Interim Board Secretary and Governance Officer — Value Agenda

The calls a governance officer actually has to make

Delegated authority looks administrative until someone has to decide what it says. The Interim Board Secretary and Governance Officer will face a run of judgement calls that shape how a listed agribusiness and food group governs itself, and will hold executive authority to make them, answering to the Nomination and Governance Committee Chair.

The first call is where to draw thresholds. Set them too low and every entity board and committee drowns in approvals; set them too high and material decisions slip through without anyone senior having seen them. You will build a delegated-authority schedule across entities and committees that shows which thresholds rest with local leadership, and defend it to people who preferred the old arrangement. The second is what counts as evidence. Committees often receive management information shaped to reassure, so you will define what the board and its committees use to oversee investment, operating capacity and controls. The third concerns inherited commitments that sit awkwardly with the new schedule. You will decide whether each goes forward, is suspended or is closed, block any proposal that passes cost or exposure along without someone accountable for it, and hold back investment where the case leaves out take-up, operating dependencies or downside. The fourth is quieter: how disputes between the committee chair and the operators get resolved, and how often the committees hear about progress, exceptions and decisions still pending. The route issues take upward, and the reporting calendar that carries them, are yours to set.

From a mapped schedule to one that maintains itself

Within the first ninety days, a delegated-authority schedule covering entities and committees should be agreed, with thresholds and escalation routes written down for local leadership. Around month nine committee reporting on progress, exceptions and open decisions should run to a fixed calendar, and every governance exception should have someone answerable for it. By month 12 the reset authority should be embedded in entity and committee records, and the secretariat should be able to keep it current after the interim term ends.

A secretary who has redrawn authority while the business kept moving

Your governance career will have put you at the centre of a business with revenue of $390 million or more, 1,300 people or more and a presence in three countries. Geographic expansion is one of the experiences that matters most, because new entities test delegated authority faster than anything else; professionalisation and succession are the other two. The committee is looking for governance ethics at level 4, with entity governance, risk judgement, and board and stakeholder management placed at level 3. Your judgement should have been tested somewhere the operation could not stop while authority was redrawn, and you should be comfortable staying accountable after the board has decided, doing the unglamorous work of closing exceptions one by one.

Committee chair, operator, panel, board

The Nomination and Governance Committee Chair speaks with you privately over video first, during the opening week. The third week is spent with the Regional President, who will test how a reset schedule lands with the people operating under it. In the fifth week an in-person panel of executive leaders from each function questions you, and the seventh week is given to the directors' final discussion as a full board. Allow five working days after each stage for the committee's assessment to arrive in writing.