Leadership

Evaluating the CEO: essentials for not-for-profit boards

Like any employee, your CEO needs a regular formal evaluation of their performance in the role. It holds the CEO accountable to their role, but also ensures that the board is actively meeting its duties to their organisation. The benefits of doing a proper CEO evaluation are invaluable. Growth Evaluations provide a CEO with an overview of their efforts. It helps them to understand their strengths and weaknesses and gives them direction for areas where they can continue to develop professionally.

Get Real: What Are The Questions Boards Need to be Asking During Mergers and Acquisitions?

So you’re on a not-for-profit board and the question of a merger or acquisition comes up. What’s your primary objective as a board member as you navigate these often complex discussions? Is it: To safeguard the organisation’s legacy? To rigorously examine the potential business case and its financial viability? To thoroughly explore the risks and push for detailed due diligence on the potential partner? To dust off your AICD training (or get legal advice) on your fiduciary duties as a Director during a transaction?

The Collective Voice – A Crucial Leadership Element

Numerous professional development resources dispense advice with the presumption that directors will approach objectives with a shared attitude and intent, that the board will reach a consensual decision and speak with a collective voice. The reality is that often this is far from the case. Resolution can be difficult and that collective voice may be impossible to achieve. While healthy dissent can be a sign of an effective board, differences – habitually ill-managed – are obvious drivers that can lead to substantive leadership and organisational damage.

Top Tips For Developing Collaborative Leaders

To illustrate how workforce requirements are changing, the DDI Global Leadership Survey (2018) found that collaborating within and across organisational boundaries is regarded by CEOs as a premium capability. Working collaboratively is harder than your leaders might think because it’s about balancing common agendas with individual goals. For example, when helping leaders from grassroots community organisations, not-for-profits, government departments and the business sector come together in a regional New South Wales town to pursue indigenous employment outcomes, we first focused on articulating the common goal and developing collaborative ways of working, which contributed to its success.

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.