Peter Williams, Australia’s #1 Authority On Leveraging Growth Through Business Advisory Boards, is interviewed by television news presenter and reporter Amber Sherlock of TV’s Nine News. In this segment, Amber asks “What are the five critical changes every business owner should make to have a more strategic board?
Transcription
Amber Sherlock: What are the five critical changes every business owner should make to have a more strategic board?
Peter Williams: Often, across boards, they got to have some foundation, foundational building blocks. So they need to have a purpose on a charter that’s a very important aspect. They need to have an independent chairman in my view, because the business owner or the CEO can’t both chair and contribute to the meetings and then they need to have a proven framework that takes the business forward. So it’s got about regular and consistent meetings. It’s having a proper agenda or a full agenda that’s actually focused on the strategic issues. But some of the other practical things that dealing with boards over many years and the number of boards that I have is that there are a number of things that need to be done. For instance, one I recommend is that you don’t educate the board members, spend the time, the valuable time that board members have.
Sitting around the table, you don’t spend your time educating them. So that’s about getting the information to them beforehand. It’s about eliminating PowerPoint from board meetings, which tend to be the bane of everyone’s life. But again, all that’s doing is justifying management’s view on where they’ve been, not about where, where they’re going. It’s about posing the questions and the help that they would like from the board members. So too often, of course, it’s just presenting reports and asking for ad hoc comments. But really effect of high impact boards will actually post those questions beforehand. So they’re just some of the ways to really turn your board into a high impact board.
