Board of Directors Development
The Board Director’s Role
Every key constituency—from investors to D&O insurers, creditors, and public regulators—expects good corporate governance by board directors who understand their roles and responsibilities and who have forged an effective working relationship with the CEO and senior management. This next level of corporate governance reform is a continuation of an existing trend: changing the boardroom culture so that directors will be effective independent overseers of management on all issues, not only in times of crisis at their companies.
At the same time, the CEO and other C-level executives must also fully understand the role of board directors and how best to communicate with them, provide them with the requisite information to enable them to effectively exercise their fiduciary responsibility, and establish a working relationship that is both collegial and candid.
Through such services as board retreat facilitation, board assessment, director training, board staffing, and mediation, Masters-Rudnick & Associates helps directors and management find the fine balance the board director’s role demands today and create the board dynamics to maintain it. As independent and confidential advisors, we help the CEO and board develop a shared understanding of each party’s needs and concerns to improve communication.
We don’t simply dispense advice; we deliver and implement practical solutions—from writing codes of ethics to skills training and coaching to creating board information systems to augmenting limited support staffs—so that directors can more effectively fulfill their responsibilities.
We can help with such practical but often overlooked matters as improved information flow in a format that focuses the board on the key issues. As a result, board directors are better able to fulfill their roles through an improved ability to:
- Understand the business
- Assess strategy and risk
- Monitor appropriate measures of short-term performance and long-term progress
- Communicate with investors and other constituencies
- Oversee and monitor increasingly complex compliance demands
- Develop good corporate governance processes for global operations and markets
Because boards today are overwhelmingly composed of non-management directors reflecting increasingly diverse backgrounds, demographics, professional experience, and skill sets, the board director’s role is in a challenging transitional stage. To that challenge, we bring the experience and the multiple perspectives we have gained as directors, senior corporate officers, general counsel and corporate secretaries, and advisers to CEOs, boards, and corporate staff. The result: board directors and executives who are better able to fulfill their roles for the long-term benefit of all stakeholders.