Board Chair — Governance Renewal and Integration (Water and Environment)

A chair's year, measured in the board it leaves

Three things need settling inside the first ninety days: the board agenda for the year, a review of directors' skills against it, and a succession plan covering both directors and committee chairs. None of these is new to an experienced chair. What matters is that they are agreed together, so that succession is planned around the work the board must do rather than around who is due to rotate off.

Around month nine committee mandates should be refreshed, and succession candidates should be assessed against the skills the board has agreed it needs, not against a generic profile. By month 12 board succession should be aligned with the agenda ahead, and the evaluation cycle should be complete and reviewed by the directors themselves.

The chair's oversight remit

The seat is oversight. The chair agrees who decides on board succession, with clear limits for local leadership, and settles which information directors should lean on when they oversee investment, capacity and control. They oversee which inherited commitments are kept, held or closed, and challenge any that would leave cost or risk with nobody to answer for it. Investment cases are tested for uptake, dependencies and downside before approval. The chair also oversees how management is organised and how matters rise, helps directors and operating leaders resolve conflicts, and decides how often progress, setbacks and outstanding decisions come before the board.

For a listed water and environmental services business, the skills a board needs are shaped by long asset lives, environmental obligations and public scrutiny. A chair who understands that will plan succession so that the board's collective expertise keeps pace with those demands.

A chair who has led through an ESG transition

The boards you have chaired or served on should have overseen $875 million or more in revenue, a headcount of 4,000 or more and three countries. Experience of ESG transition, professionalisation and succession will count most. For a chair, governance ethics at level 4 is non-negotiable; board and stakeholder management, entity governance and risk judgement should each be at level 3.

Through an ESG transition, you kept the board's account of progress tied to what the operating data could actually show. Baselines you have set have been contested by directors and by the operating leaders who answer for service, and still stood. You keep the controls that do real work, make each exception show its cost, and leave the board stronger than you found it. You can lead directors through a question that has no clean answer yet without letting the board defer it indefinitely.

The path to the chair

Directors open the process: the Board of Directors holds a private video call with you in week 1. Week 3 is spent with the Risk Committee Chair, mapping board skills against the risks ahead. In week 5 you meet in person with executives from every function, and in week 7 with the full board. Our feedback on each stage comes to you in writing within four working days.