Francis Wade 3 Big Nagging Issues Faced by Caribbean Boards

And welcome if you're joining. We're just about to get started or get going in just a few minutes. See if I can organize the stream list. It's pretty small. Okay, I don't know if we have anyone here yet. Oh, there's Marie. Hi, Marie. I should start typing in the— Hi, Marie. Okay, we're a couple minutes away from starting, and I believe I finished with the setup.— so that my screen can be seen. Don't need this. May need that. Okay. And we'll see how many people we get today. During this. This is, I call this a pop-up webinar because the decision to do the webinar was made this morning, sort of very last minute, that okay, yes, I'll pop up and do it. And okay, interesting, I set up the one screen to just show right now the, the COVID page. It's just the beginning. And let me toggle over to the page which shows the live video. Yep, that seems to be working fine. So I think I can be seen at this point. And we wait and see if we get a few more people in just a few minutes. And I'm hoping that Marie can hear me. Let's see what we get. Go here. Yep, looks as if the sound is going through. These things take an elaborate amount of setup time to organize and fix up, and they can go wrong in many, many, many ways. And it's really sort of a dramatic presentation in real time, so of course everything can go wrong in real time. And we'll see who else we get. Marie, if you're hearing me, just type in the chat, in the comment area, so I know that you are indeed receiving the— hearing the words that I'm saying. And it's now 1 o'clock on the dot, and we'll give everyone another minute, see who else we get, and then I'll start. The 3 big nagging issues faced by Caribbean boards. Just see if we have here— just checking to see if it is live on my page, whether or not it's actually working as intended. Yes, it is. And I see that it's been liked by Dale Pilgrim-Wade, so I think I better get going. And as other people come in, I'll just simply include them in. Alrighty, so let's get going. So in case you don't know me, I'm Francis Wade from Framework Consulting, and welcome to what I call a pop-up webinar. This was a last-minute decision, so put on a webinar entitled "The Three Big Nagging Issues Faced by Caribbean Boards." So there are some issues and some problems that I've noticed in my consulting work across the region, and I'm gonna speak to what these issues are. They, they take place even though people are well-intended, even though folks are really hardworking, and even though Many people, you know, they do their best to try and solve them. The problems still occur in this sort of unintended, unwanted way. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. Okay, so let's start off. So I'll take off my glasses here so the glare goes away. So it's a dilemma. If you're on a board, how do you intervene when the company is facing problems? Facing challenges. There's something happening that you're not intimately aware of because you're not in the company. You come for a regular monthly or quarterly meeting and you realize there's an issue, and as you're having the discussion, you realize that there's not consensus on how to engage the company. So people tend to, in the absence of real consensus, sort of do their own thing. So board members sort of pursue their own course of action, the one they think would work. And there are many ways it can go badly. So the way that we're perhaps most familiar, the sort of the failure mode that we know can happen is that there be some kind of confrontation between two people who are working in the company. I guess in this company, they're in the lunchroom, and a board member has a conversation with an executive, and it doesn't go well, and there's a bunch of regrets afterwards, and they wish they had done it differently, but there you have it. It didn't go as intended. It didn't go as planned. So this happens, even though, as I mentioned at the top of the show, or of the webinar, even when people are committed as in they're highly motivated. You wouldn't be on a board unless you were a motivated individual. You probably wouldn't have been selected if you weren't very, very smart and have some insight and some experience in management, in running companies, in the industry, in private sector or public sector. You wouldn't be involved in it, in the board, if that weren't the case. And you have some, of course, knowledge. Which is why you were tapped in the very first place. So even though you're smart, this dilemma still sort of raises itself, raises its head. And like many boards, I imagine that yours is one that maybe turns over quite a bit in that there is, there is a sort of a switch or a change in personnel. It turns out to be a very big problem for you because As the people change over, the norms change, the rules of engagement change over time. You saw I just tried to drag over a window, it didn't quite work. But as you try to change, as people change, the ways of succeeding become more sort of lost over time. They become more obscure. And it's just because there's a lack of institutional memory. So over time what happens is that people who kind of know how to deal with certain issues eventually move on and they're replaced by new people. And unless there's a rigorous way of managing the memory or the norms or the practices of the board, it creates a problem. There usually isn't. Usually boards just change over and whatever happens just sort of happens and that's just the way things are. And people sort of struggle to do their best to deal with situations as they come up. So the end result is that you find board members playing all kinds of roles. So they, because they're, each of them is doing their own thing, they end up advising different people in the company, responding to pleas for help, talking to people who they already know in the company who are their friends maybe or their colleagues. They respond in all these different kinds of ways that are very, as you can see from the picture, there's 3 different kinds of jobs that a board member could end up actually doing, and I've seen the equivalent of these in different companies. As a result, they end up being focused on very, very, very different things. So what happens over time is that the Big problems continue. Why? Because the board members are focused on playing these different roles. And over time, these problems increase in size. The typical response of a board member if the problem gets worse is to try harder. So they try more and more of what they were doing, try to increase, try to go deeper, try to do more of what they were doing before, but it just doesn't work. It just doesn't give them the result they want. It creates more problems, as a matter of fact. So the board members are left, you know, what should we do? We're working as hard as we can. We're obviously smart, we're committed, we're engaged, we have experience, we have knowledge, and we're doing our best, but it's not working, it's not making the difference that we wanted. So if you're a board member, whether you're paid or unpaid, or volunteer, or public or private sector, you probably want to make a difference and move from the point where you're confused about how to engage and solve these problems to the point where you're clear, the board members are clear about their role in solving the problems that they become abreast, though. So let's talk about the 3 ways, the 3 problems that boards typically face here in the Caribbean, and they have to do a lot with the way we relate to each other that I believe is quite different because we come from very small countries where we're very, very close-knit per country, per island, or per territory, and that causes us to relate to each other in a particular way that is a temptation to a board or to a board member. So the first has to do with acting as an individual coach versus part of a unified force. The second is maintaining a regular presence versus a presence as a visitor who is just there to solve an emergency. And the third is to assume the role of a colleague versus a referee. Okay, so let's get going. So it starts with an innocent question. All that happens is that a simple, well-meaning, again, well-intended employee, fellow in the blue, comes to you, a board member, and asks an innocent question, and you decide to help. So you decide to get into it and to assist them. And it's just one question, but then another question comes, and then a few more come, and over time, you know, you remain happy to help because especially the person comes back to you and says, you know, the assistance that you gave me was really useful, I'm so glad you're here, I have just a few more questions. And over time, you, the board member, and the member of staff, and this person could be at any level, start to develop, let's call it a coaching relationship over time, maybe even a mentoring relationship. Nothing wrong with that, obviously. But what you don't know or may not know is that your colleagues, other board members, are also setting up their own coaching relationships. So people have reached out to them for whatever reason. They have responded with their knowledge and experience and trying to be helpful. They assist the person who has called them for assistance. Hmm. And you start to wonder because you see them, you know, buzzing around the company the way you are, and you sort of wonder, hmm, is this the the best sort of way to do this. So next board meeting, let's imagine it's a quarterly, and it's taken up in conversations about what you found. Oh my goodness, can you believe it? I've been talking with so-and-so in the shipping department, and you wouldn't believe the nonsense that's going on there. Oh yeah, well, I've been talking to so-and-so, the other person in the marketing department, and the whole place is a mess. That continues and continues until before long, the board meeting turns into a trauma sharing about small issues, focusing on these day-to-day kinds of problems that are happening in the company. And now that you're exposed to them as a group in all different shapes and forms, The board meeting now becomes about, oh my goodness, we have to do something about this. No, it is the marketing problem is way more important. We have to do something about that. Because each coach/board member has gone into the company, found something different, and has now brought it back to the board meeting. So let me see if I can pull up, I'm trying to pull up, pull up and see who we have actually joined here today in our webinar. I see Iva Livingston, welcome Iva. Joanne Richards, Cynthia Neve, who is a friend from college days, and Marwie Elveren from high school days, welcome everyone. If you're having trouble connecting, I think Marie just said she is, then simply refresh your browser and see if that doesn't help. If you're on a small device, you may have to reboot the device in order to get more memory so that you can actually follow the presentation. But I'm gonna ask you a question. If you've been on a board or been around board meetings, have you seen this happen? I'm gonna type the question in the chat also. Have you seen this problem of trauma sharing? Happen in board meetings after boards have delved into detail as coaches? What a long question. Let's see if we can get some responses. To my question. Have you been in board meetings or been around board members who have become fixated about these small issues and then go back to board meetings and then the small issue becomes a huge topic of conversation? So let's see if we get some responses to that. I'm looking at the chat room here on Facebook. Let's see. It's the waiting that's the hardest part. I know many people join webinars and really they're coming to listen, they're not coming to participate. I didn't give the usual warning at the beginning that if you're coming onto this webinar, you must participate. So let's see if we get a few answers up. Okay, not seeing anything yet, so in that case I'm going to go on to the next slide and then you can just pop your answer in because I'm going to be coming back to pick up the answers in just a minute. I only have two screens, so a bit limited by what I can do. So the second problem, which is very much related to the first, is that when the board members come into the board meeting and they are sharing the trauma that they've discovered in the company, and oh my goodness, you won't believe what's happening, they also may share the advice that they've given. And all of a sudden, you end up with a tussle between, or a fight between, different contradictory pieces of advice. So I told people in shipping to do this. Yeah, but I told people in marketing to do that. Yeah, but that's not going to work because then if they ship and they do the way I told them, that's going to fall, create a problem with what you told them. And as it emerges, no, but I did the, I told them the right thing because no, you, you are wrong. All of a sudden you have a competition over who gave the best coaching advice or what the right advice might have been. So all of a sudden you are in a brand new problem. Now, because you weren't on the same page, because you weren't aware of what your fellow board members were doing, you've gone into the company and by virtue of your being the boss of the boss, which in other words, the CEO's boss or the managing director's boss, your words have a particular weight. So when you suggest to to someone in the company that they do A, B, or C, they say, "Yes, sir," and they go and absolutely do A, B, and C because you're the boss's boss. So they faithfully execute what you did, even though it might not make sense and they may have doubts. So when you come back into the board meeting, it turns out because you weren't coordinated with your fellow board members that the advice you gave was completely contradictory, and now you have a real problem. And this real problem adds up over time because what happens is that, especially if you're in a unionized environment, the staff members start to rely on you as their super delegate. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you're the board member who is the sort of the favorite person in the shipping department, they're going to come to you with all of their issues all their problems, and they're gonna rely on you to carry that problem past the manager, past the director, past the CEO, and directly to the board. So you have now become the conduit for all of these problems and the person who will carry them to the board so they can be aired. In a unionized environment, even worse, because what union delegates will do is they'll quickly figure out that if there's an alternate pathway to get what we need to get, we need to use that pathway. And in the guise of coaching, "Yes, that's a good idea. You should mention that to the board, you know, 'cause these issues aren't being aired sufficiently at the right levels, and that's why they're not being solved.'" When you're told that as a board member, you say, "Boy, I have to deal with this." And so do your colleagues. So you end up with this traffic jam of a conversation in the board meeting around these different issues. So let me see if we've picked up any, anyone else. I haven't seen anyone else join us in our Facebook group, so I'm just gonna keep going and hope that we get some other people coming in. So this problem is one that boards face and boards have a very difficult time solving because they can't quite tell the source of it, because it appears that they are once again all trying to solve problems with a good faith effort, and they are. It's just that it's not enough. So the second problem is an extension of the first. What happens if you keep on coaching? Well, some board members fancy themselves as, you know, I know as much, they'll say, as a management consultant. In fact, 'When it comes to shipping, I know more than the management consultants. So hey, I'm free. I'm already committed to the organization because I'm a board member, so you don't have to pay me. So I'm actually a free consultant. So I could save the company all kinds of money. You don't need to go in and bring in a company. Don't bring in Francis and his cohort. Don't need them.' just rely on me, the board member, because I know just as much. So that sounds really attractive to the head of the shipping department. So why is this a problem? Why can't a board member be— provide just like consulting services and be a board member at the same time? Seems kind of natural because there's all this knowledge and experience, they're really smart, committed, free. Why not? Well, management consultants will tell you that what makes for the success of a project doesn't lie in the knowledge only. So knowledge, of course, is important, but it lies in the contracting. So what do I mean by the contracting? Contra— the contracting is the agreement to work on a particular area for a specific amount of time in a particular way with a particular kind of relationship with the person who is the client. And contracting, a good contract, a good agreement takes a while to sort out. If it's sorted out well, and any consultant will tell you this from experience, if it's sorted out well and it works effectively, then the project can be a success. Projects that are failures the ugly failures where people hate each other at the end and phone calls aren't returned is because there was a problem in the contracting. The original agreement that was set up was too weak to allow for the work that you wanted to get done. So management consultants know this. Unfortunately, if you're a board member Can you even contract? Not really, not the way a consultant does because the way consultants think is I need to go in like a surgeon, not your family practitioner or your family doctor. A surgeon gets a particular job done and a surgeon has a particular mission in mind. Surgeon will tell you they want to make sure the problem gets solved so it never comes back again. But a family doctor is there for the long haul. They are not about solving a problem and then disappearing. A good consultant, as a matter of professional ethics, is all about solving a problem so that it goes away. And during the short time that I'm involved, I help you— I either solve the problem, help you solve it, give you the tools to solve it for yourself, and then I'm gone. I'm not a permanent presence in your life. Unfortunately, a board member who tries to have it both ways is trying to establish a long-term relationship— they already have, sorry, a long-term relationship, but they're trying to act like a surgeon, trying to solve it with a short-term intervention. Doesn't work because there's no such thing as a short-term intervention for a board member. It's all long-term. So the kind of trust that you need to build in order to have a proper contract, a functioning agreement, doesn't happen for a board member. He or she doesn't have that freedom because there's an already existing relationship. And in that relationship, there's a certain asymmetry. Why? Because when a board member offers advice, like I said, to the shipping department, the guy who is working on the dock says, okay, my boss's boss's boss's boss wants me to do something, I'm gonna do it. That's not real contracting. Real contracting comes when both parties enter into an agreement fully as peers. In fact, the person in the shipping department is following orders. Now, you may think as a board member that, "Oh no, it's just like a consultant." It's not. That person is following orders. They may not say it that way. They may pretend to trust you the way they trust an outside consultant with whom they have a contract, but it is definitely not the same. So the lack of a proper contract creates a problem. That problem leads to another problem. So where, whereas a good consultant is always looking to leave, to do the job, declare victory with some integrity, and move on as a professional to something else, something different, as a board member you don't have that freedom. You are in it for the long haul, so you cannot create a consulting contract. However, you can hang around long enough, and if you pretend that you are having a consulting contract, eventually you may move from being originally like a coach or a mentor, then you become like a consultant, and then eventually over time, especially here in the Caribbean, you become friends. So you develop a personal relationship. With the people in the company. Again, you know, what could be wrong with that? What's the issue? Why am I even mentioning it in this vein? Well, imagine, so you're on the board and your new friends tell you a juicy piece of company gossip. And as a friend, you hear it and you now need to decide what to do with it because you're a board member. This is more than just gossip. This is actually mission critical. And now you have a problem. See, it's a little bit like if you could imagine a goalie who wants to be the center forward, who wants to— is supposed to be tending the goal, but it ends up all up on the end of the other end of the field wanting to play a role that he or she isn't meant to play. So what happens is that they leave their goal unattended. And it's really easy for the opponents to score. So when a board member becomes a friend, consultant, a coach, it's as if they're trying to play a role that they are not intended to play. And the problem, the hint, is that when they start to play that role, they leave their real role unattended. So here's one of the big roles that they leave unattended when they go and play other roles is that, so imagine a goalie who also wants to be the referee. Not only do I want to score the goals, I want to be able to enforce the rules as well. Well, a huge part of what a board does is to set standards and to hold executives accountable for reaching them. And when a board member abandons their role and goes and takes up other roles, what happens is that it becomes impossible, or at least very hard, to hold someone to account who is a colleague or a friend. In other words, you stop being a board member when you take on these other roles. So here's some solutions, 3 solutions. One is to put the norms of behavior of interacting with your board, or with your executives, sorry, in writing. It's to actually establish a quasi-vision statement, mission statement, set of procedures. Over time, allow these procedures and policies and processes to accumulated to something looking like a playbook. So when a new board member joins, there is a whole sequence or series of instructions about what to do when, how to behave when, how to respond when. It's fine to be a coach for 5 minutes, it's fine to be a friend on the occasional, it's fine to be a consultant, but to warn against behaviors that are inappropriate by prescribing the correct behaviors and how to follow them when problems occur or problems come up in a company. And then the second, once these have been placed in writing or have been captured in some stable form, is to bring a level of rigor and integrity to the whole party, which is that you execute the norms, the mission of the board, the written mission, almost as if your life depends on it, as if the company depends on it. And here I'm making the case that the company's future absolutely depends on board members playing the role of board members with some rigor and integrity. And what that means when you play your role in this way is that you establish boundaries for what you will do and won't do in particular circumstances. And the ones that I'm mentioning happen with every board, and they're commonplace, and it can't be left to chance to just rely on a board member in the heat of the moment when they're, you know, they want to help and they're caught unawares. To respond just from gut instinct or from the goodness of their heart. And the way to solidify the behaviors that would enforce these boundaries is to practice them over and over again. So what I mean by practice, I mean case studies, that boards need to continuously be examining their behavior in the light of best practices. To look at simulations, you know, descriptions of problems that they can solve together about how the playbook can be used to guide a board member's actions in those circumstances. Also, there is practicing conversations, difficult conversations where someone pins you down, you know, you're at a cocktail party and someone says, have you heard what's happening in shipping? 'Let me tell you, we have a huge problem. No one is doing anything about it, even though everyone knows all about it.' So in that moment, a board member may rely on just luck, or a board can actually practice having these conversations so that each board member can be effective in having them. And not leave them up to chance and not leave them just up to, "Oh yeah, yeah, I know how to do that," or not leave them up to just showing them 3 PowerPoints. I mean practice as in role plays where you actually throw yourself into a conversation that's very similar to the one that might happen and you practice what to say, moving your tongue and having the words come out so that you are able to simulate and go through the actual situation before it happens for real. So with those three solutions, I invite you to hear some more about us. We're going to take some questions and answers, and I'm going to share some of the common questions that we get with respect to the three problems that board members often face and challenges that they have to deal with. If you go to www.fwconsulting.com, you can join my mailing list or send me email directly. But I'm gonna go over to the Facebook page and see if we have picked up, I don't think we've picked up questions. I'm not seeing any yet. Yes, okay, there is one. I'm not sure if it is by fear where we execute what's told to us. And not think it through, we become robots, people worshipers. This is a comment from Marie, meaning adhering to doing what pleases who pushes the paycheck. See, board members often underestimate the power of their paycheck, just like Marie is saying. And they don't quite catch, they don't quite understand that people will say yes even when they, in their heart of hearts, mean no, because that's not behavior that they're used to at the board level. They're not, these are powerful people who aren't used to feeling disempowered, so they don't put themselves in the shoes or in the chair of the person in the shipping department who gets this little piece of advice little piece of advice from a board member. They don't quite get the asymmetry. So you're absolutely right, people, they become robots and people worshipers. That is absolutely true. Nathan says, excellent presentation. Thanks, thanks Nathan, I much appreciate it. See if there's any other comments or questions. Marie also said she's not sure where the fear comes from and why people execute just what they're told to do. I can't explain it either, but I do know that in many boards, there's sort of a mystification. So I have conversations with board members who, it's almost like they look at each other and they say, why do people behave the way they do? Why aren't they acting? Why aren't they just telling us? Why don't they talk to each other? Why, why, why? And what they're not getting, and no one will tell them, and no one is available to tell them, is guess what? You're the problem. No one either has the insight or the guts or the skill to say, board members, you're creating your own problem, and now it's up to you to extricate yourself from it. And I can tell you from experience that boards who end up in the worst of these situations have an extremely difficult time digging themselves out of the hole that they got themselves in. Because now everyone is used to treating them a particular way and being treated by them in a very particular way. And to go back, board members, to go back to each of these people that they have coaching relationships with, consulting relationships with, and that they're friends with, And to now try to turn the conversation, turn the relationship around is extremely difficult. It's painful, it takes a very high level of skill, and in the face of it, many board members would rather quit than go have these conversations to set things straight. See if we have any other comments. We don't. So I'm gonna thank you guys. Thank you, Nathan, Marie, Cynthia, Omar, Joan, Iva. Thank you for jumping on the webinar at such short notice. We are all done and calling a close to the first pop-up webinar. Again, a very last-minute effort. Thanks guys for showing up, and if you have any questions, just shoot me an email or visit my website. And this is Francis Wade signing out from Framework Consulting. All the best. There'll be more webinars like this in the future, so be sure to join our mailing list. Bye-bye.