Ciarán Fenton
Leadership consultant
The Emotionally Intelligent Board
I facilitate boards - main and operating - to reduce risks and increase opportunities by stretching their decision-making behaviour outside of their comfort zone and onto a higher level of collective leadership performance.
Are your company's biggest competitors sitting in your boardroom?
Do you recognise these personality traits in your board colleagues, or in you?
-
The micro-manager: always interfering
-
The defensive: rarely acknowledges a mistake
-
The pleaser: either won’t challenge anyone or say what they really want
-
The intellectually superior: won’t listen or must be the brightest in the room
-
The irrepressible: likes to please with many good ideas, but struggles with focus
-
The anxious one: never trusts their own judgement
-
The bully/passive aggressive: makes everyone's life a misery
Individual behaviour can frustrate business goals. It competes with your business as surely as your biggest competitor. And yet, boards live with such behaviour, month in, month out.
​
I led several companies through organisational change in my corporate career and, since 2002 as a consultant, I have advised leaders at listed and private companies on how business strategy and individual board member behaviour are inextricably linked in achieving objectives.
Using a methodology I developed over 15 years working in all sectors, I identify the specific behaviour of each board member, including yours, that may be frustrating your business goals. This includes behaviour which hides individual potential.
I reflect these behaviour agreements in a special type of business plan I have designed which integrates behaviour planning into traditional business planning. Then, usually over a three to nine month period, I support the implementation of the plan, especially when it goes wrong, which it usually does. Because people are people.
In this way, I combine business consulting with behavioural change consulting so that your board can agree a shared purpose, a shared strategy and shared behaviour to implement that strategy.
Then I facilitate agreements between everyone on small behavioural changes. I find that small changes get big results. That’s because confronting counterproductive behaviour, even a little, releases hidden potential in individual board members and, then, in aggregate from the board as a whole.
The problem with many boards is that they don't know how to integrate all three components - purpose, strategy and behaviour, without conflict or suppressing hidden talent.
The Fenton Model helps them negotiate this process, quickly.
