In France, the regular evaluation of the board of directors is mandatory for all listed companies and the evaluation of the executive committee (Comex) or the management committee (Codir) is recommended. We encourage all companies to undertake this process because experience shows that it can only be beneficial for the company’s governance, efficiency and performance. The advantages of evaluating your Codir in three questions:
What are the issues that motivate the evaluation?
Like a top athlete, the executive is constantly faced with challenges, competition and performance and, like a great athlete, he or she must be able to rely on teams to achieve his or her objectives – in this case, effective governance bodies. There are two such teams, the Board of Directors for strategic direction and the Codir/Comex for operational management. It is fundamental that each of these teams is robust, cohesive, informed, shares a common vision of the company and is as efficient as the great athlete it supports, in the service of the leader’s success in his mission. Undertaking an assessment of the executive committee will allow you to take stock of the situation and, depending on its conclusions and your objectives, to define a strategy to bring the current situation into line with the desired one.
What are the objectives of the evaluation of the Codir?
- The complete evaluation covers the analysis of three fundamental themes:
- The skills and expertise of each member of the Board of Directors, particularly in relation to the company’s business and strategy
- The soft skills and posture that allow them to form a team with the same objective: to strengthen the collective intelligence at the service of the company’s development
- The collective performance of the team, its strategic alignment and the quality of the collaboration. The first step is to take stock of the years the current Codir has been in office, to assess the impact of its position in the organization and to analyze the gap with the strategy. Looking at the past allows for a better understanding of the present in order to make tailored recommendations to adjust the Executive Committee in order to lead the company towards its future. On the basis of this diagnosis, the second phase will be to define areas for improving the efficiency of both individuals and the collective operation, to identify the skills and positions that are necessary but not very or not at all present in the current management team, and to propose an action plan to strengthen their contribution to the realization of the company’s strategy.
What are the risks of not conducting an assessment?
In our assessment missions of the Codir, we notice that beyond the recommendations that result from our assessments, it is a rare opportunity to take a step back and a time to reflexamine in the service of the vision carried by the executive and the board of directors. Not doing an assessment means depriving oneself of a diagnosis and its feedback – a privileged moment of dialogue for each member of the Codir with experts in human strategy and professional talent analysis. It also means depriving oneself of transformation assistance, which is difficult to implement using only internal resources but is better accepted with the intervention of external experts, and complicated to manage without methods to overcome the usual resistance. However, change is inevitable in order to stay in the race: without evaluation, the risk is that the company will eventually slow down its trajectory, or even lose its leadership in its markets. Implementing an evaluation is therefore an investment in the performance and sustainability of the company.