Who helps you make the right decisions at the right time? Why consider an advisory committee? From Bernadette Petitpas
You need help making the right decisions at the right time? Perhaps an advisory committee is the answer!”
Photo de Joseph Barrientos
You are a founder or manager of a small- or medium-sized company. Your agenda is overloaded or cluttered with many things that do not add all the value you want to create. Yet, you have adapted to the pandemic. You have reinvented the way you produce and deliver, offer your services and manage your employees. But, who's helping you manage the complexity and the unexpected, while still delivering your results?
If your organization is not publicly traded, the responsibility for governance and management rests on your shoulders. Governance is defined as everything that ensures the long-term sustainability and resilience of the organization, including risk management, ethics, culture and accountability to stakeholders and the community. Knowing that most of your time is spent, and must be spent, on short-term concerns, and that although it may be a lonely job at times, you want to be the only one to maintain control over your organization, how can you benefit from sound advice?
It is in such contexts that an advisory committee makes sense.
WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Basically, it is a committee whose members are chosen by you to guide and advise you in the governance of your organization. Of course, the interest is to seek out people whose profile and experience are complementary to yours, in aspects that are strategic for your organization, who will share their opinions and perspectives with you with authenticity, and... whom you will be ready to listen to. After all, why spend extra time listening to your ideas, and why solicit insights that you don't intend to consider? But if you're thinking about creating and adding an advisory committee, how do you go about putting it together?
Much like in the composition of a board of directors, the skills that will be important to the advisory committee are related to knowledge of your industry, your customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders, the technologies that are important to you, and the different facets of running a business. There are also aspects related to leadership, communications and influence, negotiating partnerships, international relations if your company is abroad or aspires to be, and everything related to corporate social responsibility.
WHAT WILL ALL THIS HELP YOU DO?
It will give you solid support in answering fundamental questions such as:
How can the organization create value for its stakeholders?
How can you better know and understand your environment, your ecosystem and all the relational dynamics that are found within it?
How can you better identify and manage risks?
Are the strategic objectives, or even the strategic development axes, still relevant, and if not, what should be considered and why?
How can we ensure that management monitoring and accountability focus on the right elements and are associated with the right performance levers?
How can we better connect, build trust and create partnerships with different stakeholders?
What is the most appropriate culture in relation to the business model and context, and how do we develop, strengthen and live it on a daily basis?
WHAT IS THE LINK WITH ACHIEVING YOUR OPERATIONAL RESULTS?
It’s in the alignment of all actions towards the same objectives which themselves are aligned with the reality and complexity of your context. It’s also in the integrated perspective of relations with all stakeholders, respecting the interests of each. It’s also in the search for different, complementary points of view, which make it possible to reduce blind spots and look at things differently, thereby facilitating creativity and innovation.