Governance is often blamed for delays, poor decision making or performance failures, but where do you start to ensure that good governance is established in your organisation.

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Governance mechanisms can often be seen as burdensome, bureaucratic and getting in the way of innovation and flexibility. However, Governance is necessary to establish strategy and to drive business performance. The Governance Institute of Australia defines governance as follows:

‘Governance encompasses the system by which an organisation is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it, and its people, are held to account.’ ‍

Accountability can be culturally challenging, and many organisations struggle to find a way to hold individuals and management to account in a constructive and supportive manner. We can all probably recall examples of poor accountability, where individuals are blamed and criticized, or worse still no-one says or does anything to address poor performance.

Building a culture where accountability is embraced is difficult, positive accountability structures can be used to celebrate wins, learn lessons and recover from failure quickly. Having effective governance will help your enterprise to:

• Ensures accountability: Establishing clear roles, responsibilities, and decision-making frameworks to hold leaders and employees accountable for actions and outcomes.
• Manages risk effectively: Providing structured processes for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks.
• Supports sustainable growth: Aligning business strategy with ethical practices and long-term objectives.
• Enhances transparency: Promoting open communication and accurate reporting, to strengthen trust with stakeholders, regulators, and customers.
• Improves decision-making: Creating a robust framework for informed, consistent, timely and strategic business decisions.
  

What does this look like in practice?

• Ensures accountability – through clear roles and responsibilities in documented in terms of reference, comprehensive and effective delegation of power, and the tracking and reporting of actions and outcomes.
• Manages risk effectively – anchored to your enterprise risk frameworks and assessments, you can focus effort on managing the highest risks and push lower risks down to management, with established reporting and escalation pathways.
• Supports sustainable growth – establish plans with actions linked to business strategy, with a clear line-of-sight from the Corporate Plan all the way down to individual Division, Branch and Section plans. Monitoring actions with reliable forecasting of resourcing requirements and achievable timelines.
• Enhances transparency – Access to informative and timely reporting against strategy and risk, with outcomes and actions from governance committees communicated to those who need to know. Information is created once and used many times.
• Improves decision making – having clearly documented tolerances, delegations and strategic direction to guide decision makers and governance bodies receiving papers that support decisions and action with confidence.

As you start to assess your governance arrangements, speaking with key personnel including board and committee members, management and secretariats will help guide your focus. Some prompting questions:

- Who is accountable for action?
- Where do they report to?
- What do decision makers need to know?
- When do they need to know?
- Who is told when decisions are made?