What 4000+ corporate directors think about the economy, risk, board strengths and weaknesses, and boardroom diversity.
“Boards cannot afford to have directors around the table who aren’t delivering value,” says a new report based on the 2016 Global Board of Directors Survey. With greater institutional and activist shareholder activity and stronger concerns about risk and global competitive threats, boards are taking on a more strategic, dynamic, and responsive role in their companies.
The survey research revealed ‘a gap between best practice and reality’ in boards’ readiness to handle strategic challenges, especially regarding talent issues. While both public and private company directors named ‘attracting and retaining top talent’ as one of the top challenges to their companies’ achieving strategic objectives, respondents gave their own boards relatively low ratings when it came to talent issues such as board diversity, HR/talent management, CEO succession planning, and director evaluations.
Key findings:
- Cybersecurity is in the top three political issues relevant to directors —with the most relevant being the economy, the regulatory environment, and cybersecurity.
- Women directors report higher concerns about risk to the company than male directors — from concerns about activist investors and cybersecurity to regulatory risk and the supply chain.
- Directors – especially women – favor tools to trigger board turnover such as director retirement ages and term limits.
- Private company directors reported having similar proportions of female and ethnic minority directors on their boards.
- The percentage of women on boards is staying stagnant with a gender divide and a generational divide on why this is. Male directors said the ‘lack of qualified female candidates’ was the primary reason; women cited most often the fact that diversity is not a priority in board recruiting.
- Boardroom diversity quotas not supported overall with nearly 75% of surveyed directors not supporting boardroom diversity quotas.
Source: 2016 Global Board of Directors Survey, Professor Boris Groysberg and Yo-Jud Cheng of Harvard Business School, Spencer Stuart, the Women Corporate Directors (WCD) Foundation, and researcher Deborah Bell
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
