Nominee Director — Controls, Stewardship and Delivery (Energy and Utilities)

Not a nominations exercise

Board succession is often treated as a matter of filling vacancies as terms expire, with a skills matrix updated once a year. This seat asks for something more demanding. The Nominee Director is not being appointed to run a search or to manage a rota. The task is to help the board work out what its portfolio actually requires of the people around the table, and then to shape succession so the board's composition follows that work rather than habit or availability. The seat is also not executive: it is oversight, and its tools are challenge, testing and stewardship.

The oversight brief

Reporting to the Board of Directors, you will help agree who decides what on board succession and the limits local leaders keep, and help set the evidence the board will use when overseeing investment, capacity and control. You will challenge investment, sequencing and inherited commitments, including any that push a cost or exposure onto a party without its consent, and test value cases for adoption, operating dependencies and the downside before approval. You will oversee how leadership and escalation are organised, help the board and the operating heads settle disagreements, and help agree how often, and in what form, the board sees succession progress, exceptions and unresolved choices. A nominee director holds a stewardship duty to the appointing interest alongside the independent judgement owed to the company.

In a subsidiary of a multinational group, board succession has an extra dimension. Group appointees bring valuable context, yet a subsidiary board still needs enough independent and sector expertise to oversee a business in energy and utility services on its own terms. Judging that balance is part of the work.

The director the board needs

Your governance decisions in energy or utility services have been ones where waiting had a measurable price, in organisations reaching revenue of $410 million or more, 800 people and seven countries. You have acted on partial evidence with a decision you could undo, firming it as better facts arrived, and you have declined to fund cases that left adoption and the downside unnamed. The board will look hardest at scale-up, then at professionalisation and buy-side M&A, and seeks governance ethics at level 4 and level 3 sought in risk judgement, in entity governance, and in board and stakeholder management. You can lay an open gap before a board without retreating into uncertainty. The seat suits someone who will press for a stop without waiting on each country, and who expects to answer for the full 12 months.

Skills first, then the succession plan

Within its first ninety days, the board should have mapped and agreed the skills its portfolio requires, and set succession criteria against them. Around month nine the board succession plan should have been reviewed against those skills, with the gaps and their timing put to the board. By month 12 the succession plan should be approved and its first evaluation complete, with the board's skills matched to what the portfolio needs.

The selection begins with the Board of Directors, privately and over video, in week 1, discussing how you would define the skills the board needs. The Audit Committee Chair holds a working session with you a fortnight later, in week three. Executive leaders from each function form an in-person panel in week five, and the board meets you in week seven with every director present. Each step is answered in writing within three working days.