Boards do care about quality – even if they don’t know it yet

Getting boardroom attention is a perennial challenge for the quality profession and one that the CQI has dedicated itself to tackling.

The CQI brought together senior quality professionals from CQI Corporate Partners including Lloyd’s Register, Raytheon and NG Bailey at a Corporate Connect event in London, to learn how to get quality on the board’s agenda.

It’s not as if boards don’t care about quality and how it affects their business, said the CQI’s acting CEO, Vincent Desmond, how could they not? So, if the quality profession has had difficulty getting traction with boards, “it’s our problem, not theirs”.

On hand to give advice on how to change this was Natasha Szczepanik of Board Intelligence, who specialises in how to influence the C-suite.

The right information, presented in the right way, can “fundamentally change the dynamic” in a board, said Szczepanik. But board members often feel they’re not getting this.

Despite the vast “data dump” of information that is thrown at them, many boards “feel they are blindfolded,” she said. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

Recent research conducted by Board Intelligence and Cambridge Judge Business School found that the average length of a board pack for a FTSE 100 company is 288 pages – about nine hours’ reading. But the average length of time a board member spends reading their copy is just three hours.

“When we’re presenting to boards hundreds of pages of material in quite short timeframes, it’s almost unfeasible that they’ll be able to read it,” said Szczepanik. “So there’s quite a big question around how much information can they digest and are they getting the right information?”

Research by Board Intelligence and Cambridge Judge Business School found the average length of a board pack for a FTSE 100 company is 288 pages – nine hours’ reading

What can quality professionals do in the way they communicate with boards to make sure that strong governance, assurance and improvement are embedded at the highest level of the organisation?

First, understand their questions. Szczepanik says one of the biggest reasons managers bombard the board with data is that they “want to answer the questions the board would have, but have no idea what those questions would be”.

When preparing a report for the board, imagine it as a series of questions and answers. And remember that the questions boards ask tend to be very high level and simple: why are we doing this? What are the benefits and risks? How confident are we that it will work? Answer them as concisely as possible.

When reporting on performance, don’t just list the outcomes – provide an explanation of what’s driving those outcomes. This way you’ve answered the “so what?” question and given the board a basis to make a decision to address the issue.

Make clear what you want the board to do with a piece of information, for example, if they need to make a decision or provide comment

It’s also important to make clear what you want the board to do with a piece of information, for example, if they need to make a decision or provide comment. It sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often boards don’t know what they’re supposed to do with information they receive.

Another area where quality can help is to understand the duties and concerns of board directors. Since the financial crisis, Szczepanik says, they have become “more alive to their responsibilities and the fact that they can actually be fined and go to jail for failings in the boardroom”.

This means they pay minute attention to their legal and regulatory requirements. “It’s right and important that they should be focusing on that,” says Szczepanik, “but we have to help them do it in a way that means that they can also take a broader perspective.”

Being honest about problems and mistakes helps to win the trust of board members, who should act as “critical friends” in these situations, Szczepanik says.

“Every board member I’ve spoken to acknowledges that things go wrong in business. They say to us time and time again that they have much more confidence in people who can say: things haven’t gone well, but here’s what we’re doing about it.”

Whether it’s communicating directly with the board or educating the wider business on the importance of governance, assurance and improvement, the CQI’s Vincent Desmond said quality professionals must learn “to speak the language of business, not the language of quality”. 

Words: Robert Bain