Leadership

5 Strategies to Measure and Embed Trust in Your NFP

If you have listened to the news in the last 12 months, you would almost be forgiven for thinking organisations are awash with unethical behaviour. Governance failures have shaken community trust in not-for-profits (NFPs), banking institutions, sporting codes and churches. Today, it is no longer feasible for boards to assume all is well in their organisation. In fact, assuming good intent can often lead to blind spots that allow bad conduct to flourish.

Why Listen? How Listening Skills Can Improve Your Board

When people talk about communication skills for the C-suite or the boardroom, many think of speaking or presenting. Communication is seen as how we share our ideas, our knowledge, our opinions, our hopes, fears and aspirations with others. We communicate to influence others, to tell them what to do or think, to warn them, to advise them, to challenge or confront them. We use our words to achieve many goals.

Why External Coaching for Your Executives is Critical

There are very few safe harbours in the world these days and for the isolated CEO or executive carrying all the pressure, providing them with one will make a significant difference to their performance and longevity, and through them, the organisation. It doesn’t matter how smart, insightful or even self-aware you are, getting a quality, external perspective helps. Someone to help sort the important from the urgent, who doesn’t have a vested interest in anything other than your success.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk (But with Heart)

Introduction: Fiduciary Duty (Have a Heart) Board members have fiduciary duties that include acting in good faith in the best interests of their organisation, avoiding conflicts with their own personal interests, acting with reasonable care, skill and diligence and not using their positions to misuse information, gain profits or obtain benefits for themselves or for anyone else.1 Put another way, board members need to have a heart to create a culture in which the organisation’s strategy arises out of its inherent values.

Adaptive Governance… Transformational Leadership

For boards of community businesses (NFPs) the move to a customer-driven, competitive marketplace is a radical departure from their known industry/sector context to which they and their management team were perfectly adapted. When any industry or sector undergoes a radical paradigm shift, it presents all boards, chief executive officers and executive teams with the dilemma of: do we disrupt our organisation, that is seriously transform our organisation, re-engineer our business model and reinvent our culture to ensure we are part of the new paradigm?

Can Boardroom Leadership Meet the Challenges of the Future?

Leadership remains the biggest challenge of all for 2013 and beyond. – World Economic Forum Global Agenda Outlook There’s never been more commentary on the challenges facing planet earth (and organisations and boardrooms) than we find entering the 21st century. Humanity is challenged to lift its adaptability index massively. Corporates are more adaptable than governments and are ideally positioned to globally and locally confront the world’s most pressing issues. The boardroom is at the epicenter of corporate action.

Leadership Succession Management as an Ongoing Governance Discipline

A board’s primary responsibility for the succession of the senior leadership of an organisation is increasingly acknowledged in light of clear evidence that inevitable changes in these positions often cause preventable disruptions to corporate performance. Australia, which previously has been lagging its counterparts in the US and the UK, has recently tightened its governance guidelines to make boards more accountable for directly overseeing the succession of all key management positions. As this translates into one of the most ‘hands on’ roles of a board, how can directors ensure that an effective approach is being implemented?

Disrupt or Be Disrupted ... The Six Leadership Challenges of the New Customer-Driven Competitive Marketplace

The strategic and organisational impacts and implications of the new customer-driven, competitive marketplace of human services are profound. Never before and probably never again will the boards, chief executive officers and senior managers of Australian community businesses (NFPs) face such a cataclysmic shift in the way they need to think, behave and operate. The shift from a government-funded, welfare paradigm to a customer-driven, competitive market paradigm should not be underestimated – there are immense strategic and organisational challenges as well as significant opportunities.

Three Cheers for the Chair

Every board member has an important role to play in the governance of your organisation, but it is your board Chair who has the greatest influence over the culture and focus of your board activities. As such it is crucial that boards carefully consider their Chair’s appointment and make sure they choose the right person for the job. When discussing the role of Chair for your organisation, there are several things you may want to consider.

3 Sources of Purpose Creation

In this video, Aaron Hurst – CEO & Co-Founder of Imperative and author of The Purpose Economy – outlines three primary aspects of purpose creation and how they can be utilised within your organisation