Effective governance is concerned fundamentally with the enhancement of business performance. Implementing a governance system helps you coherently connect key elements of your business so that you can confidently orchestrate change, growth and innovation to enable sustained high value creation.
What Is a Governance System?
In the legal and organisational sense, governance is concerned with accountability, direction, oversight and power. However, effective governance is concerned fundamentally with the enhancement of business performance. Effective governance requires adopting a state of mind and way of working that will add value to your organisation. When you start to combine principles and practices to achieve such a state of mind and way of working in order to take others on the journey with you, you are constructing a governance system.
How Effective Is Your Governance?
You’re an expert on your product or service and on how you meet your customers’ needs. You’re also the Chief Executive of the organisation created to produce and deliver the product or service. As CEO, you're charged with the organisation's effective governance, perhaps together with a Chair of the Board of the organisation. Is your current system enabling effective governance - enhancing business performance?
You may be unsure or may not know how the key elements of business can be connected coherently to effect sustained high value creation. Books, courses and consultancy on different facets of business abound, but rarely or not at all on a governance system. This leaves organisation leaders like you to construct their own, often it seems, with mixed long term results. A ready-made governance system help you to enhance business performance.
Why Implement a Governance System?
These are some drivers for implementing a governance system:
- Address change: A governance system helps address the strategic shifts in the business landscape this century that are radically changing what people want of organisations of all types with which they interact.
- Consistent results: A governance system gives you a means to achieve repeatable results by providing a process to improve your existing value chain processes.
- Customer centricity: A governance system aligns all aspects of the business that are involved in helping get a customer’s job done with the customer’s perspective, enabling fulfillment of your brand promises while achieving your organisation’s goal.
- Effectiveness and efficiency: A governance system enables you to distinguish effectively between things you must do, may do and might do, and balance efficiently what you must maximise with things you can optimise.
- Employee engagement: A governance system facilitates both the development of a culture that increases everyone’s personal engagement and decision-making about recruiting or developing people for the knowledge, skills and experience required next.
- Innovation ethos: A governance system helps you to establish a corporate process to bring future thinking ahead of present action and explore new competencies while exploiting existing ones, when both compete for resources and require distinct ways of thinking and doing.
- Structured growth: A governance system encompasses the development and implementation of strategy, processes and planning throughout your organisation from insight-driven selection of high-quality revenue opportunities that exploit your competitive advantage and core capabilities.
- Succession planning: A governance system is not dependent on a single individual for its continued operation, so if a leader moves on the fabric of the system is not damaged.
What Are the Benefits Of a Governance System?
A governance system supports your employees throughout your business who every day are making decisions and taking actions which are layered with corporate social responsibility, ethics, internal standards and regulation, and can make or break your brand. These are some benefits of a governance system:
- Achievement-focused
- Alignment
- Compliance
- Consistency
- Data and information security
- Decision-supporting
- Democratises action
- Efficiency and productivity
- Growth-oriented
- Organisational happiness and health
- Progress when you’re not present
- Scalability
In summary, a governance system facilitates improvement and innovation, and a deep understanding of the motivation and need for change, and gives leaders confidence in their ability to achieve their organisation’s goal.