Board Development

There are thousands of professional coaches in the UK, but of those probably only a tiny fraction have the skills and experience to coach Boards of Directors.  Starr is one of the few specialising in this niche area.

In some ways, Boards can be said to have deficiencies designed in. They bring together very disparate individuals, often with opposing interests and views – and they have a difficult balancing act to meet. On the one hand, they are responsible for governance and assurance issues, such as short-term performance monitoring, whilst on the other, they have to focus on the future and set organisational strategy. And to complete the picture, they are usually accountable to a set of external stakeholders. The result is a group dynamic full of tensions and paradoxes which need to be mitigated for the Board to lead the organisation effectively. Whole-board coaching is a natural step for us to take and complements our work with developing individual Board members to ensure outstanding organisational leadership.

Coaching the whole Board may have similar objectives to individual leadership coaching, but it requires a completely different approach. The coach has to move the Board on from being a roomful of individuals with conflicting tensions imbued in their roles, responsibilities and dynamics to a highly effective, cohesive and agile social system able to cope with change and uncertainty and deliver success.

The way we approach this is firstly to take a brief from the Chief Executive and Chair of the Board to assess the existing strategy and how the Board are already performing. The next step is to communicate with every individual Board member through a questionnaire and a series of one to one interviews to identify potential tensions, challenges and development themes. We then observe at first-hand the dynamics and relationships of the Board in action.  The culmination of the process is a workshop for the whole Board, following which we provide group and individual feedback and help to identify and execute an on-going development plan for the Board.

Please read the case study for a detailed description of how Board Development works in practise.