Giselle McLachlan is someone I have met through my relationship with BoardPro (a Board management software provider). Giselle is an experienced Board Member from New Zealand, having started on Boards as part of her leadership role. From there, she has built a Board portfolio while leading Grounded Governance, a governance training, advice, and education organisation. Her and I share a similar human-centred view of corporate governance; we touch on this a lot in this conversation because it underpins everything that we do as Board Members.

In our conversation Giselle also shares:

• Her interesting and varied Board journey
• What she loves about Board service and the value the team can bring to organisational success
• How she built a portfolio career, balancing Board service with the need to earn an income
• Her analogy of Governance yoga and how discomfort and stretch are necessary
• Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable
• How your network will help you build your Board career
• The challenges that come with a Board role
• The essential skills of great Board Members (including her handy R3 framework)
• Powerful questions to ask yourself and your Board
• The human element in being a high performing Board member and a high functioning Board team
• And, her down-to-earth advice for aspiring and emerging Board Members, from Board pay to the importance of saying no

Connect with Giselle on LinkedIn

Grounded Governance

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Wellbeing in the workplace is a topic that has been around for a while. But with new positive duties for company directors in Australia, psychosocial safety in the workplace is the latest evolution in workplace health and safety obligations. Board Members are well-aware of their responsibilities to the physical safety of their work force. However, directors now must proactively manage hazards that could create harmful levels of psychological injury. These injuries may include anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sleep disorders.

It will help boards to see these positive duties as an opportunity to embed a strategic workforce wellbeing program; one that moves the needle for employees and for the business bottom line.

How an organisation does this is the domain of Dr Clint Strahan, a Partner at Exsona, where they help organisations elevate the human experience at work. Clint has spent his career in consulting and senior leadership roles applying the principles of organisational psychology to help businesses, and the people within them, perform at their best. His PhD research on accountability and employee engagement in Australian mining provided a foundation for effective strategies and interventions designed to develop leadership capability & drive business performance. He led high-performing Talent Acquisition and L&D departments in the insurance industry for 7yrs and brings that internal, real-world perspective to his consulting work with clients.

Clint and I discuss

• Workforce wellness and wellbeing: what it is and what it isn’t.
• How workforce wellness addresses psychosocial hazards.
• How to best address poor performance and incentivise high performance.
• Ways to measure employee wellbeing to understand how your organisation is performing with psychosocial safety and workforce wellbeing.
• Simple strategies that all organisations (even small organisations) can introduce to leverage psychosocial safety and workforce wellbeing for a tangible ROI.
• How to create the business case for investment into workplace wellness and wellbeing programs.
• Experimenting with workplace wellbeing activities to find what works and moves the needle forward.
• Clint’s views on recent comments about employees literally taking up arms for their early-stage tech company employer.

This isn’t a soft and fluffy wellbeing conversation. There’s a lot of valuable information in this conversation; I took a page of notes and made some key points to ask at my next board meeting. Enjoy this conversation with Dr Clint Strahan.

Useful and Mentioned Links

For regulatory codes and guides for psychosocial hazards/management, refer to SafeWork Australia and your industry peak body.

Connect with Clint on LinkedIn

Clint’s Organisation: Exsona

Access the Psychosocial Hazards Checklist

Creating and sustaining an engaged and motivated group of individuals is critical in any business context. The boardroom is no different.

What is often the case, though and I’ve experienced this first-hand, is we expect board members to show up, but what we get are human beings. Human beings that are very smart, used to being in charge, and leading other humans. But, when placed in the context of the boardroom, lack of board experience, board dynamics, and internal politics influence how well those humans can collaborate and produce valuable outcomes for an organisation. These forces are unique to the boardroom, but not unique across all boards.

It takes a special toolkit to effectively work with and leverage value from the individuals who make up the board of directors while at the same time minimising the impacts of negative board dynamics and politics. It also takes a special leader to utilise this toolkit consistently; preferably proactively, yet sometimes reactively.

Effectively and efficiently integrating, activating, and motivating board members is much easier through the appreciation and use of – what I call – people-first principles and a purpose-focused board. Using this I AM framework, this episode shares smart and practical techniques that all boards can introduce to create and maintain an engaged, empowered, and energised board.

Specifically, I will share:

· Techniques to integrate and onboard new board members so they deliver value fast.

· Methods to activate board members and ensure they are working on the right things at the right time. And,

· Approaches to tap into board members’ motivations to sustain their board participation.

Webinar and WhitePaper

Creating and Sustaining a High-Performance Board https://www.boardpro.com/resource-centre/webinars/creating-sustaining-high-performance-boards

Board Induction Resources

New board members - the first 100 days: https://www.boardpro.com/resource-centre/webinars/new-board-members-the-first-100-days

Conscious Governance TV: https://www.consciousgovernancetv.com/conscious-governance-tv-home