He hono tangata e kore e motu; kāpā he taura waka e motu

15/4/2022

I do a mix of paid and unpaid work these days.

Last night I facilitated a not-for-profit board through a workshop I run on creating positive relationships between the board room and management. In my experience, those boards that understand the importance of whakarangatiratangatia do much better than those who do not.

My motivation to design the workshop is based on a personal experience as an official. I hate being micro-managed. I have never liked being told what to do every five minutes, especially when I know I am more expert at my job than the person telling me.

About twenty years ago, I was preparing a Minister for Parliamentary Question time. Throughout the briefing, a senior manager kept interrupting me in a loud voice, “Are you sure that is right?”. I kept replying, “It’s the advice we have right now”, to which he would say, “Well, I am not sure that is the best advice”.

What struck me was how his need to be right made it difficult for me to respond to him positively. It also made it difficult for me to listen to what the Minister really wanted to know before going into the House.

It is possible the senior manager was being rigorous and wanted the Minister to be well briefed. But in reality, it was unhelpful and intrusive and degraded the advisory line. In the common poneketanga kupu– it chilled the advice. I mean, who wants to advise someone who does not want to listen or who already knows the answer?

Anyways, why does this matter? In today’s increasingly complex and diverse world, boardrooms have to draw on the expertise of professionals, experts and occupations different from their own. Suppose you are a board member that doesn’t know how to ask questions that build relationships based on mutual respect. In that case, you are more of a liability than an asset to that boardroom.

In the workshop, we discovered the board relied heavily on accusatory, aggressive and process questions. They noticed they asked mostly closed questions and were trying to catch management out. They also accepted that they spent most of their board meetings on broadcast – telling management what they wanted instead of asking powerful governance questions to get to the heart of the matter. They are now working on asking open, empowering questions.

Here are a few suggestions I offered to get them going.

• When your management team is struggling to present a paper, ask, ‘What guidance do you need from us today on this paper?’
• When an official gets off to a bad start, and you can see one of the board members is getting ready to climb into the official, stop the meeting and ask, ‘Do you mind if we start over?’
• When your management team has placed a proposal on the table, but you know the board is not happy with it, ask, ‘How could this proposal have been even better? Or what’s the best part of this proposal, and what can be improved?’
• When your board cannot manage themselves and just say what they want, even though it is often contrary and at odds, ask, ‘Please build on the questions already on the table?’

As the whakatauki says, connections between people cannot be severed, whereas those of a canoe-rope can.

Ask yourself, am I actively building connections in my boardroom to build trust and disclosure, or am I more interested in being heard and expecting management to do what they are told? If it is the latter, you are probably degrading the company’s value, and everyone is too scared to tell you.