Board Development

Governance has been a hot topic for organisations in all sectors for some years, following high profile failures and public concern. It’s increasingly understood how good boards add value and weak boards hold performance back. And these days, regulators and investors or funders are paying more attention to how effective boards are.

And since ‘the buck’ stops with your board, boards need to know they are doing a good a job. The question is how.

Clients Approach Us To

  • Carry out a review of governance effectiveness.
  • Support a board member appraisal process.
  • Review the governance structure.
  • Benchmark governance practice
  • Facilitate meetings to consider major decisions or to ‘blue sky’ the future.
  • Review skills and support succession planning.

We have some great experience of working on these challenges – with great results. We design bespoke interventions and we have some tried and tested tools to help your organisation deliver excellent governance.

Our approach is always to support boards as the leaders of their organisations to develop new understandings and to arrive at shared decisions about new ways forward.

This approach has been developed over a number of years and was influenced by a range of publications we developed on the governance of social housing organisations, most notably Treading the Boards: A Self-Assessment Approach for Board Performance (Housing Corporation, 2001).

We have some valuable tools to help develop boards, including:

  • Transform’s Governance Effectiveness Tool-kit.
  • Our Board Climate Survey.
  • Transform’s Board Transitions – a skills analysis and succession planning tool for boards of directors/trustees.

See our Tools page for more details.

Try our free governance benchmarking sampler here.

We’ve also been contributing to the debates on this subject in our blog, Transforming Tales. Select the governance category for all the relevant articles.

“We want to have top boards across our Group. What do we need to do ensure that we do?”

In brief, we:

  • Worked over a three-year period to observe, support and act as the board’s critical friend.
  • Improved the individual appraisal system and the all-board effectiveness reviews.
  • Recommended training/development inputs for board members.
  • Coached the Chair generally and in particular through tough points of change.
“We have worked extensively with Transform in the last few years, on comprehensive governance reviews, rolling through all boards in the Group. John Tierney works well with all the team, Board members, staff and customers alike, offers deep critical analysis and has genuinely helped our Boards gain the tools for self-improvement. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Transform’s John – a thorough professional”.

Sinéad Butters, Chief Executive, Aspire Group