Board Chair — Governance Renewal and Integration (Business Services)

A chair who has kept the story and the evidence together

The board is looking for someone who has led a board through digital transformation, a joint venture and a turnaround, and who never let the board's account of events float free of what the operating figures showed. That drift is the characteristic failure of boards under change: the narrative becomes more confident just as the facts become less certain. You have resisted it at a business with no less than $430 million in revenue, 1,700 people and a presence in seven countries.

Faced with partial operating evidence, you have made a call the board could undo and then firmed it up as better information came in. You would count it a good first year if the board's best act were stopping a commitment rather than launching an initiative, and you can defend that with evidence. The capabilities that matter are governance ethics at level 4, then three at level 3: entity governance, risk judgement, and board and stakeholder management. You can set an unresolved gap before the Board of Directors and still bring the board to a decision.

What the chair will lead the board to settle

Oversight, not management, defines this seat. The chair does not run the business; the chair makes sure the board challenges, tests and oversees it well. Here that work centres on delegated authority, which in a listed organisation with several entities and committees is rarely one document. It is a set of reserved matters, committee terms of reference, subsidiary board mandates and approval limits, each written at a different time for a different purpose. Resetting it means deciding, deliberately, which decisions the board keeps, which it delegates and to whom, and what thresholds stay with local leadership.

The chair leads the board in agreeing that allocation and the evidence it will rely on when overseeing money, capacity and control. They lead challenge on commitments, sequencing and local exceptions, especially where an expense or a hazard changes hands without anyone answerable for it, and make sure investment cases are tested for take-up, operating dependencies and downside before the board approves them. They oversee how the leadership is structured and how issues travel up to the board, help directors and operating leaders resolve conflicts early, and set a board cadence that keeps progress, exceptions and open decisions in view.

Eighteen months of resetting who decides what

Within its first ninety days the board should agree a reset framework for delegated authority across its entities and committees, with local thresholds written down rather than assumed. Around month nine each committee's mandate should have been reviewed against that framework, and integration investment cases tested before they come for approval. By month 18 a board evaluation should confirm that the reset is working in practice, and that escalation between directors and operating leaders has been tried under real conditions rather than merely described.

A short selection

Selection is brief. The Board of Directors talks with you privately over video during the first week about the reset and how you would chair it. The Audit Committee Chair sets you a case in week two. In week three you sit down in person with the investment committee. Each stage is followed by our feedback inside four working days.