We ask a prominent director to share three important lessons from three different professional experiences.
Trent Bartlett FAICD is a seasoned company director, board chair and AICD faculty member. His 20-year board career spans roles at listed and unlisted public companies across banking, insurance, financial services, agriculture, retail, automotive, packaging circularity, travel, tourism and disability services.
Bartlett currently serves as an independent director on the board of Beyond Bank Australia and the Australian Packaging Covenant. He chairs Rocky Bay and Travellers Choice. He was previously an independent director for CBH Group, board chair for Good Sammy Enterprises and inaugural board chair for the largest local tourism organisation merger in Australia, Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association.
The Board: Travellers Choice
The Lesson: Adapt to the changing needs of your stakeholders.
Before COVID, Travellers Choice had maintained a perfect profitability record for 42 years. Nearly 90 per cent of funds had been returned to its member-shareholders (independent travel agents). Travel was the first industry impacted by the lockdowns and the last to resume normal trading.
As chair, I believed it was crucial to respond in a member-focused manner. We started having weekly webinars and check-ins, as mental health issues were common due to the stress. We also chased supplier refunds, provided draft letters to their landlords to seek rent relief in some cases, and implored local MPs to lobby on behalf of small business owners.
The board worked with the CEO to approve the risk appetite under these new circumstances. We wanted real rigour in forecasting and modelling. We had fortnightly catch-ups to double-check cash flows. We got a third party in to run a safe harbour defence exercise with the board and used that template to run the business.
The board relied on robust budgeting and forecasting to sustain the business and still meet the threshold requirements for the safe harbour defence. With just two weeks to go before crossing the threshold, the business finally turned around after three full years of balancing prudence and focused member service. In FY23, the company returned to financial health with a pre-tax operating profit of $2m.
The Board: Australian Packaging Covenant (APCO)
The Lesson: Strategic composition of the board is critical.
Not-for-profit APCO had been set up through a covenant. The government was unhappy with the progress it had made in reducing the amount of packaging going to landfill. I was one of three independent directors recruited in 2016 to help move the needle. I chaired the remuneration and nomination committee of the board, led by independent chair Sandra “Sam” Andersen FAICD, who joined at the same time.
The board had a dominant theme of packaging skill sets and brand owners. But to fulfil the covenant and drive systemic change, it needed to include representatives from retail, recycling, packaging circularity, sustainability policy and advocacy. We needed different skill sets and cognitive diversity to represent the value chain as we worked through each strategic horizon.
The board chose a collaborative strategy based on collective impact and we continuously reviewed the ideal board composition to ensure we had the necessary skill sets. Strategic thinking is a core board purpose, and if you’ve got a homogenous-thinking group, it will be near impossible for it to develop the optimum strategy.
Fast-forward to today and APCO has been asked to continue to pursue its strategy to 2030. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is introducing mandatory packaging design standards and has asked APCO to contribute to the future regulatory framework design.
The Board: Co-operative Bulk Handling (CBH)
The Lesson: Follow through with decisive action on material breaches.
I was one of the independent board members on the 12-member board of CBH, Australia’s largest co-operative.
Despite signing confidentiality agreements, in 2015, [it was alleged] a board member at CBH was leaking details of our meetings to the media [which the board member refuted]. In response to this behaviour, and as part of its corporate governance framework, the board updated the code of conduct to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to material breaches. We agreed on the escalation processes and the consequences, and everybody signed off on it. Following an alleged breach, the board drew a line in the sand and hired a digital forensic investigator to establish [whether there was] breaching of confidentiality.
In the following years, board dynamics and relationships with management significantly improved. Further violations of the code resulted in some composition changes, the most public of which led to the removal of a director at a special general meeting in 2020. There have been no violations of the code since, in part I believe, because the board took strong action every time an issue arose.
The lesson in all this is that you can have all the policies in the world, but unless you have follow-through with consequences, the policies will lack integrity. A lack of accountability erodes the framework’s efficacy, it really is as simple as that.
You can have all the policies in the world, but unless you have follow-through with consequences, the policies will lack integrity.”
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