By Blandine Cordier-Palasse
President of BCP Partners, a human strategy firm specializing in recruiting for the Finance, Legal, Risk & Compliance and Directors functions and in advising executives on governance / Board of Directors and Executive Committee / Management Board evaluations.
Doctor of Law, Company Director. Co-founder of the Cercle De la Compliance, former Legal Director and Secretary of the Board of Directors of listed companies.
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 board of directors in three questions.
What are the issues that motivate evaluation?
Like a top athlete, the executive is constantly confronted with challenges, competition and performance and, like a top 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 evaluation of the executive committee will allow you to take stock of the situation and, depending on the conclusions and your objectives, to define a strategy to make the current situation converge towards the desired one.
What are the objectives of the Codir evaluation?
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 team’s collective performance, 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 the areas of improvement in the efficiency of both individuals and the collective operation, to identify the skills and postures that are necessary but little or not present in the current Codir, and to propose an action plan to strengthen their contribution to the realization of the company’s strategy.
What are the risks of not doing an assessment?
In our assessment missions, we note that beyond the recommendations that result from our assessments, it is a rare opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the vision carried by the executive and the board of directors.
Not conducting an assessment means depriving yourself of a diagnosis and its feedback – a privileged moment of dialogue for each member of the Board of Directors 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.In our assessment missions, we note that beyond the recommendations that result from our assessments, it is a rare opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the vision carried by the executive and the board of directors.
Not conducting an assessment means depriving yourself of a diagnosis and its feedback – a privileged moment of dialogue for each member of the Board of Directors 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.