Board Chair — Governance Renewal and Integration (Logistics and Infrastructure)

A chair who has already grown a board, not just sat on one

The boards you have chaired, or sat close enough to the chair to shape, served businesses no smaller than $1000 million in revenue and 4,600 people, operating in three countries or more. The record that matters most is one where geographic expansion or a buy-side M&A deal changed what the board needed to know, and the board's composition changed with it rather than lagging a year behind. Professionalisation belongs in the same story: the moment a board moves from trusted relationships to written mandates, reserved matters and formal evaluation, someone has to lead the shift without making directors feel audited. That someone is usually the chair.

The appointment panel will look first for governance ethics at level 4, because a chair who reshapes a board decides, in effect, who will hold management to account, and that power has to be exercised with visible fairness. Three further capabilities are each expected at level 3: entity governance, risk judgement, and board and stakeholder work with directors and investors. In conversation we will ask where you kept a board's account of itself honest by tying it to operating evidence, and where an investor's view and an independent director's view pulled apart and you held the two together.

What the chair settles, and what stays with management

Chairing is oversight. You will not run operations; you will decide what the board must see before it approves, and you will make sure directors challenge investment, sequencing and inherited commitments that shift cost or risk somewhere without anyone accepting it. In logistics and infrastructure, a capital case can look sound on volume and still be silent on how long an asset takes to earn its keep, or on whether customers will actually take up what is being built. Testing those assumptions before approval is the board's job, and the chair sets how rigorously it is done. You will agree with directors which thresholds remain with operating leaders, oversee how leadership is organised and the way problems reach the board, help directors and management settle disagreements, and fix the rhythm on which progress, exceptions and open questions return to the table.

Succession is the heart of the mandate. Rebuilding it around the work the business now does means asking, seat by seat, which skills the board lacks for the next phase and in what order to bring them in, without unsettling the directors who carry the institutional memory.

Board renewal in sequence

The first ninety days should leave directors with a skills matrix they believe in, a succession sequence that says which seats change and when, and a short list of decisions the board reserves for itself. Around month nine, committee mandates should have been refreshed, the evidence used to oversee integration should have been tested at least once under real conditions, and the first evaluation led by the chair should have been discussed openly with directors. By month 12, the renewed composition should be in place, with succession, evaluation and the handling of escalations running to a calendar the board owns rather than one that lives in the chair's memory.

How directors and executives will test the fit

The Nomination and Governance Committee Chair opens the process in the first week, one to one and over video, asking how you would read a board's composition against the business in front of it. The Risk Committee Chair follows in week three, sitting down with you to work out how oversight of integration and risk should be split between committees and the full board. In week five the conversation moves into a room with executives who each lead a different function, and they will want to know how a renewed board would change the questions they are asked. The last step, in the seventh week, is a session with the full board. After every stage you get our response in writing within four working days.