MME #04: How Great Managers Can Become Great Board Directors
Monday Morning Manager
Read time: 3.5 minutes
MMM #04: How Great Managers Can Become Great Board Directors
In this week’s issue, I want to talk about how great managers who want to be great board directors...
...need to be capable of an out of body experience.
Here’s why…
Manager or Executive and Board Director, (Non-Executive or Executive) are two completely different roles and to be effective at both you can only do one at a time.
At any one time it’s vital to know which hat you are wearing, the Director hat or the Manager hat.
Wearing the Director hat (the same hat for executive, and non-executive director), and working as a Board Member your responsibilities to board colleagues are:
Setting the Direction - Agreeing the mission, vision, values vital few and action plans to enable the organisation’s future development to be delivered
Measuring Progress and Performance - in the delivery of the mission, vision and values
Ensuring Accountability and Good Governance are in place
Understanding the organisation and how it works so that the board can properly review and add value to management thinking
Learning and Development - to ensure contributions are always up to date, pertinent, and relevant
Wearing the Manager hat, (when working back in the organisation), the focus is on making the mission, vision, values vital few and action plans happen to standard and to time:
Leading Self - planning and taking action on your way ahead
Engaging others - in planning and delivering their way ahead
Delivering Results - individually and with others
Developing Coalitions - so that multi faceted projects can be delivered
Systems Development and Transformation - so that today’s breakthrough can be tomorrow’s normal, so new breakthroughs become possible.
What Do Great Managers And Great Directors Do?
A pivotal role of a great board is to help the managers do their jobs even better, One of the main ways directors do this is by providing what I call 'second sight’. This is how it works:
A great manager/executive works long and hard with their team to create a new plan to deliver a key area of action to bring the vision about. They know they will need to take it to the Board for approval.
Inevitably when completing the plan, the executive will have invested emotional capital to get it to be at least 85% as good as it could be.
The manager's team present their plan openly and fully it to board. The Board, including the owning manager, listen carefully and objectively to every detail of the plan, and ask questions to appreciate the detail. All Board Members actively make suggestions about how the plan can become 5-10% better. The benefits and worth of this activity to the organisation could be huge. The teamwork across the whole board should be excellent.
At the end of the meeting the managers thank the Board for taking the time to listen so carefully and make suggestions about how the ideas could be improved even more. The Board thanks the managers for all their hard work, agree next steps, and express their confidence in the management team to take the plan forward successfully.
Consider The All Too Common Alternative
If the executive who made the plan had stayed in their manager role, they could have entered the board room wearing the fatigue from long hours of work over many weeks.
They may have become defensive and reluctant to be fully open about their ideas lest they received criticism. Consequently, the engagement of other Board members may have been minimised.
The Board's willingness or ability to provide ideas about their plan may not have been forthcoming to a defensive manager. It is possible that the Board meeting may have deteriorated into an argumentative difficult activity with little agreement or teamwork.
An important opportunity to test bed the ideas could have been prevented. Important opportunities to improve the plan, or correct a catastrophic error may have been missed. The loss of opportunity, and the cost to the organisation, could have been huge.
All those involved and affected would suffer in numerous ways as a result.
In Summary
If You are a great manager who also wants to be great director it really helps to separate the two roles. Ideally you need to be able to walk into the Boardroom, throw your own work on the table, and view it with colleagues as though you’ve’ve never seen it before. The art is being able to see your own work afresh when you change roles – as though you’re having an out of body experience.
That’s all for now.
Have a great day.
See you next week
5 ways I can help you when you’re ready
If you have questions about this or anything else related to Board productivity and effective functioning please DM me on LinkedIn here.
I’ve helped hundreds of Chairmen, Chairwomen, Chief Executives, Directors, Executive and Non Executives over the last 35 years. If you’d like to discuss how I might help your Board move forward, you can book a discussion about your situation here
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If you’re a manager, or executive, or a new Non-Executive about to become a Board Member, and you would like some coaching to become a better Board drop me an email here so we can have an initial chat and see if we can work together.
