When it comes to company culture, we often focus on the role of employees. But in fact, a key component of building a positive corporate culture is ensuring that the relationship between management and boards works smoothly. This can be particularly challenging for companies that have undergone rapid growth or are transitioning from startup to scale-up organisation.
A CEO who has grown up in an environment where everyone worked together in one office may find it difficult to suddenly manage geographically dispersed teams that require frequent face-time with board members. On the flip side, directors may not understand their responsibilities as leaders on their own teams or within broader organisations at large. Here are some tips for building better communication between boards and management:
Management and boardroom harmony begins with communication.
Communication is a two-way street. The CEO and the Board of Directors are equally responsible for communicating with each other. This can be difficult, especially when executives and management teams are busy running the company day-to-day and board meetings are not happening regularly. However, it's important to remember that communication is a key component of any good relationship.
The first step in building trust between you and your board members is ensuring that they have access to everything they need from you so that they can have confidence in your leadership and execution abilities. They need timely updates on anything happening within the business or outside of it (e.g., new products, sales figures, customer/community sentiment).
If necessary, make sure someone from the management team (ideally the CEO) regularly attends board meetings so there isn't any confusion about what's going on within the company at large or within specific departments/units/business lines/etc.
Encourage informal communications.
Informal communications are a great way to keep board members in the loop and an effective way to build trust and respect between executives and the board. In addition to the more formal meetings and calls with executive leaders, encourage informal communication via email, chat, phone or video conferencing so that you can pick up on any red flags early on. This will help prevent miscommunications when no one is monitoring what's happening in the organisation.
Give executives the tools and the support to thrive.
The best thing you can do to build a positive culture of transparency and trust is to provide your executives with the tools they need to do their job. This includes giving them adequate resources, as well as support when they need it. If your executive team has been struggling lately, consider rewarding them by offering training for growth and development. While this might sound expensive, remember that helping your employees grow within their roles will actually save time for everyone involved in the long run—as long as those employees are happy with their work environments.
Keep lines of communication open year-round.
While the need for transparency, trust and respect is obvious during every board review process, it’s important to keep these lines of communication open year-round. That way, you’ll be able to get a sense of how the board feels about the leadership team before any big decisions come down the pipe. Board members can also communicate when they think something needs to change or what they think could be done better so that everyone is on the same page going forward.
In addition to keeping lines of communication open throughout the year, there are some key things that boards and management should do together in order to build strong relationships:
- Proactively make time to communicate regularly with each other
- Be empathetic—don’t take things personally! It's not personal when someone disagrees with you; they're just giving their opinion based on their experience and expertise
When management and boards work in tandem, everyone wins.
Building a culture of transparency, trust and respect between the board and management is not only good for the organisation, but it’s also good for individual executives. The board needs to know that they can rely on the executive and management team to tell them what’s going on – good and bad. When there are no secrets between the two groups, everyone wins.
Here are four steps to get started:
- Encourage informal communications between your management team and the board chair. There may be times when an informal conversation is more appropriate than sending out a formal update email or presentation deck.
- Give executives the tools they need to communicate effectively with the board members who report directly to them (the CEO), as well as those who don’t report directly (audit committee members). You should also help them understand each other's roles so there are no misunderstandings about whose role it is to take actionable steps in response to issues uncovered during a review process or audit engagement.
- Keep lines of communication open year-round -- not just when audits happen. That means communicating regularly throughout your fiscal year so people can share information openly without fear of being reprimanded or penalised if something goes wrong later down the road due simply because nobody knew about it until then.
If you want your company to thrive, then you need to foster an environment where trust and respect are the norms. This might sound like an uphill battle in some organisations, but it doesn’t have to be if you take a proactive approach that includes communicating openly with each other at every level of the organisation. By doing so, both boards and managers can work together toward a common goal: making sure that everyone on staff feels valued and appreciated for their contributions to the business.
