Interim Governance Director — Value Agenda (Banking)

Eighteen months to rebuild a board around its work

Board succession usually goes wrong slowly. Seats are filled one at a time, each for a sensible reason, until the board as a whole no longer matches what the business asks of it. The Interim Governance Director's year and a half is about correcting that drift in a listed bank, where every change in the boardroom is visible to investors and supervisors alike.

The first ninety days are diagnostic. With the Board Chair, you will set out the skills and experience the board and its committees actually need, measured against the portfolio rather than against the last skills matrix, and agree which decisions belong in the boardroom and which limits management may use without returning to directors. By month nine there should be an approved succession plan for board and committee seats, and every inherited governance commitment you found on arrival should have been kept, deferred or closed, with the reasons on file. By month 18 succession should be running to plan, and the Board Chair should own both the way issues climb to the board and the rhythm of its meetings without needing an interim to hold either together.

Authority to decide, not merely to recommend

Unlike an adviser, you will carry executive authority over the governance agenda for the whole term. That includes deciding which inherited commitments go forward and which stop, and refusing any plan that passes cost or risk to another part of the bank with no one accountable for it. You will hold back investment, including in board systems and governance programmes, when the case cannot say who will actually use the thing being bought, which other work it leans on, or how the bank copes if it disappoints. You will set the evidence the board uses to oversee how capital and capacity are deployed and where controls sit, approve how issues reach directors, and settle disputes as they arise when the Board Chair and the bank's operating heads see a succession question differently. In a listed bank the nomination process is also a disclosure process, so the record of why each choice was made matters as much as the choice.

A governance leader who has been on the hook

The seats you have held were in businesses turning over $710 million or more, employing 1,300 people or more and operating in two countries, and your governance decisions had effects felt by directors and by branch and operations staff alike. The board is interested in your record in value creation, joint ventures and turnaround. Each tests how a board composes itself under pressure: who needs to be in the room when a partner holds rights, or when one plan has failed and the next must be believed. Alongside that it wants governance ethics at level 4, and three level-3 capabilities: risk judgement, entity governance, and the management of board and stakeholder relationships.

What sets a strong candidate apart is staying power after the decision. Succession plans are approved in a single meeting and then delivered over months of difficult conversations with directors who are leaving and candidates who are not yet sure. You stay answerable for that unglamorous part. You can tell the Board Chair what remains unresolved and still move, rather than treating doubt as grounds to wait, and you will not hold out for unanimous agreement among country leaders before stopping a governance commitment that no longer serves the board.

A short route to the boardroom

The process is deliberately quick. The Board Chair opens it in week one, speaking with you confidentially over video about the mandate, your availability and how you read a board's composition. Seven days later, in week two, the Board Chair hands you a working case built on the kind of succession choices the role will face. By week three you are in the room with the directors themselves. Each stage brings our response, set out in writing, within two working days.