Elevate day 1 highlights
More than 650 governance, risk, compliance (GRC), audit and ESG professionals gathered in Houston this week for Elevate, the world’s premier GRC event. Taking in insights from over 80 speakers across topics such as AI, new disclosure requirements, enterprise risk management, operationalizing sustainability, nonprofit board experience and more, attendees learned about the latest trends, insights, best practices and tools to navigate what's ahead.
Below are the key highlights and takeaways coming out of the first day of content at the conference.
See highlights from day two and day three of Elevate.
Opening keynote: Clarify risk. Elevate governance.
Presented by Brian Stafford, President & CEO, Diligent
In his opening keynote, Stafford examined how boardrooms have evolved over the last ten years — from getting together four times a year, to more diverse boards that are busier than ever, facing an evolving and increasingly growing set of risks.
And Diligent has changed, too, from a leading board portal to embracing and introducing modern governance, to expanding into risk, compliance, audit and climate, to revolutionizing the GRC landscape with the Diligent One Platform and launching Diligent AI to help you – our customers – better understand and mitigate risks.
Key takeaways:
- In the past decade, governance has become an exercise in risk management. Regardless of if you’re a member of a school board, work at a nonprofit, head up the legal team for private company, or sit on the board of a large public institution, risk is all around you.
- Ten years ago, boards and CEOs spent most of their time focused on the performance of the organization. Today, most boards would tell you they spend the same amount of time on performance, but also spend even more time than ever understanding, mitigating and managing risks.
- Understanding and prioritizing these risks is at the core of what we do at Diligent. Since last year, we have enhanced the Diligent One Platform to be powered by artificial intelligence, making it the only solution with continuous monitoring, analytics and automation built into its core so it can handle virtually any data set.
- The Diligent One Platform is different than any other GRC application because of its components:
- Artificial intelligence - Each application within the Diligent one platform has an AI roadmap with enhancements to improve your experience, drive efficiency and surface new insights.
- Integration & analytics – The Diligent One Platform pulls from 100+ third-party solutions and partners to create new applications and experiences for our customers.
- Education & templates – Diligent’s unique superpower is our access to the boardroom of more than 20,000 organizations. Our certifications, reports, newsletter and other educational materials are based off conversations with you – our customers.
- Extensibility - By eliminating the need for multiple vendors, the Diligent One Platform houses the broadest range of AI-powered GRC applications working together.
Learn more about the Diligent One Platform and how it can help your organization here.
10 practices to build the best boards
Presented by:
- Jim Myers, Deputy General Counsel, Corporate Governance, Fannie Mae
- Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, Co-Founder, Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab
- Moderated by Jason Geeves-Booth, Shareholder Activism Editor, Diligent Market Intelligence
This session offered practical strategies to improve board governance and relationships. It highlighted ten key practices aimed at fostering a collaborative and effective board environment, including setting inclusive norms, conducting efficient meetings and nurturing strong interpersonal connections among board members. Emphasizing ongoing development, mentorship and the inclusion of diverse viewpoints, it focused on the alignment of directors and how to enhance their contributions to the board's culture and overall performance.
Key takeaways:
- Establish inclusive norms for board practices and behaviors. Define your board norms to bring clarity to formal and informal practices and behaviors that directors aim to follow - akin to a board’s governance model - to make your board work more effectively, mitigate risks, and capture the contributions of all directors. Be intentional with ongoing practices.
- Be intentional with meeting facilitation. Set the tone and lay a solid foundation for how the board is to engage. Facilitate so that everyone joins in and encourage different perspective. Intentional meeting practices will allow you to capture the value of different ideas and perspectives especially in time of board turnover, welcoming first-time board members and increasing diversity.
- Intentionally build capacity to help the board be more effective in harnessing differences to generate value. Foster a culture that allows for learning, mistakes and candid discussions without undue judgment or harm to relationships. By engaging in challenging conversations, you can learn more about what works on the board and create spaces where people can more fully contribute to the work.
The engaged board: Supporting a positive member experience
Presented by:
- Catherine Hill, Executive Secretary to the Superintendent, Vigo County School Corporation
- Dr Brad Saron, Superintendent, Sun Prairie Schools
- Chandu Vemuri, Executive Assistant, Sun Prairie Schools
- Dr. Steve Schroeder, Board Member, Sun Prairie Schools
This discussion panel focused on the critical roles of trust, teamwork, transparency and strategic focus in fostering an engaged board. The panel also spoke about the necessity of robust relationships between board members and administrators, and stressed the importance of prioritizing the community's best interests. Board management software such as Diligent Community helps to serve as an extension of the board's work, bridging the board's activities with the community to ensure transparency.
Key takeaways:
- Building an engaged board requires strong teamwork and relationship-building. Trust among board members and administrators is essential for effective collaboration and decision-making. Involving board members in the process, agenda building and approval, helps engage them.
- Consider “flipping the board agenda” so instead of staff presenting during the meeting, they prerecord the presentation so that board members must do their homework and come prepared and engaged. This also helps cut down on the length of board meetings.
- In public boards, transparency and accountability are essential. Recruiting individuals committed to serving the community's best interests and fully engaging in their roles is crucial. Start the recruitment process early with meetings and information for people interested in running for the board, and make sure that one of the key things you tell them is that their board management software is the place to get all the information they need.
- Maintaining a strategic focus helps the board work as a cohesive unit. Setting clear priorities and having centralized access to information enables board members to stay informed and make well-informed decisions.
- Technology is the tool to support the board’s work and alongside the technology, it is important that you also create an environment where board members feel comfortable to ask questions. Relationship building is key and technology helps enhance that relationship and build that board engagement.
Let’s not get sued: Proactive governance in the new era of Caremark
Presented by:
- Priya Cherian Huskins, SVP & Partner, Woodruff Sawyer
- Deborah Birnbach, Partner, Goodwin Law
- Nithya Das, Chief Legal & Administrative Officer, Diligent
With recent high-profile cases out of the Delaware courts and increasingly litigious proxy fights within small cap public companies, the level of personal liability facing directors and officers of companies has never been higher. And the pressure on governance and legal professionals to mitigate these risks has increased commensurately as well. This panel of Diligent customers and legal professionals discussed how they're implementing proactive governance practices to mitigate legal risk in this new era of Caremark standards.
Key takeaways:
- Proactive governance means a good process that neutralizes conflicts. This includes excellent document and record keeping, board materials being consistent with meeting minutes, and identifying the directors who are making the decisions.
- Excellent record keeping is key. Maintain contemporaneous notes, and make sure you can easily locate records and documents.
- Open communication between directors is crucial to preventing conflicts of interests.
- D&O questionnaires are an annual task but should be revisited when new information comes to light.
- Be proactive and seek the advice of external experts. For example, a compensation committee that requests the independent advice of a compensation consultant will serve to protect the board.
