Being a Director

Whether you are new or long term to the role of Director, understanding and balancing the responsibilities can be tricky. On a recent workshop, Directors from various businesses looked at the dilemmas they face and sought solutions, as well as recognising the positive aspects of the role. Despite the diversity of businesses, from hospitality, landscaping, agriculture, and consultancy, many issues were the same.

Benefits of Being a Director

Participants identified the benefits to them as:

• Having new challenges all the time as things change.
• It allows you to hone your skills and challenge yourself in personal development.
• It enables you to build a culture.
• You can feel empowered with increased level of ownership.
• The challenges can be very motivating.
• You can help develop strategic change.
• There can be a great sense of achievement, especially when receiving thanks from customers, staff, and the industry when things go well.
• The opportunity for financial reward.

What do you see are the benefits for you?

Roles, Responsibilities and Accountabilities

It is important to be clear on the expectations of you as a Director. Certainty can help increase confidence and performance. If you are unsure of what your role, responsibilities and accountabilities are, then ask for clarity at a Board meeting, or you may like to attend an Institute of Directors (IOD) course.

Does your contract of employment reflect the new requirements?

From the workshop discussion, the following were also identified

• Protect the company as a whole and not just individual shareholders or stakeholders.
• Set the strategy, vision, values, and culture and role model these.
• Focus on the long-term results.
• Be brave to make difficult decisions.
• Ensure departmental development and fairness across departments.
• Manage Health & Safety and corporate liability.
• Provide financial reports which are timely and accurate.
• Manage insurance and have key person liability.
• Ensure personal and team development.
• Study future markets and trends.
• Manage change and reassess it.
• Be open to ideas and listen.
• Set clear expectations and accountabilities.
• Ensure good systems and processes are in place.
• Provide the resources for your team to do their job.

What else would you add to this list?

Issues of being a Director

Here are some of the concerns that prevent SWAN (Sleeping Well at Night) identified by participants:

• Coping with employment law and staffing issues, especially tribunals.
• Not knowing what I don’t know and putting the business at risk.
• Being too hands off and managers not performing or getting over confident.
• Having too much to do and not delegating enough.
• Succession planning.
• Self doubt of own capabilities especially with strategic thinking.

In family businesses, is ‘blood thicker than water’? This may make it difficult for non-family Directors and suppress them from expressing their ideas. Demonstrating fairness is important.

What are your issues?

“Don’t bash the same old door down, find the key to open it”

Huw Bowles, Trecelyn

Letting Go

Owners & Directors, especially if they are founders of a business, can find it difficult to make that transition from being the “controller”, where everything goes through them, to someone who looks to support and grow their managers. It requires ‘letting go’ and giving people the trust and direction as to where they need to focus their efforts. It also requires setting expectations, managing performance, and holding them accountable.

Even for newly appointed Directors, letting go may be a challenge, As a business grows, you cannot do it all and there is a need to trust and effectively delegate to others. Delegation is a key skill, as this frees up your time to work ON the business rather than in it. Not delegating suggests a lack of trust, but it does require monitoring and review.

Delegate to make yourself redundant!

It is important to identify what only you can do. If this a large amount of your job, how vulnerable does this make the business? Identifying the key skills and developing others will help keep a flow of managers coming through and aid retention. To get a free guide to delegation, just sign up for our newsletter.

“If you really want to grow as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to learn to delegate.”

Richard Branson, British entrepreneur

Establishing Accountability

For many people, accountability is a feared word. Directors can find it tricky taking responsibility and ownership, especially if they are new to the role. How can you support or develop them to be confidently accountable? It requires building a culture of positive accountability. Setting expectations and accountabilities from the start is paramount and the bedrock of an accountable culture. How open people are will depend on how well you handle accountability, mistakes, or under performance

Action minutes of Board meetings enable accountability, provided these are reviewed and followed up. How you hold people to account without creating a blame culture is the fascinating topic of our next article.

How are you held accountable as a Director and as a Board?

Actions Identified

Workshop participants agreed to:

• Invite one Director to attend the IOD course and cascade the learning to others. 
• Clarify and agree expectations of each Director and give recognition for success.
• Set up monthly one-to-ones for managers to aid accountability.
• Delegate more with monitoring and evaluation.
• Plan delegation by breaking down tasks to assess % to delegate.
• Take more time to reflect and so ‘find the key to open the door’.

If you would like to find out more about Directorship, please contact the IOD. For further topics, join us on future workshops. These are open sessions but can be in-house, so let me know what you would like included.

Also published on Medium.