Today we're diving into the world of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on board secretaries.

Joining me is Suzanne Rowe, the founder of Board Support Services, a company that provides governance support to organisations across Australia. With her many years of experience in corporate governance, Suzanne offers a unique perspective on the role of AI in the boardroom.

In this episode, we explore the pros and cons of using AI for board secretariat activities. We discuss the importance of understanding what AI can and cannot do, the risks involved, considerations for legal obligations and duties, and the human element that's still essential for accurate board meeting minutes.

This episode will provide valuable insights into how approach using AI to streamline your board administration while maintaining high standards of governance.

Join the conversation: Share your thoughts on LinkedIn using the hashtag #BoardShortsPodcast.

Mentioned Links:

LinkedIn – Board Support Services Company Page

LinkedIn – Suzanne Rowe

Do you leave writing your board resume to the last minute, rushing to produce something that you’re not quite happy with? GenAI may seem like a helpful solution. But, is it?

I used Google’s Gemini to write my Board Resume and in this episode I share what happened.

Key Takeaways:

• GenAI is not a silver bullet: While it can assist in writing board resumes, it cannot fully replace human judgment and expertise.
• Human input is crucial: GenAI requires specific instructions and context to produce relevant and effective content.
• Editing is essential: AI-generated text often needs refining to align with personal style and tone.
• Focus on quality: A well-crafted board resume is more important than a quickly generated one.

Overall, I conclude that while GenAI can be a helpful tool, it should be used in conjunction with human effort and understanding to create a strong board resume.

Mentioned Links

Build Your Board Resume program – enrol before 15 September 2024

Board Resume articles and resources

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

Join the priority waitlist for the new Build Your Board Resume program

Thanks to our sponsor BoardPro

Visit boardpro.com/boardshorts and use the promo code boardshorts – all one word, lowercase – to get a 30-day free trial AND 20% off the price of your first year on any plan.

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