Nominee Director — Controls and Stewardship (Water and Environment)

A nominee who reads a delegation schedule like a balance sheet

Delegated authority is where governance either holds or quietly gives way, and this seat needs someone who has learnt that at first hand. Your board experience should include businesses of $275 million and upward in revenue, with 1,400 people or more and four countries or more. Your record will include succession, professionalisation and buy-side M&A, each of which leaves a trail of delegations written for a structure that no longer exists. Entity governance at level 3 is unusually central to this seat, sitting beneath governance ethics at level 4; risk judgement and the management of the board and its stakeholders complete it, also at level 3.

You have sat on a board where infrastructure cost and the ability to recover it pulled in different directions, and you understand what that means for who should be allowed to commit money. You have carried a contested downside before fellow directors and left its consequence at full weight. You have refused funding when uptake and downside were unnamed, then helped rebuild the governance capability that was missing. And you are willing to tell fellow directors, courteously, that a decision they took sat outside anyone's clear authority.

What the nominee will oversee

The Nominee Director holds a board seat: the work is oversight, carried out with the stewardship duty of a nominee alongside the independent judgement owed to the company. The director helps agree a delegated-authority framework, including what local leaders may decide alone, and fixes the information directors will lean on when overseeing investment, capacity and control. They challenge inherited commitments and any proposal that would leave its cost or risk unclaimed, and test value cases for uptake, dependencies and downside before approval. They oversee how management is organised and how matters reach the board, help directors and operating leaders resolve conflicts, and agree the cadence of the board's reviews of progress and decisions still awaiting a call.

In water and environmental services, long-lived assets and regulated obligations mean that a gap in delegation is rarely harmless. Someone eventually commits money or accepts risk without clear authority, and the board learns about it afterwards.

Twelve months from schedule to practice

During the first ninety days, every entity's and committee's delegated-authority schedule should be reviewed, with gaps and overlaps identified and agreed. Around month nine revised delegations should be approved and tested in real committee decisions, with reserved matters clear to every director. By month 12 delegated authority should be working in practice, reviewed by the board and reflected in committee terms of reference.

Four meetings on who may commit what

The Board of Directors opens and closes the process. Its first conversation with you, privately by video in week 1, is about the seat and its stewardship duty. In week 3 the Board Chair works through with you where delegations and reserved matters should sit. Week 5 is in person, with the executives who lead the business's functions. Week 7 returns you to the directors as a whole. Feedback, in writing, follows each stage within two working days.