's another one of the areas we're looking at is how do we drive a more innovative conversation in the boardroom.
[00:23:10] Ralph Grayson: It's a real enigma, isn't it? Boards are becoming more diverse than ever. Recruitment of board members is more rigorous. There's more effective use of board appraisals. So logic suggests that board performance should be improving, but it's not. Not a very scientific question, but why do you think that is?
[00:23:31] Scarlett Brown: Maybe it's unfair of both you and I to say that board performance isn't improving. I think it's just that the standard is so much higher, the expectation is higher. You'll know from being in this space for a long time that there are some unbelievably good people on boards right now. Like they really, really are and it is a difficult job. When it all goes wrong, it's really thankless. When it's going well, people don't notice, you know, I mean, the same is true of lots of leadership roles, but we're seeing I just think a hunger for being better, and much more in the public eye.
As I said already, I think that also some of the processes that we have just aren't setting organisations up to succeed. Boards rely on the information that they can get through the board pack, and I guess engagement with the business and actually setting better expectations around that, I think is really important. But we need to be setting them up to do that. We need to be setting them up to succeed and not kind of creating barriers for themselves.
There is an expectation now that actually perhaps board members aren't always the finished article. It used to be, as I said,that people would only really get onto boards at the end of their career, and you expect somebody at the end of their career to have kind of reached the pinnacle or be the person they're going to be.
But we have younger board members. We have board members earlier on in their career. Perhaps they're coming from different sectors, they're adding different aspects. They're coming from different expertise areas and so I think there's also, we need to kind of all be comfortable that actually boards or board members will need different kinds of upskilling, different kinds of skills. They will need to grow and understand more expertise and we can't just fill every gap that we need in a boardroom with, you know, recruiting somebody with a different skill.
So perhaps it's not fair to say that board performance isn't improving. I think board performance in terms of what they're delivering for their organisations continues to rise. It's just that what organisations need continues to rise faster.
[00:25:25] Ralph Grayson: Yeah, I think that's a good answer.
Heidrick & Struggles has done some great work recently around turnover of CEOs and starting to ask some really smart questions about the breakdown of trust between the C-suite and the board and I think trust is a word that's becoming a critical factor for boards.
The Edelman Trust Barometer, which some people might be familiar with, has reported an accelerating erosion of trust in business leaders. A record number of respondents believing businesses purposefully mislead people. Patrick Dunne again, referencing one of our earlier guests, has posted a great article this week on LinkedIn following up on this and stating that we've now moved from a trust deficit to a trust default.
Just hold that thought for a moment. So your own work references the PwC Survey, which found only 30% of C-suite executives rate their board as good or excellent, and 49% want at least one of their NEDs removed. Are we really in that much of a mess?
[00:26:30] Scarlett Brown: Again, I think it could be easy to get depressed by the statistics, and I also don't want to get too bogged down in it because again, I don't want to put anybody off becoming a board director. It's one of the coolest jobs in the world. My friends don't believe me when I say that, but it really is and we need lots of people doing it. So, I would hate to set up to only pull on the negative sides. But I think this piece around trust is super, super interesting. As you mentioned that the piece that Heidricks have talked about, and actually there's been really interesting academic research about improving CEO and board relationships.
One of the things that we advise a lot is around seeing the board meeting the relationship between executives and non-executives as a dialogue. We encourage all board information to be written in question answer format. We talk a lot about how you should be spending the board meeting time discussing, debating, you should be saving that meeting space for a conversation that couldn't happen outside the boardroom. And we need to be seeing that as a dialogue. Whereas I think when you see boards going really wrong. What you have is this kind of checks and balances or people feeling like they need to impress the board and then the board approving what they do and that's where it starts to get really toxic. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is improving dialogue. I think another thing, we interviewed a really brilliant chair recently, called Alison Platt, and we got her interview up on our website and she said some amazing things about trust and about the role that she as a chair plays and as a non-exec.
A couple of really great tidbits I took from her. So one is that she really emphasises the need for board members to visit their organisations. So sheworks with a large financial services organisation. She spends a day, a quarter, in the call center listening to calls, talking to people who work in the call centers, people who are on the frontline with customers and she does that as a matter of course. And she says this brilliant thing about how as a non-exec you need to go regularly to avoid it being a Charles and Diana visit. And I think that was really good, that like we need to break down this assumption that the board are here and everybody has to put out flowers and put on their best frock, and I think, you know, as a board member breaking down that barrier and going and just sitting in the organisation and building relationships with people even within your own employee base, but you know, employees, customers and seeing your stakeholders as being people you should engage with, I think just makes a massive difference for building that trust.Because you're all working towards the same goal, right, which is the organisation's success. but actually you need to see each other as human, and I don't think we spend enough time seeing board members as human.
[00:29:08] Ralph Grayson: Sadly we probably don't have time to get too much into this, but some of the best chairs that, that I meet talk about how most of the best boards add most of their value outside of the boardroom.
[00:29:20] Scarlett Brown: A hundred percent.
[00:29:21] Ralph Grayson: Then conversely, it exacerbates that problem of noses in, fingers out, in terms of the board being perceived sometimes to be overly meddling.
I think the pros and cons of being a NED are more under the microscope perhaps, and they have been for a long time, reputational risk, compensation, a whole number of variables. But one of those is just the, oh my god, 200 pages of a board pack on a Sunday afternoon. Is it really worth destroying that? And by the time I've read it, what value can I add? So you've touched on some of those themes, but I'd just love a bit more perspective on that.
[00:30:00] Scarlett Brown: Yeah, definitely. Whenever I tell anybody what my business does and I think about when I, you know, tried to explain it to my mom and she sort of looked at me with this incredibly blank expression, like she had no idea what I was talking about. And if you say, say it to anybody who has worked with a board. They know instantly. They know that feeling that, you know, getting 600 pages on a Sunday afternoon. You know, my mom goes, how can the lengths of board packs be a problem big enough to run 150 person company? I'm like, let me tell you something. So I mean, I could talk for hours, Ralph, about how we improve board information and there's loads and loads and loads of tips and tricks that we've been using over the years. We have a very structured methodology that we use which encompasses a whole bunch of stuff, including question driven insight, which I've talked about.
So I won't try and sort of pick out too many, but I suppose one of the things that I wanted to kind of flag that I think is really interesting in this area is that actually the skills that we teach leaders and organisations about how to write well for the boardroom, cause that's where we always start. We don't start necessarily with solving the board pack when it exists. We solve it at the process it's produced. Some of the things that we teach around that and our structured approach to that is actually the basis of what we really see is around an effective writing culture. And that's something that actually drives value in the organisation, not just for the production of the board pack.
There's some really cool examples of this. I wish I had more public examples than just Amazon, because they're the most well known organisation that does this. But things likeset an expectation that every meeting should have a structure, an agenda, and a memo that is sent before that meeting. So you shouldn't have a meeting that isn't sent with information beforehand and an expectation that people should engage with the content of a meeting before they come into it. One of the most amasing things that we see in our work is that if you are asked to sit down and articulate on just one page what you want to get out of this meeting, this is the thing that we need to discuss. This is the proposal I've got. This is the challenge we need to solve. This is what we know about it. This is what I think we should do as a result. And then everybody in the room reads that same piece of information and you are all then on the same page. The quality of discussion you have with the next 40 minutes of your meeting is astronomically better and it's something that we advise almost anybody at any level to think about doing.
So we have some cool stuff on our website about this and in our book, Collective Intelligence, I'll do a little plug for that as well. But we realised when we were working with boards that we would speak to a chief exec and they would say, God, I'm going to get everybody in my business to do this and actually a lot of the things that we can learn from how we communicate with each other, how we make meetings more effective, how we drive better leadership work all the way through the organisation. So I suppose to answer your question about how to improve board packs, I would also say it's not just about board packs, it's about the way that we run organisations and making people wade through mountains of information and then have meetings that aren't based on the things that matter, is not how we succeed in business in the modern era. We have to solve that problem.
[00:33:00] Ralph Grayson: And that segues brilliantly, I think, into diversity and composition of boards.
Less from a skillset, but more back to Patrick Dunne and his five generations. I think you and I are aligned in we need more younger people on boards. We need to encourage people to volunteer and see it as a positive thing to do.
So how should our younger listeners think how to position themselves and what's the right blend of experience and enthusiasm in that respect?
[00:33:30] Scarlett Brown: It's a great question. I guess as I've already said, I'm a board member. I've been board members a couple of organisations myself. I just think it's the coolest job in the world and I wish more people did it, and I wish people did it earlier. There's so many charities and organisations out there that, are crying out for people to be brilliant board members.
So, you know, step one is always do it. Really, really do it because it's a really cool thing to do. One of the things that I've really observed actually over the last few years is this kind of changing need of different kinds of expertise and if you'd asked me this question five years ago, I would've said be really, really clear on the one area that you are an expert in and make sure that is front and center. Whether that be you come from a finance background or you are a marketing expert or you're an AI expert.
I'd love your thoughts on this as well, Ralph, but we are seeing certainly that changing. That really board members need to think about themselves as being quite T shape in their expertise. So yes, you will have an area that you know more about than other things that actually, that breadth across the top the kinds of experience and expertise that you need the T is getting wider. So the things you need to have coverage over is, you know, getting more and more. So I think thinking about like mapping out what your T shape is, what is the the dropdown, what is the things that you know about? And then making sure that the things across the top of that T you really are across.
So of course, being able to read a P&L, being able to understand the finances super important. But understanding the market, that the organisations that you are interested in joining are operating in is probably the number one thing. It's that horizon scan what's coming down the track, and I think if you can get that across, that's super, super important.
[00:35:11] Ralph Grayson: There's a ton of work being done on the idea of the T board and I would encourage anybody to go and look at that. It comes back to, I think, the essence of that is boards aren't so one size fits all.
[00:35:21] Scarlett Brown: Exactly. Yeah,
[00:35:22] Ralph Grayson: How do you think a perspective NED should think about their fit on the board? That's a very unscientific question.
[00:35:29] Scarlett Brown: Yeah, definitely. I get it asked a lot because my PhD research was about how non-execs try and get roles. So, in theory, it should be something that I know a huge amount about, and again, there's other people who have better advice than me on this.
But I got asked recently by a colleague who was thinking about trying to kind of think about non-exec roles or charity trustee roles, and actually knowing where you want to go, I think is a really, really big step. I think when I first started thinking about it, I was like, oh, I could add value in loads of places. And then I thought, well, what are the things that I really, I care passionately about? What are the things that I know lots about and where might that lead me? That led to one of my first non exec roles which was working for the British Association of Counseling and Psychotherapy and I was part of their research committee there. And that was this perfect combination for me of an organisation doing things that I really, really cared about and them needing research expertise, which is something I know a lot about.
So I think there's something about like really understanding what are the areas that you play well in, whether it's public sector or charity or private organisations, and then trying to work at actually what are the things that they are really struggling for, and then actually putting yourself forward. I think lots of, particularly in the not-for-profit space, lots of organisations there don't have time to look up and think about the kind of people that they would like to be working with and actually approaching organisations and saying, I'd love to help. How can I help? Do you need these kind of experiences? I think is, again, I would encourage anybody to go for it.
[00:36:59] Ralph Grayson: Try before you buy, I think is an interesting concept there, and how people, a lot of people are put off making that first board application and I can't be one because I've never been one. The role of advisory boards, Ollie Cummings at Nurole talks a lot about popup boards. Groups of experts that can come together for a finite period to, to address a particular issue in the company, which I think is a brilliant idea. Any general thoughts around the informality perhaps, of learning that board experience and fit?
[00:37:28] Scarlett Brown: Yeah, definitely. From a candidate perspective, from an individual perspective, those kind of opportunities can be really good. I think when I used to work with an organisation called Dynamic Boards. We would advise organisations a lot about how you can go about getting younger non-execs onto your board.
And we used to feel very strongly that if you use kind of shadow boards or advisory boards as a way of getting the kind of young person or the inexperienced NED voice, they will always be relegated to that level. If I was advising an organisation, I would say be braver, and actually there's expertise out there that you are not going to find in an experienced non-exec and be brave in appointing a non-exec. If you are recruiting and you need somebody with experience in a certain area, recruit for two roles, and one of them doesn't need to have previous experience.
So I think I would always push organisations to be braver when appointing non-execs. At the same time, I think there are some really cool creative ways that boards need to get better at about engaging with wider stakeholders. So popup boards within organisations, popup boards of external advisors for particular challenges. It's a really cool, I have to dig it out, it's a really cool workshop exercise called Boardroom 2030, which does this. Which kind of encourages people to sit in the role of a boardroom, and I love that. That's really great, like if you can get people in your business to run a kind of board simulation of what they would do, like some of that stuff is really cool.
But for me it's about boards being able to get that viewpoint and not about solving the problem of getting people their first NED role.
[00:39:07] Ralph Grayson: Yeah, I look, this is an entire new podcast, reverse mentoring. Again Dunne in his generation books, talks about the Gucci board. Where they've put a young first generation board together. I can't remember quite what the expression is, but all of these things are such, such great initiatives to start thinking how we can get diversity of thoughtin the boardroom.
So look, time is running on. You and I could keep talking forever.
What practical steps does my perspective aspiring new NED take from this podcast? What should they be thinking about and doing now to best progress their path to the boardroom?
[00:39:45] Scarlett Brown: Great question. So some of the things I've already said, know where you add value, know what you know better than other people, and find ways of thinking about what you offer in terms of your skills, experiences, and perspectives and getting that across. Go on the websites and look. There's some great places that you can find access to roles. Again, I'll plug for Dynamic Boards because I know them well when you're looking for potential roles and other advertising websites are available as well. And again, I think particularly if you're looking for roles in sectors that don't advertise, or perhaps in smaller organisations getting to know organisations that you might want to work with.
So again, volunteer for them and get to know them. They need people who understand their businesses, understand their organisations, and that can be particularly in the charity space. Really, really important and of course, get to know the search firms. Always a good starting point as well.
And of course I would say this, but understand how boards work. There's loads of cool stuff out there. So really knowing what the board does, how the board can add value, and that strategic horizon scanning piece. What's the thing that the organisation you want to work with hasn't thought of yet, and how do you help them be ready for that?
[00:40:55] Ralph Grayson: So number one, Am I reading this now? Plug for Scarlett, her newsletter comes out every Monday morning. It's brilliant synopsis of stuff that's been written the week before and commented around corporate governance. It is along with, Ollie and Nuroles podcast, which is my Saturday morning, walk the dog must do Scarlett's synopsis on a Monday morning,is great.
So what else should a listener take from this? How do they follow up with you? How can they engage maybe with Board Intelligence?
[00:41:24] Scarlett Brown: Absolutely. In all the usual places on our website, on LinkedIn,and please do, yeah, sign up to the newsletter. A lot of what I've referenced today has come up in the newsletter at some point. It's my job to keep across the latest research, the latest insights, and yeah, what people are saying about the boards, what's going on.
So please do find me there, and there's loads of resources we have as well. Everything I've mentioned today is very much in the public domain. We have loads of guides, workbooks and things like that, that are all designed to try and help you tackle some of these challenges and anything else, get in touch.
I've got a long list of questions I'd love to keep asking, butwe're going to have to come back to this another time. We have more than run out of time. So Scarlett, thank you so much. I have so enjoyed this.
Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:42:06] 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 programme 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.