Notes From A Ned: Episode 6 Transcript - Alice Maynard

Notes From A NED – Season 1 Episode 6

How Trust and Transparency Drive Board Effectiveness with Alice Maynard: NED at the Financial Conduct Authority and former NED at HMRC

Samuel (00:01)

Hello again, you’re listening to Notes from a Non-Executive, a podcast being brought to you by Inclusive Boards. This podcast has been edited by Kaiser Sernevall. Now today we have a very special guest, somebody who can only be described as a non-executive chair board titan. She has had some awesome experiences at board level and continues to inspire with board level work and…and advice to organisations and boards across the country. So Alice Maynard is currently the non-executive director at the Financial Conduct Authority. I’ll do that again. Alice Maynard is currently a non-executive director at the Financial Conduct Authority, the current chair of the University of York, which is a lovely city to visit if you haven’t just yet. She is also a non-executive at the Government Commercial Function. She has recently sat on the board of Transport for London. She sat on the board of HM Revenue and Customs. She was the chair of Scope. I could go on and on, but it would probably take the whole of this podcast if I name all of the things that Alice has done in her life, so I won’t.

So hello, Alice. Thank you for coming today.

Alice Maynard (01:43)

Hello Samuel, thank you for having me.

Samuel (01:46)

Amazing. before we crack on, in terms of all of your various boards, I’m not going to ask you which one was your favourite. I might do that after I warm you up. But actually, I’m going to start by asking you a question that I just want to ask, which is what does the government commercial function do?

Alice Maynard (02:02)

So the government commercial function is part of the government, it’s part of the Cabinet Office, and it brings together all the commercial directors within the different elements of government, because it was originally founded as a way to raise the quality of the commercial activities within government.

So it’s those people kind of sit within and outside their own departments. So they’re managed within their own departments, but they are part of the government commercial function. And partly it was in order to be able to bring some high quality commercial expertise into government in order to improve things like procurement and management of contracts and that kind of thing.

Samuel (03:06)

Is it going well? Are people coming in from the commercial world into government?

Alice Maynard (03:11)

yeah, there are quite a lot of people on, so people come in both from the civil service and from external organisations. So yes, it’s made a very significant difference in the time that it’s been up and running.

Samuel (03:18)

Mm-hmm.

Okay, great, fascinating. It reminds me of my time in government where there was a lot of focus on yes, bringing in commercial knowledge, but also thinking more commercially and focusing on how you can get more value for money, more productive assets developed internally as a government. And it seems to be a question that people ask themselves all the time. Certainly a question I think this new government is asking itself. So we’ll see how they get on.

So yes, we know we’ve established the fact that you’ve been on many, many boards. But of course, you were not born into a board. You had a journey up into the point where you had your first board role. So tell us about your background, your experience and how you arrived at this moment.

Alice Maynard (04:04)

Yeah.

So I spent the first 10 years of my career in IT. I actually got my undergraduate degree from York and then joined a software house in the 1980s. And I spent 10 years in IT in various roles, gaining some skills, which actually I have found since I joined boards are fundamental to things like digital transformation because the fundamentals don’t change with things like project management and what computers, well, there’s been quite a lot of change in what computers can do, but there’s still a bunch of ones and zeros and code and all that sort of stuff. And after that 10 years, it became quite difficult to progress further. So I did really well to start with, and then I got stuck. So I did my MBA in case it was me, my ability that was holding me back.

And when I successfully graduated from that, so kind of proving to myself that it wasn’t my ability, I found it really hard to get past the recruitment stereotypes. So I set up a business with my sister consulting on disability. Now this was in the days before the Disability Discrimination Act, which has since been superseded by the Equality Act. And it was really tough to get business, particularly we were based in the North and there was a North-South divide on the interest in equality.

I learned how to keep a very small business going when the pipeline is thin and the cash flow is pretty unpredictable. And on one project we developed a suite of guidance for disabled people’s organisations. And so with my knowledge of business and my sister’s knowledge of legal issues because she’d been a solicitor, I grew my understanding of governance and later as I became a non-profit, non-exec, I kind of polished that understanding of governance and that’s where my fascination for and understanding of governance comes from. And I was invited to join a number of user representation fora, where I joined them all for free of course and I was often the only person around the table who wasn’t paid but I did learn a lot about stakeholder management particularly how not to do it and putting this alongside my legal understanding of the Disability Discrimination Act I could put all that into practice when I joined the railway in 1998, which was not long after privatisation.

I’d been recruited to develop an accessibility strategy for the stations. And during the time that I was working there, it was quite tricky because that was when Rail Track went into administration and it became Network for Rail, Network Rail, I beg your pardon, and it…It was a time when the organisation was in real flux and it was moving from a strategy organisation where it was appropriate to have a strategist, which is what I was, into a delivery organisation where people were just laying track and mending things and doing it at the behest of the DF Dispute Department for Transport. And that wasn’t really the place to have a strategist.

And so during that time, I also did some work for London Underground and Transport for London because I was waiting for the organisation to settle out and see what happened.

But what happened was there wasn’t really a role for me. So I left the railway and I set up my current business, which is Future Inclusion. And at the outset, I was working mostly in transport, but also with government across a range of departments like health and work and pensions and business and industry. And it was at that point that I took on a number of non-profit boards.

and the most significant of those, I I did a lot in the noughties and the early 2010s and then in 2007 I became, actually it was 2008 technically, it should have been 2007 but it turned out to be 2008, I took on the chair of Scope and I really enjoyed the non-executive work I was doing. So I decided I wanted to be paid for it. It seemed like a good idea, I was quite good at it. And eventually I managed to get a place on the board of HMRC, as you’ve mentioned already, and Transport for London, those both happened in 2016. And a few years later, I became a non-exec of the Financial Conduct Authority.

Now I stood down from TFO and HMRC because I came to the end of my terms and I’m now on the University of York and I’m hopefully going to be able to announce that I’m on another board soon. The problem is when you’re on the board of the Financial Conduct Authority you have to wait for the Treasury to give you clearance for pretty much everything. So I am in Treasury, waiting for Treasury clearance mode, but I’m really looking forward to joining a new board as well. So that’s me.

Samuel (10:05)

So.

Okay.

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you. Very concise, but also very interesting. I want to go back a bit before we go on to boards. When you mentioned you went to do your MBA because you didn’t, you wanted to find out if you were potentially or your ability was potentially a barrier to you being able to progress, which clearly it wasn’t because of all that you’ve achieved since. But

What were some of the barriers that you identified then and do you believe those barriers still exist for people trying to progress?

Alice Maynard (10:55)

I think they do still exist. The barrier that I, it was, it’s difficult to say what the barrier was. And it may just have been in the mind of my HR director at the time. But I, and it, there may have been all sorts of reasons for it. One of the problems with discrimination and barriers is that they’re quite, discrimination’s quite slippery.

it’s difficult to actually point at something and say you are discriminated. You can do it sometimes, but a lot of the time it’s just a sense of, you know, is this? am I? why are they not dot, dot, dot? Why are they not giving me the opportunity? So I had the same issue in my very first company where I was never sent out onto a client site. And when I said, is that because I’m disabled?

They said, no, no, no, And in the end, I just didn’t believe them because I had to wait around unsold, which is very expensive for a software house because they’ve got, have to pay your salary still, but they’re not actually getting anything back from clients for you. So they don’t like unsold stuff. And yet I was waiting around for an in-house project. So a big project where they had the computers on site and then they would develop it in-house and then they’d move it to the client site, which is where I never ended up going.

And in this instance, I came back from a course that I had asked to go on, which was called Strategies for the Successful Woman. And I thought, right, I’d like to be managing director of something, and that’s my long term goal.

And so I asked the HR director how I might become managing director of this particular company. And I expected something like, well, you don’t have any marketing experience, so you’d have to do a sideways or a downwards move to be able to, you know, because it’s essentially a marketing or something like that. You know, some actually a bit of a career progression that I might not have wanted to do.

What I didn’t expect was you couldn’t. It’s flat. You couldn’t. And that was, I have to say I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask, why not? So that was the point at which I went, well, okay, there are three possible reasons here. It could be because I’m a woman. I can’t do anything about that. Could be because I’m a disabled person. Can’t do anything about that. Could be because I’m stupid or I’m incompetent and I can do something about that or at least I can demonstrate that I’m not. So that’s why I went off to do the MBA.

Samuel (14:02)

Gosh, and you think those barriers still exist?

Alice Maynard (14:09)

I think in some instances they do. I think one of the things that’s very difficult for people from groups that are different from the norm, whatever the norm is these days, is that much of that is not as overt as it was. And it’s much, much harder to identify. And one of the things that I think…

I don’t have the evidence, except my own experience through the processes, is that when people are recruiting to boards, for instance, they start out with a very strong, genuine view that what they want is a more diverse board. And they genuinely believe, they believe in the diversity of thought and background and experience all helps with that and so on and so forth. And then as they go through the process, it becomes harder and harder for them to go.

Okay, this person is very different from me, but they could do this job really well. I think they’re more inclined to start thinking, I’m not sure I’ve never really seen somebody like this doing a job like that. And there are still ways in which particularly for women, I think there’s an issue around you make a mistake in a role and all women suddenly are completely incapable of doing that kind of, it’s like, yeah, but she’s a woman. So what would you expect? Why did we appoint one in the first place?

Nobody’s going to say that these days. Nobody’s going to say that these days because you’re not, you know, you’re not really supposed to. And everybody knows you’re not really supposed to. There are certain people who still express those views quite publicly, but we don’t like them.

I think it sort of underlies, and it’s not anybody’s fault, and it’s not conscious, and it’s not that they’re unpleasant people or difficult people. It just is, because we live in a society that… still has barriers, still has stereotypes, still has misrepresentation of different people, still, one of the things that happened when I was working with my sister was there was a guy at Leeds University who was doing a lot of research into disability issues and he wrote a paper about stereotypes of disabled people in film and on TV. And there were about nine stereotypes and they were all pretty negative, including the ones like Heidi in literature where she’s kind of, you know, a bit pathetic. People were pathetic, they were asexual, they were mean and nasty like most of the James Bond villains in the early James Bond films were all disabled in some way. So there’s a lot of that still permeates our social fabric, if you like. And that means that it’s very difficult for people to step out of that. So even if in your organisation, you have a really inclusive approach, your organsation is made up of people who live within society.

And so it’s quite hard to make sure that you end up with really positive, inclusive approaches, because there’s always something that actually you’ve got to battle against, if I can put it that way, that is coming from the outside in.

Samuel (18:29)

Yeah, of course, because we all enter an organisation or any type of psychological group with all of our baggage, all of our biases, all of the things that we’ve learned.

Alice Maynard (18:40)

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve got as much baggage as everybody else has. I try to recognise it, but I know there will be times when I don’t. And I would love it if people just told me so from time to time. Nicely. Don’t cancel me. Please don’t cancel me. But, you know, just tell me when I get something wrong, because it’s really easy to do.

Samuel (18:57)

And in a lot of your work, you’ve been quite vocal about the importance of transparency at governance level. I suppose, how does that work in reality? Because of course, when you have board discussions, you need to have an element of candor. You need to have the trust that some of your thoughts, which might not be things that you might be able to cure the way we’re saying on live TV or an interview with journalists can be said in a safe space. But at the same time, people need to trust that decisions were made in ways that are as fair as possible and you follow due process. So how do you strike that balance?

Alice Maynard (19:52)

I think with difficulty and there is a lot of, there’s quite a lot of difference between the ways that people think about what could be done with this particular piece of information. And it’s one of the interesting jobs I do at the FCA, because I’m a board member, is I’m what’s called a qualified person for information commissioners office purposes, which means that I sometimes have to look over a freedom of information response and say whether or not it’s okay for us to have redacted something. And I tend towards transparency, but that’s transparency in my head. And my view of that may well be different from my colleagues view of that.

And it’s not that either of us is wrong or right. You know, it’s one of the many things that you have to do as a non-exec is make judgments. And what happens to those judgments is the critical issue.

Whatever we’re doing in life, we’re making judgments all the time. That’s the way we have to live. We make judgments. You make a judgment as to whether you want to pay more for something because you might get better quality or you…

you don’t want to pay more for something because you haven’t got the money for it and you can’t afford to take out a loan or, you know, it’s that kind of thing. You know, we’re constantly making judgments, you know, do I go out without my umbrella this morning? I said, it’s judgment. And yes, it’s trivial compared with should we redact this piece of information. But it’s just something on the spectrum of judgments that we make every day.

And the way you balance it is by making judgments and making them as well as you possibly can and probably debating. Sometimes you will need to discuss those judgments and go, well, what do you reckon…? Do you think…? Should we…?

It’s like the minutes of boards as well where they’re published government board minutes are quite often published.

At FCA minutes are published, lots of people’s minutes are published, and you need to make sure that you are not putting somebody in a difficult position because they’ve expressed an opinion. Because if you can’t express your your opinions freely, as you’ve said, within the context, you can’t really talk openly and make sensible decisions.

One of the questions that used to sit in my mind around things like Transport for London was that all their board meetings were held in public. Now there was a bit where we shoved everybody out at the end because if we were doing something like a contract and talking about figures and companies and so on, we had to have that done in private. But it’s quite a tricky balance. Do we do that in public or do we not do it in public? And I think sometimes you’re going to get it wrong. Sometimes you’re going to be transparent and one of the newspapers will come along and pick it up and make the worst of it. Or one of the organisations that doesn’t like you will pick it up and make the worst of it.

And sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you’re not transparent enough. And I mean, it’s just, you just have to get on and do it.

Samuel (24:04)

Yeah. And I suppose linked to transparency is, well not linked. Part of transparency, is not only your ability to digest and give opinions on information that you’re receiving and be open to challenge and provide challenge. It’s also ensuring that you have the right level of transparency in terms of what you’re getting in from your executive team.

And so…

Where do you sit on, the level of information that a board member should have? The level of information that a board member should inquire of? And when you should ask for more?

Alice Maynard (24:49)

So.

Non-executive board members are supposed to be not operating at the level of detail, that’s the executive’s job. So it’s the board’s job to, to guard the vision, mission and values of the organisation and to develop strategy. It’s the executive’s job to deliver that strategy. I mean, it’s a really broad and basic categorisation, but that’s roughly the way it should be.

And what the board needs is sufficient information to see, to be assured, not reassured, not there, there, it’s all lovely, but assured that the executive is delivering appropriately, that you are on track, that it’s within budget, that it’s to quality, that all that stuff, right?

You need enough information, good quality information to be able to assure yourself that that’s the case. You don’t need to know every last thing about how much money we spent yesterday on this particular project or whether, you know, we’re losing this person and we’re recruiting somebody. You don’t need that sort of stuff.

Unless you cannot gain assurance. And then if you are not assured that everything is on track, then you might need to ask for further information. But it’s always a dangerous line to cross for non-executives, but it is one we need to cross sometimes.

And in some areas, there may be some areas where we’ve got sufficient information to take assurance and other areas of the organisation where we haven’t. it’s again, it’s a matter of judgment. Am I content with this? Because in the end, if it goes wrong and I didn’t ask for extra information and I didn’t feel assured, but I went.. ‘Oh they’re probably doing the right thing’, that’s down to me. I am accountable if everything goes wrong.

Samuel (27:30)

And it’s a tricky balance because they often board members become more interested when there are alarm bells that are already quite loud. You’ve received the letter from the regulator or you know, you found out that actually there was a pension deficit or what have you

And so how do you get to a point where you ask I mean what kind of questions allows you to reasonably foresee a challenge ahead without being so, so maybe the word is irritated, unhelpfully irritated towards an executive team because you are asking those questions.

Alice Maynard (28:18)

So one of the really important things for non-executive board members is to develop a level of trust with the executive. And so with that trust, if you develop a good level of trust with your executive, and part of that is the chair’s job to make sure that happens, if you have that good level of trust, you can between you work out, what are the key indicators that non-executives need to understand in order for them to know whether this is working or not working? And what are the leading indicators that might show that it’s about to go off course, not gone already?

Because a lot of the indicators that many boards get are lagging indicators. And so it’s too late then. You’ve done that. You’ve overspent your budget this month by three million quid. Oops, how did I know? How should I have seen in advance that that was about to happen?

And that’s really challenging. So that’s where it’s so important to have that trust with the exec because you can together go, yes, but what about this? Have we got good data that will tell us whether this is happening?

And the other thing you want to look at is trends.

So if it still looks okay, but it was more okay last year and even more okay the year before and you’ve got that gradual downward slide, that would be probably an indicator that maybe by next year it won’t be okay. So there’s a whole raft of different things that you need to know.

And sometimes as board members you may not even understand that those are the things that you really need to know. And that’s where the trust with the exec comes in because that’s where you’re going to know you’re going to be able to work out with them, what are the things that we need to know?

Sometimes you can draw from your executive career and you can go, I needed to do, you know, these were the important bits when I did this. But the world changes and you may not be operating in the same space as you were as an exec.

And so you can’t always rely on that historic understanding and sector based, usually sector based understanding in order to be able to ask the right questions in your new space.

Samuel (31:18)

Yeah, yeah, because obviously very often an experienced non-exec has the skills that can be transferred to different sectors where they may not have previously worked. And in fact, very often that’s a good thing because you bring fresh eyes, fresh perspective as well.

And we’ve spoken about the dynamics between, I guess, a board and the executive team and the need for richness in relationship and trust in order for things not to be a surprise or at least reduce the likelihood of surprises.

But what about the dynamic between the board and its chair?

I mean, you sit on both sides because you’re very used to being the chair, the boss, but you also have chairs on the boards where you’re a non-exec. How does that dynamic help to mitigate serious challenges ahead?

Alice Maynard (32:15)

Well, it’s a really important relationship and it’s one that is largely the job of the chair to manage.

So the job of the chair is not, sometimes people think about a chair as just chairing meetings and sometimes you’ll look at people’s articles and basically that’s all the chair is and it’s not really.

Certainly within the nonprofit sector, the chair has no special place in law. They’re just what’s called the first of mine equals. But actually in practice, they have an enormously important job to do in shaping the board and through the board in improving the performance of the organisation.

And again,

you need that trust between execs and their chair, non-execs and their chair. If you don’t have that level of trust between the non-execs and their chair, it becomes quite difficult to manage because you’re not quite – as chair, if one of your non-exec seems a bit off, you’re not quite sure whether they’re having a bad day. So you need to know people as well. You need to find out more about them. And that takes time and contact and that can be quite tricky because people have lots of things to do.

Non-execs have loads of things to do and you know sometimes they can’t necessarily spare the time and that’s why on some boards it’s useful to have a senior independent director who kind of sits between chair and non-execs or chair and board members and is a sounding board for non-execs to say

‘I don’t think this is happening right’, you know, ‘I don’t think this is okay’. And they can have a quiet word in the chair’s ear. Because they’re kind of capable of sifting and judging and again with judgment back to judgment. Judgment,

Judgment figures really large in the life of a non-executive, whether you’re chair or on a board, for all sorts of reasons and trust figures highly and focus and those three I think you need them.

Samuel (34:49)

Yeah. And, the theme for this series is overcoming obstacles.

And we’ve spoken about some obstacles, but this was a really interesting obstacle, not just for first time board members, but especially for first time board members is how do you go in with your eyes open as best you can because sometimes, well, very often you will not be given the full picture.

Alice Maynard (34:57)

Mm-hmm.

Samuel (35:19)

And so I’m thinking about one of your early board positions when you were the chair of Swan’s Royal Charitable Trust. And you went in there and you didn’t quite have the full picture. But how can you do your best to make sure you know as much as you can, knowing that you probably won’t know everything by the time you arrive?

Alice Maynard (35:28)

Mm.

Well, I would have said that I did my due diligence.

before I took Swanswell on, which is what, that’s what we call it when you diligently study the organisation and try to find out what position it is in, what the issues are, what the challenges are for it. Perhaps something about the people on the board, you might talk to a few, you might try to make contact with the people who are already on the board or who’ve left it and say, you know, what was it like?

What was the chair like? That’s an important question if you’re going to be a non-exec.

You want to know you can work with the chair for all the reasons just outlined. You need to be able to trust them, you need to be able to work well with them. And so you can do all that stuff. You read the accounts and the directors reports. Maybe for the last couple of years I’m not one who advocates going back miles because organisations change.

But that’s a good way to do it. You can Google them, see if there have been any media stories that might make you go, ‘ooh, I don’t know that I like that’.

So there’s lots of different – you’re basically, you pretend you’re a researcher and you go off and you do a load of research and sometimes just that isn’t going to work.

Which it didn’t when I went to Swanswell. There wasn’t much information out there anyway about them.

Bare in mind that when you look at someone’s website, that’s fine, but that’s not usually very helpful because that is their marketing tool. So they’re not actually going to say, gosh, we’re in a mess. But when I, so when I, I don’t think Swanswell knew when I took it on that it was in a mess.

But it quickly became evident that it was because I was actually asked to raise the national profile and diversify the income streams. Those were my two main jobs to come into the organisation to do. And within a few months, it became apparent that that wasn’t a good idea. We really didn’t want to raise the national profile full stop.

And we were heavily dependent on contract income, which is never that brilliant for an organisation. And one of the contracts was not performing well, really. And it was a big contract. And we couldn’t get management accounts out of the finance people which probably sounds a bit strange, but it’s true. And that was one of the problems with the executive team. And it took us quite a long time to, I mean, I’d spoken to the chief exec before I came on, but it still – I hadn’t picked up how, maybe that was me, you know, maybe I should have picked up.

But I don’t think so, because none of the board members quite recognised what a state the organisation was in. And essentially, it was in such a tricky state that we had to find a merger partner in order to sort it out.

That in itself was quite a challenge. But in terms of due diligence, you do what you can and you always have – when you join a board, you always have to be prepared to say, actually, I don’t like this, this is not okay and I’m stepping down.

Now, that’s not great and you won’t be very popular and if you do that lots of times it will get around the executive search whatever, that that’s what you do but if you have a really good reason for doing it actually you need to do it and that’s one of the things that’s very important for non-execs to understand that your job should not be I have to keep this job

because actually you may come to a point where you go, you may end up with a conflict that is unmanageable, conflict of interest that’s unmanageable, or you may end up with a conflict with the way that other board members or the organisation is behaving and you cannot; because as a board member you have to do what is taking collective responsibility for things that are going on, for decisions that are made. You don’t go outside the organisation and say, well, of course I didn’t agree with what the board did then. Because you are the board and it is your job to take collective responsibility, even if you didn’t agree with it and to stand behind it. If you get to the point where you think you can’t do that, you have to stand down. And I have done that.

Samuel (41:13)

Wow, that’s not an easy decision.

Alice Maynard (41:15)

And so when you join, you do your due diligence as much as you can.

If you get in there, you are taking on accountability and responsibility. You just shoulder it basically, because you’ve taken the job on. If it turns out that you really can’t shoulder it, then you just have to say, I’m sorry, but this is not what I thought it was when I joined.

Samuel (41:45)

And is it better to do that sooner rather than later?

Alice Maynard (41:53)

I don’t know, really. I mean, it depends.

Most of the time, you wouldn’t know what the contractual arrangements were between the search firm and the company. So you wouldn’t know whether you had to stay on the board for three months before the company paid the fee to the… You don’t know any of that. And actually, that’s irrelevant. What matters is, do you think that you can make a difference?

to the point where you will then be comfortable and you feel you are morally okay to continue? Or do you not? And if the answer is, really, I’ve done my best.

So, you try, you talk to people you say, ‘i don’t like the way this is going’. ‘Can we do something about it?’ And if they all go, ‘it’s fine’, you know, ‘it’s fine, who cares,’ you know. Well, not that anybody ever says that – but if you don’t get, again, if you don’t get the assurance that things will change and you genuinely can’t stand behind it, it doesn’t actually matter whether you do it sooner rather than later. You need to do it when you need to do it.

Samuel (43:10)

Yeah.

Alice Maynard (43:11)

And you don’t need to do it just because you think you ought to stand down sooner rather than later. Because you’ve got a job to do. You took it on. You do it.

Samuel (43:17)

Yeah, makes sense.

And you know, you’ve had quite a few public appointments and that is often a very difficult, I guess, bridge to jump. Is it jump the bridge? A very difficult hurdle to get your first public appointment. There we go.

So what would your advice be to people who may have some experience on charity boards? and who have been applying, applying, applying, going on the government website and they just don’t seem to be getting the opportunities, maybe not even getting interviews.

Alice Maynard (43:59)

So that’s a really difficult question to answer because it took me seven years.

So it does take a long time, potentially.

I think you need to examine yourself and your behaviors and your skills and experience and you have to decide whether you are actually, are you applying for the right roles?

Samuel (44:11)

Hmm.

Alice Maynard (44:30)

Do you have what it takes to put together a good application?

If not, you need to get some training on that.

So when I was in the process of doing all this, I did everything I could to enhance my skill. I got admitted as a chartered director by the IOD (Institute of Directors). I had a theater director in my conservatory for an entire bank holiday Monday, training me in presentation skills in case it was the way I came across in my interviews.

I had competency in interview competency training or whatever it is because public sector interviews are quite often competence based and I, what else did I do? I mean, I even won a few awards, which obviously you don’t do by striving to do so. But I got the Sunday Times Non-Executive Director of the Year in the public and nonprofit sectors in 2014. I got an honorary doctorate from York in 2015. I was awarded a CBE.

You know, and you don’t, you can’t achieve those. I achieved what I could achieve and I was blessed with the other stuff. And still, it took me a further two years to get any board roles at all.

And I don’t know what you do apart from…

be honest with yourself and and do everything you can to improve your chances which includes research into the final if you get to the final panel do the research into who’s on the final panel and as much as you can find out linkedin is really good for finding stuff out and you can – i i mean, I’m not on facebook or twitter

So I – or not Twitter anymore is it? That’s partly why I’m not on it anymore.

And you can do quite a bit of research into who’s on the panel and what are they going to be interested in? And how do I frame what I want to say? And what are the key things I want to say? And one of my failings is I try to answer the question that’s asked. And actually that’s always what they want.

Samuel (46:54)

Okay. Yeah.

Alice Maynard (47:17)

I need to learn more to be a government minister and say the three things that I want to say regardless of what the journalist is asking me, which I’m not very good at. But it’s difficult, it’s hard. And you never know, get feedback, by all means get feedback. But you never really know why you didn’t get the job because the feedback is the feedback is the feedback. They’ll tell you what they can, but they won’t tell you what happened behind closed doors.

Samuel (47:50)

Yeah.

Yeah, say no more. Okay, so we’re almost done. This has been a fascinating conversation. I just have a few more questions for you.

One, what would you say has been your biggest lesson or takeaway from one of the various boards that you’ve sat on?

Alice Maynard (48:16)

Wow, my biggest takeaway.

I think it…

I think the importance of trust between, that’s too many takeaways, Samuel, I can’t do one.

Samuel (48:36)

Okay, you can give me a few. You can give me a few.

Alice Maynard (48:54)

So there’s a trust issue between the board and the executive, absolutely fundamental.

There’s… I think social contact between board members is really important. I didn’t realise that when I joined Scope and it was in Scope that I learned how much that contributes to the good performance of the board.

And boards signing up to a kind of a code of conduct that says this is how we want to be and this is how we’re going to get there is really important.

And I think in general in relation to organizations, one of the things that Swanswell taught me was that if you’ve got money, but you don’t have the right people, you can turn an organisation around and you can make it a really thriving, brilliant organisation. Because you can recruit new people, you’ve got a bit of financial cushion, doesn’t have to be massive, just to be able to wait while they get their feet under the table and they get going.

It’s not great, but it’s doable. If you’ve got the right people, but you don’t have any money like I did at Scope, you can also turn an organisation around because you work together as execs and non-execs and you’re working together for the good of the organisation and you can make change in that organisation. But when you’ve got problems with the people and the money, that’s the point at which I’m kind of not sure I really want to be there.

I mean, that’s where I found myself in Swanswell. And that was a very hard year, very hard year. And I wouldn’t really want to go there again. But if I found myself there as chair again, by mistake, then I would.

Then you just get on with it. It was my job. I would have loved to stand down several times during that year. I just wanted to go, just somebody take it away from me. But you can’t because it’s your job and you have responsibility in any organisation as a non-executive director, you’ve got responsibility for the wellbeing of that company. That’s what you’re there for.

If you are a charity trustee and a director of that company, you have responsibilities which are potentially quite in tension of having responsibility for the good of that company and responsibility for the good of beneficiaries.

So you’ve got that tension where sometimes you need to do things that would be not so great, not the best thing for the company, but also they might not be the best thing or they might not be the best thing for the beneficiaries. It’s really, it’s a very difficult place to be in and people sometimes poo poo charity trustees and I believe it’s one of the hardest things you can do.

Samuel (51:56)

Yeah, of course, most charity trustees are not remunerated as well,

Alice Maynard (52:00)

Correct.

Samuel (52:06)

which is a barrier within itself. But of course, most charities are also small. And so there are all these trade-offs. Do you have any views on the paying of charity trustees?

Alice Maynard (52:23)

Yeah.

I think I kind of go by the labourer as worthy of his hire, to be honest.

So I do rather think people should be paid for the work they do. Incidentally, the HE sector, the higher education sector is not generally well paid either. So and they are big organisations and they’re not generally paid.

Samuel (52:43)

huge.

Alice Maynard (52:48)

I think it is very tricky because the optics of paying people are not always great, particularly if the organisation is big. So it’s kind of why would you pay people who sit around on a board when you could be putting that money towards the wellbeing of the people that your charity is for?

And there are people who argue that actually it’s excluding to pay because if somebody’s on benefit, for instance, we have this argument in the housing association sector when I was working in a few housing associations around, do we pay and what do we do about the tenants who are on the board who are on benefist or do we not pay? And actually some of these organisations are pretty huge.

And actually they got through that. My take is probably we should pay people for being on boards. Otherwise you do get the great and the good. You get people who can afford to do it. And I keep getting approaches from headhunters for non-remunerated roles. And I have to keep saying, I’ve got a big one already. That’s all I can manage to do.

And yes, I do believe in, I’m very torn on this one actually, so you’ve probably worked out. I believe in doing good for society, but I think you can be paid to do that at the same time as doing it.

Samuel (54:33)

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.I think if you – there is a balance, you know, there will be some smaller charities who will never be able to afford it, but there are larger charities, large institutions that benefit from expertise and actually any remuneration will probably not even be commensurate with the experience that you’re buying in anyway.

And in addition to that, not remunerating when you can- if you’re a university and your turnover is in excess of 100 million pounds, you probably create a barrier for people who can add value to your institution or people who should be represented where decisions are made about your institution. And it’s the same for things like housing associations, as you say, which are very large organisations and organisations that should benefit from the diversity of experiences of both the people they serve, but also the people in the places where they exist.

So I think there’s an unbalance.The unbalance is probably something linked to the size of an organisation.

Alice Maynard (55:44)

Might be, might be linked to the purpose of the organisation, might be linked to the financial situation of the organisation, HE sectors struggling because the business model is not working brilliantly at the moment, so you know it’s probably not the time to talk about it.

Samuel (55:57)

Yeah.

Yeah, with HE, you know, I mean, we digress a bit,

But with HE, yes, there are huge financial challenges. I think about a third of higher education institutions may not even exist in the short term or in the medium to long term. But remunerating board members is not going to be what makes the difference here, between whether the lights are on or not.

Alice Maynard (56:26)

Yeah, and for the optics, you know, it’s the optics, the optics are really important. Because actually, you need to, you need the trust with your stakeholders, as well as the trust, I’ve talked a bit about trust, but actually your stakeholders and why does there is a legitimacy for organisations like higher education institutions and charities that is about how wider society perceives them and you just kind of have to live with that.

Samuel (57:08)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, on that note.

Not a very depressing note, but interesting note.

I think we’ve run out of time, but this has been a real tour de France of being on a board. We’ve explored how you can make sure you know as much as you can when you arrive on a board.

We’ve explored how you can make sure that you, I guess, reduce the likelihood of bad surprises, particularly through having… good relationships and trust between the board and an executive team. The importance of the role of the chair, who is very often, particularly in a challenging context, first amongst equals on paper by law, but still responsible for board effectiveness or the lead was responsible for board effectiveness. We’ve looked at public appointments and you’ve waited seven years at least, some people have waited a lot longer.

And the best way to reduce that is through being honest with yourself, self-reflection, and recognising where there may be gaps in your development and what you might need to do to be able to navigate what is often quite a foreign recruitment process for people who are not from the public sector. We’ve even touched on higher education and the remuneration of board members and the debates that will continue to… to be ongoing because of the economic moment we’re in as a country. And I think if we were in a more stable environment, we could probably be a bit more practical about what is fair, what makes sense, what will allow us to have the best possible board members. But this economic moment and public perception are perhaps barriers from us being able to have what is, think, very important conversation because there are some really fascinating people in our country with great experience, great skill, great lived experience, who should be, you know, having portfolio careers, lending their hands to institutions across the board.

But, you know, unless you have access to certain public appointments and private sector boards, then it’s just not a sustainable career of choice. And we did all of that in less than an hour, Alice.

Alice Maynard (59:27)

Yeah, you really need it. There are certain people from certain backgrounds, a number of different backgrounds, and we need a leg up. And, you know, I’ve been given a few legs up in my time. I’m not sure that’s terribly appropriate analogy for a wheelchair user, but never mind, let’s leave that on one side. And I’m very grateful for them, and I’ve had a lot of help from people, very senior people, giving me advice and so on.

And I’m very grateful for that. And I am more than happy to pay it back if people want to talk to me. They’re more than welcome. I haven’t got any brilliant answers, but I am happy to try to help.

And I do do some coaching as well if people are interested in that. So, you know, we need all the help we can get, frankly.

Samuel (1:00:28)

Great.

Yeah, you’ve given some brilliant answers today. And so Alice Maynard, look for her on LinkedIn if you want to be in touch and hopefully you can have a chat with her.

So you have been listening to notes from a non-executive. My name is Samuel Kusumu. I’ve been your host today. Please share, like, leave a five-star rating. Let us know what you think.

Keep the conversation going and hopefully you’ll be with us at the next episode.

Thank you.

Alice Maynard (1:01:04)

Thank you.