The bedrock of board effectiveness: A generational gearbox

• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Chuck Underwood
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/ban.31161
• Published date: 01 September 2020

© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC • All rights reserved

View this newsletter online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI: 10.1002/ban

Editor: Jeff Stratton

Supplement

Adding diversity to a board has never been

more important

BY JOHN BARRETT AND BRYAN BUCK

The world is a diverse place, and successful

companies understand, respect and model that di-

versity within their leadership teams and through-

out the organization.

But diversity is more than a buzzword. And that

is one major reason why achieving meaningful

diversity in the boardroom has proven to be a lot

harder for many organizations than just checking

a couple of boxes when identifying potential candi-

dates for director roles.

We encourage the companies we work with to

view diversity in broad terms, since high-impact

directors may strengthen the mix in the board-

room by adding diversity in a number of vital ways.

These may include gender, ethnicity and sexual

orientation, but also age, background and strategic

perspective. All are important. Directors who add

some type of diversity to the boardroom frequently

strengthen its impact in ways that simply replicat-

ing the current director mix can never achieve.

As an executive search firm, we are proud that

35% of our successfully placed candidates con-

tribute to diversity. What helps make this pos-

sible is we try to think (and search) outside the

box when it comes to identifying candidates who

might be well-suited for a board or leadership role

within an organization.

John Barrett and Bryan Buck are partners at ex-

ecutive search firm ON Partners, where they work

with companies to identify and recruit high-impact

executives for board, C-suite and other senior lead-

ership roles. ■

September 2020 Vol. 37, No. 1

The bedrock of board effectiveness:

A generational gearbox

BY CHUCK UNDERWOOD

In the past, boards were composed of members of

only one or two generations: the older, more experi-

enced and presumably wiser business minds in their

60s and 70s. And, overwhelmingly, white and male.

Well … welcome to 2020. Boards are now more

age-diverse, gender-diverse and ethnically diverse.

But this new complexity can be simplified: Every sin-

gle board member belongs to a generation and brings

powerful generational core values to his or her perfor -

mance and final decision-making. And so, if boards

are trained in generational diversity and strategies,

they will possess the Holy Grail of human interac-

tion: a generational gearbox, which enables them to

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