I had an interesting conversation the other day. I was chatting with the Chief Executive and Chairman of a large organisation – 3500 staff, £300m+ turnover, competitive environment etc They are getting to know one another – and, I think, respect one another, and are beginning to recognise that their differences are of value to their board of directors. In the past 3 months, a series of very experience non executive directors have joined their board, and they were musing about how it seemed to them.
Various things came up in the conversation – but we got snagged on the fact that the new non executives did not understand why the executives exchanged private glances and ‘smirked’ at each other during board meetings. What was going on? The Chairman made clear that when he had joined the Board 18 months ago, he had noticed the same thing, and wondered about it; now he did not notice it. The Chief Executive was struck how – she qualified the word, but said it – ‘paranoid’ this seemed. They both agreed something ‘uneasy’ was at play.
There was a long pause.
Then we started to wonder about ‘induction’ – and how you got involved with this organisation if you were not working in it all the time (a challenge to the non executive directors); and how you got involved in the Board, given – in many ways – this was a small part of your job (the executive directors’ challenge). The Chief Executive and Chair both looked at each other and smiled – ‘we are all the same’ they both said together; ‘none of us are yet fully involved with each other at the Board’.
It was interesting that we explored
- our sensing the exclusion (partly self-exclusion) of the non executives which pointed to a confusion over power and accountability – they thought that the executives had an ‘inside track’
- our sensing that the executives did not know how to challenge-in-the-moment, and thought that the non executives were there to hold them to account in transactional terms
- our sense that we were all expressed different ways of responding to the same dynamic
- how through exploration of intimate perspectives on the felt experience, we were able to re-imagine in
Slingshot