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Finance for Directors: Critical Skills for Participating in Boardroom Conversations
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To register for the event, follow this link.
Governance Leads to Better Patient Care
Governance expert Liz Watson of Watson Advisors and two of CDSBC’s Complaint Investigators, Drs. Chris Hacker and Cathy McGregor, provide their insights into why governance matters both in the dental office and at the College.
Read the full article here.
Does My Board Need a New Chair?
In a National Post article printed last June, authors Shaun Francis and John Kelleher fly us at 30,000 feet over the tricky terrain of "Signs Your Board Needs a New Chair". Here are a few of the signs that could indicate you need a new person at the helm (our thoughts are in bold):
1. The chair isn’t the board’s biggest champion of good governance principles. If you don’t have a framework for success, your organization can’t perform at its best. What gets measured gets managed, and people know what’s expected of them.
2. The chair allows small issues to dominate discussions while major issues go unaddressed. Sounds like it could never happen to you, right? A good chair understands that, while it may be important to get keep pressing through the agenda, it should never be at the expense hot topics or discussing the white elephant in the room.
3. The chair allows management to present bad or delayed board materials. Good governance means ensuring the right materials are delivered from management in a timely fashion. The board deserves to have the time to prepare so they can add full value during meeting times. A board can’t make informed decisions in a vacuum.
4. The chair becomes a friend instead of a leader to management and other directors. On its own, this may or may not be a problem. What’s more important is that a chair can still ask the hard questions and guarantee robust discussion.
To read the National Post article, click here.
Financial Literacy – Why it Matters
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Did you know that November was Financial Literacy Month? It seems everyone is getting on the ‘bandwagon’ of financial literacy. Don’t get me wrong, as a CA I am all for it – but what does it really mean? The Wikipedia definition says that financial literacy is the ability to understand finance. More specifically, it refers to the set of skills and knowledge that allow an individual to make informed and effective decisions through their understanding of finances.
The truly great decisions are always informed ones. However, many decisions are rooted in emotion and others are made in haste (sometimes both). When it comes to the BIG decisions, we hope they are made with the best possible information by people with the ability to interpret that information.
Which brings me to boards. Boards of Directors are the people who are trusted to ensure their organization is performing at its best. People selected to be on boards are leaders in their industry, sector, and community. They are well-seasoned, educated, and engaged individuals who commit their time and expertise to organizations in need of their skill sets. This is where financial literacy matters. With all the changes to reporting standards and the increasingly complex world we live in, it makes good business sense to ensure that lifelong learning is a part of the board experience.
Stay tuned for Financial Literacy for Boards – an initiative by WATSON to help businesses perform better.
The Who, What and How of In Camera Meetings
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by Katie Armitage
Board meeting agenda items serve different purposes, and the particular items on the agenda shape who needs to attend the meeting and its degree of openness. While most portions of the meeting are held with the CEO (and some or all management) present, there are certain issues that require the board to meet on its own, i.e., in camera. In fact, in order to normalize the practice, we suggest that boards schedule an in camera session as part of every regular board meeting.
Board sessions without the CEO are essential for strengthening board oversight, team building and building board capacity for robust discussion. It is important for board members to have an opportunity to discuss and deal with their duties in a forum where they feel free to raise issues without the influence of management. Typical agenda items in this section include: CEO formal performance review, CEO compensation, CEO succession planning and CEO performance. Another agenda item in this section is board governance; it's crucial for board members to have an opportunity to discuss among themselves their own effectiveness. This would also be the appropriate forum to address any serious conflicts between board members.
Although regular in camera sessions are a key aspect of good governance, care should be taken to avoid decision-making in such sessions in the absence of input from management, when such expertise is relevant to the matters under consideration.
In most instances, the board should debrief management on the general nature of the activities and discussions of the board in the in camera session. It should also review the in camera discussions with the CEO following the session (assuming such disclosure is appropriate in light of the circumstances) in a spirit of openness which encourages ongoing good board/management relations. Instances may arise where such disclosure may be inappropriate, in whole or in part, but those instances are likely the exception.
Don Prior Encourages Job Seekers To Research BC’s Smaller and Innovative Companies
British Columbian employers are among an increased number from across the country to add full-time, permanent workers in 2012, led by hiring in information technology, according to a survey conducted by online job site CareerBuilder.ca.
In all, 34 per cent of employers said they plan to add to full-time staff, up from 32 per cent in 2011 and 29 per cent in 2010. Ten per cent plan to cut staff, and another 48 per cent anticipate no change.
Charities and Conflict of Interest
by Megan Stewart
The term can strike fear into the hearts of organizations, as it conjures up visions of costly lawsuits and scathing headlines. Charities involved in raising money to fund research causes are especially vulnerable to the fallout from conflicts. Those involved in the governance of these organizations are often also beneficiaries of the money that the charity raises. In fact, they are typically involved in the charity because they are leaders in their fields. This can create difficulty when it comes to dealing with conflicts of interest.
And this is not only where conflicts actually exist - the perception of a conflict can be just as detrimental to a charity. Rumbling amongst donors who suspect that their money is being channeled by an interested director, or disgruntled researchers whose projects have been passed over for funding provides ample grist for the rumour mill.
So what can charities involved in funding research do to ensure that conflicts of interest are not their undoing? First, they need to think about avoiding conflict. Depending on how risk averse they are and how large the research pool is, they might choose not to allow funded researchers to sit on their board of directors at all. But if this is too drastic a measure, there are alternatives. Charities should think about adding outside experts to their funding panels. These people might be retired researchers or experts from different jurisdictions or related fields. This can go a long way to countering the appearance of bias in decision-making.
Second, they must implement watertight conflict of interest policies to deal with conflicts when they come up. A good policy should include:
• a definition of conflicts;
• a duty to disclose any conflicts;
• a procedure to bottom out whether a conflict actually exists;
• a process for recording conflicts and how they're handled; and
• a way to communicate the policy to people involved in the organization that drives home the importance of adhering to it.
In the end, the goal is to ensure that charities' stakeholders and the general public continue to have trust and confidence in their granting processes, so that they can continue to do great work. Having a robust conflicts of interest framework in place is key to making this happen.
Is your board diverse? Liz Watson weighs in.
If approximately one in seven of a company's board seats are held by women, is that good enough? How about one in 20 for visible minorities or less than one per cent for aboriginals? Apparently so, according to most board respondents surveyed in the Canadian Board Diversity Council's second annual report card on board diversity, which was released Wednesday.
The report's survey of 218 charity board members and 164 Top 500 board members found that 15 per cent of board seats were held by women, 5.3 per cent by visible minorities, 2.9 per cent by people with disabilities and just 0.8 per cent by aboriginals.