What’s Keeping Your Company’s Directors Up at Night?
Although we typically define executives by their ambitions, their anxieties can be equally telling. If you’re losing sleep over handling cyber security threats, keeping your business strategically agile, or creating and maintaining a positive organizational culture, for instance, I’d venture a guess that you’re a high-ranking director or board member.
Wait, how do we know that? No, we haven’t been hiding in your bushes or reading your email drafts. Each of these concerns—cyber security, business strategy, and corporate culture—were overwhelmingly common among respondents of the National Association of Corporate Directors’ 2017-2018 Public Company Governance Survey.
CFO reports that the “survey results showed that only 37% of board respondents felt ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ that their company was properly secured against a cyberattack” about “five percentage points less than a year ago.” At the same time, “[s]eventy-one percent of directors indicated that their boards must better understand the risks and opportunities that will affect performance and drive strategic choices over the next 12 months.”
But in an overall fascinating read, this section is what really stood out to us:
“Eighty-seven percent of directors said they had a good understanding of their companies’ tone at the top, but only 35% of directors said they had a good understanding of ‘the mood in the middle,’ and just 18% of them indicated they had a good grasp of the health of the culture at lower levels of the organization.
While directors generally were confident that management could ‘sustain a healthy corporate culture during a period of performance challenges,’ 92% of directors said they relied totally on reporting from the CEO about the health of organizational culture.
According to the survey, it was rare for a director to get a direct take on corporate culture from functions such as internal audit (39%), compliance and ethics (30% ), and enterprise risk management (20%), ‘which possess a much deeper and perhaps more independent perspective on the strength of the corporate culture than the CEO does,’ according to NACD.
Click here to read “Directors Lack Info on Their Core Concerns: NACD.”
Believe it or not, Compli’s workforce compliance solution is engineered to help our clients address each of these big, scary concerns. In fact, we’ve written—recently!—about how Compligo enhances cyber security, enables better strategic decision-making, and helps organizations measure their cultures and turn up the tone in the middle. In short, our platform takes the uncertainty out of compliance. It all adds up to fewer anxieties, more ambitions, and, of course, better sleep. Learn more here.
