Advisory Board Member — Governance (Logistics and Infrastructure)

Delegated authority, seen from the board

In a group of several entities, delegated authority is the quiet machinery of governance. It decides which decisions a subsidiary board can take, which a committee can approve, and which must come to the parent. When it drifts, decisions get taken in the wrong place, or twice, or not at all. This board seat exists to oversee a reset of that machinery.

A board seat's work is challenge

The appointment is a board seat, so its work is challenge and oversight rather than management. Reporting to the Board Chair, you will help agree the delegated-authority map and what entity heads may decide alone, and help set the evidence the board uses to oversee investment, capacity and control across entities. You will challenge inherited commitments, their sequencing and local exceptions, including any proposal that parks cost or risk where no one answers for it, and test investment cases for take-up, what else they depend on and downside before approval. You will scrutinise how leadership roles are arranged across entities and how issues climb, help the Board Chair and entity heads reconcile their differences, and help decide how often reset progress, breaches and pending choices come before the board.

What a good reset looks like

A reset is not a longer list of approval limits. It aligns each authority with the entity or committee best placed to judge the decision, and with the information that body actually receives. In logistics and infrastructure, where asset decisions and service commitments are often taken in different places, that alignment matters: authority to approve an asset should sit close to someone who answers for the service it supports.

How the reset should unfold across 18 months

During the first ninety days, the delegated-authority map across entities and committees should be reviewed and agreed with the Board Chair. By around month nine, committee mandates should have been tested against the reset authorities, with inherited exceptions challenged and an accountable owner for each. By month 18, delegated authority should have been reviewed in operation, and the board's cadence for escalation assessed and refined.

A director who has reset authority before

Your experience comes from businesses with revenue of $280 million or more and 1,500 or more people, present in five countries or more. The Board Chair will weigh your experience of cost transformation, succession and turnaround, each a moment when authority must move quickly and clearly. Governance ethics is expected at level 4, with board and stakeholder management, risk judgement, and entity governance each at level 3. You have brought a contested downside before a board chair at full strength, and you have opposed money for cases that could not name their users or their risks, then helped rebuild the governance capacity required.

Chair twice, then the executive committee

The Board Chair accounts for your first two conversations: a confidential discussion on screen in week one, and a case worked through together in week two. In the third week you meet the executive committee in person. Each step is answered in writing within four working days.