Board Effectiveness Reviews

Boards approach us to ask for a Board Governance Audit or Board Effectiveness Review covering all aspects of board performance to shine a light on how effective the board is at leading the organisation, or in short, how well they are doing.

Why do they ask?

1. Compliance purposes
2. The route most companies take, to gain an insight into how the board can work more effectively in delivering its vision, purpose and strategy.

What do we do?

Either remotely (useful for a range of reasons such as directors travelling, non-executives based abroad or during business disruption such as Covid-19) or face to face, we look at the board across 6 key areas. The responses to these areas helps provide insight into six areas of board activity, namely:

1. Leadership
2. Board dynamics
3. Strategic direction and clarity of purpose
4. Stakeholder engagement
5. Board processes and controls
6. Risk management and committees

A key area is risk management; we consider the top 5 risks to the organisation and how the risk management process helps control and mitigate risk, balanced with the risk appetite and tolerance of the organisation. We give an objective assessment of where the board is and offer recommendations to the board around areas of improvement.

Benefits

The primary purpose of a Board Effectiveness Review is to make sure the board are objectively checking themselves.

It offers an independent insight into how effective boards are at running the business by an objective, professionally qualified Chartered Director of the Institute of Directors (IoD) from Lanson Consultants.

Our Board Effectiveness Reviews have already been successfully run across a number of sectors – insurance, local authorities, military and manufacturing to name a few.

Larger, listed organisations are often required to have an independent Board Review every 3 years.

Highly regulated industries (such as finance, pharmaceuticals and nuclear) usually have a requirement to be reviewed every 2 years.

Process

Customers choose one, any, or all of 3 stages:

1. Basic: an online questionnaire tailored and scaled to the needs of the review for that particular board provides a basic data output
2. Standard: Lanson Consultants analyses the questionnaire output and interviews the board members, either remotely or face to face, drawing conclusions to make recommendations in a formal report. This flags up interesting areas for debate such as whether all board members agree on the strategic direction of the organisation
3. Platinum: Lanson Consultants observe 1-2 board meetings to see how they really operate and use this along with the outputs of the questionnaire and its analysis to feed into an objective and professional report of observations, conclusions and recommendations for improvement.