Interim Governance Director — Value Agenda (Business Services)

Evidence directors can stand behind

Most board papers are written by management, for management's purposes, and there is nothing wrong with that until directors have to rely on them for a decision that carries their own accountability. The Interim Governance Director is appointed to draw that line: to separate management information, which describes what the executive believes, from evidence the Board of Directors can rely on when it approves, challenges or declines. The appointment runs for 12 months and reports directly to the Board of Directors. Where public accountability adds another audience to every board decision, as it does for a state-linked organisation, the distinction carries particular weight.

An interim governance seat with the power to act

Although the director serves the board, this is an executive appointment with authority to make changes, not a secretariat. The director establishes how decisions are allocated, including the limits within which local leadership acts alone, and settles the evidence the board will use to oversee money, capacity and control across a multi-country scope. They decide which governance commitments carry on, pause or stop, and halt any proposal that hands its expense or hazard to a party nobody has made answerable. Funding is declined where a value case does not deal with take-up, dependencies or downside. The director also signs off the leadership team and the channel through which issues climb to the board, and works through disagreements between the board and the operating heads before money moves.

Doing this well depends on a distinction good governance professionals learn early: assurance is not the same as reassurance. A paper can be accurate, well presented and still give directors nothing they could defend if challenged. The test the director applies is simple to state and hard to meet: could a director explain, from this evidence alone, why the board decided as it did?

A year in which the board papers change

The first ninety days are spent agreeing what counts as evidence: which figures directors will rely on, how they are assured, and how they are kept apart from management's own reporting, with an accountable owner against each governance exception. Around month nine the change should be visible in the papers themselves, which by then should carry independent evidence on where money is committed, how stretched delivery capacity is and whether controls are holding, while governance proposals without an owner are halted rather than merely noted. By month 12 a governance rhythm and a dependable route for escalating issues should be in place, one that directors can keep relying on once the interim term ends.

Where your record should come from

Your integration work has had effects felt by directors and by staff at the operating edge alike, in organisations with revenue of $245 million or above, at least 1,000 people and activity in five or more countries. Directors and the managers who do the work have both challenged your baselines, and the baselines held. You have refused funding when take-up and downside went unnamed, and then built the governance capacity to do better next time. Alongside integration, the board will ask what you learned from succession and from professionalisation. On capability it expects governance ethics at level 4; at level 3 it wants risk judgement, entity governance, and board and stakeholder management. You are content to be accountable for the full year rather than advise from the edge of it.

The board's process, stage by stage

The Board of Directors opens proceedings in week one, confidentially and over video. Third week: you and the Risk Committee Chair work through a governance problem together. In week five a panel of executives who lead the organisation's different functions meets you in person; they will want to know how your evidence standard would feel from their side of the table. All the directors meet you together in the seventh week. Feedback on each stage reaches you within four working days.