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

My guest for this instalment of the Boardroom Insider of the Month series is Anna Hurley, Project Manager of the Hurley Hotel Group and Publican of the Marion Hotel. Anna’s day job includes oversight of the Marion Hotel, the construction of the new Hotel Panorama, and overseeing various capital projects and investments across the 9 hotels and various property interests of the Hurley Hotel Group, founded by Anna’s parents almost 50 years ago.

As part of the many hats Anna wears, she sits on the board of the South Australian Motor Sport Board, the body that runs motor sport events in South Australia including the flagship event the Vailo Adelaide 500 (which many of us still refer to as “Clipsal”). Anna also sits on the Executive of the Australian Hotels Association's SA Branch, the primary body representing the commercial interests of hoteliers in South Australia.

Find out more about the Hurley Hotel Group

Conversation Highlights

In my conversation with Anna, we discuss her pathway to the boardroom, how she sees her extensive hotel and tourism sector expertise benefitting the Boards she sits on, the advice she is reluctant to give to aspiring and emerging board members, her biggest Board career challenge so far, the value she gets from her board service, the negative aspects of board service that no one talks about, her idea of the essential skills of great board members, and what the future of corporate governance needs to incorporate.

Useful Links from this Episode

Podcast: Asking Better Questions in the Boardroom with Greg Bustin | Ep. 21

Podcast: Previous Boardroom Insider of the Month Episodes

Course: Boardroom Bootcamp

The CEO-Board relationship often persists despite mutual frustration; each doing or not doing things that inevitably get up each other’s noses. This normalisation of Board-CEO tension is helpful to a point; however, it can lead to negative outcomes for the board, organisation, customers, and stakeholders if left unchecked. Issues between the Board and CEO frequently stem from a handful of easily managed root causes. However, these are not ferreted out, examined, worked through, and resolved. This conversation discusses five of the most common root causes of a strained Board-CEO relationship and shares easy actions for a CEO and Board to implement for a thriving relationship to blossom and sustain.

For this conversation I am joined by some previous international guests who I invited back to the Board Shorts Podcast, Sabrina Walker Hernandez and Patton McDowell. These guests bring their own experiences as being both CEOs and Board Members, and are currently working with senior leaders and board members in profit-for-purpose organisations (AKA non-profits or not-for-profits), so they are deeply attuned to the topics we cover in this episode.

Investing in governance education is something that all board members and boards will consider multiple times during their Board career. There are so many options available: for individual board members and for boards; and so many other considerations to make: in-person or online, free or paid, formal or informal. In this episode, I hope to equip you with some tools and considerations that you can use when you or your board next invests in governance education.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Boardroom Bootcamp

BoardPro Article: How I Keep up to date as a Board Member

Further Reading

[article] Most Boards Don’t Budget for Director Development. Here’s what that means for you.

[article] How to Choose the Best Director Development Program for You

[article] The Value of Informal Director Education

[article] The Value of Formal Director Education

Most aspiring and emerging board members would describe themselves as a high performer. If you’re listening to this podcast, I would suspect that you would lean more towards high performing than not. All this to say, this episode is for you if you’re an aspiring board member (whether you want to join your first board, or you’re looking to take the step up to larger organisations, more sophisticated Boards, or into a paid board role).

My dear friend, Mark Gregory, has spent many years of his career working with high-performers like you; supporting them to transition into roles that they aspire to be in, whether as a student looking for their first career move, an elite athlete transitioning into life after sport, or supporting a seasoned professional into their next career evolution. I invited him onto the Board Shorts Podcast to talk about the process he uses to help people ‘see the label from inside the jar’, as he puts it. Like most of our conversations, we like to break up the seriousness with the occasional joke or segue into a totally different topic. Nonetheless, Mark always brings us back to the main point and makes it clear with colourful stories and analogies that we can all relate to.

About Mark Gregory

From a foundation in the UK Banking / Finance sector, with forays into Outdoor Pursuits and Expedition Training, his experience is strongly focused on the assessment and development of both individuals and groups. Since arriving in Australia, in 1996, Mark has developed links across community and commercial networks, assisting and managing a range of innovative programs.

Having graduated with a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Psychology), from Flinders University, Mark is able to draw from robust frameworks whilst reflecting on extensive workplace experience. His Career Development roles continue his passion for navigating individuals through career decisions, ensuring they have tools and resources tailored to their chosen field. Working across high school and tertiary contexts gives Mark a full understanding of education and employment pathways, in a complex and dynamic labour market. Supporting Students from equity groups provided an opportunity to collaborate with both student support services and Employers.

Since 2015 Mark has supported over 250 elite Athletes across two Olympic/Paralympic cycles, a home Commonwealth Games, and multiple World Championships.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

• Mark Gregory on LinkedIn
• Monty Python Accountancy Skit
• Monty Python Spanish Inquisition Skit
• Transactional Model of Communication
• Crampons (Google image search)
• Dr Fiona Kerr
• Links to Dr Kerr’s studies
• Proximity/Collective Effervescence
• New Day Leadership Summit

Get on Board Australia Courses

• Break into the Boardroom
• Five Steps to Build Your Board Resume

Where do I find the right people for my NFP Board? How do I build a Board that is generous? Why can’t I find any good Board Members?

I often hear these questions from exasperated not-for-profit leaders, Chairs, and Board Members. It turns out that there is a better way to define, find, and recruit non-profit Board Members and Sabrina Walker Hernandez is an expert on this topic. She has previously been on the Board Shorts Podcast, and I invited her back to speak about finding the right people for your NFP Board.

This conversation with Sabrina covers all facets of defining and finding the right board members for your not-for-profit board, including how to switch-on Board Member giving, how to best recruit future Board Members to ensure generosity with their time, talent, and treasure, and the CEO and Chairs’ responsibility when it comes to building and maintaining a giving culture on the Board.

This is a short but jam-packed conversation with lots of takeaways for NFP leaders and Board Members. Grab your notebook or notes app and settle into this conversation with Sabrina Walker Hernandez.

About Sabrina

As a consultant and coach, Sabrina specializes in helping small businesses and nonprofits thrive by fostering meaningful relationships that directly impact revenue growth. Using the B.U.I.L.D. framework, Sabrina specializes in strategic planning, leadership retreats, board development, staff empowerment, and resource optimization. Her track record includes consistently delivering a remarkable 30% increase in revenue for the organizations that she works with.

She is a bestselling author with over 25 years of experience in nonprofit management, fundraising, and leadership. Among her successes is that she increased operation revenue from $750K to $2.5M and completed a $12M comprehensive capital campaign in the 3rd poorest county in the United States. She has facilitated numerous workshops with hundreds of nonprofit and business professionals. She is certified in Nonprofit Management by Harvard Business School.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Sabrina’s Website | Supporting World Hope

Sabrina on LinkedIn

Optimising your NFP Board with Sabrina Walker Hernandez | Ep. 59