When governance becomes more powerful than leadership

Introduction

Governance enables leaders to direct an organisation, make sound decisions, and ensure those choices are implemented responsibly. But what happens when the governance itself is no longer under control? Many organisations experience slow decisions, excessive consultation, repeated assurance, overlapping committees and a growing number of people who can prevent progress. Yet when each part of the process is examined individually, it often appears perfectly reasonable.

• Finance needs to approve the funding.
• Commercial needs to protect the procurement.
• Technology needs to confirm architectural compliance.
• Risk needs to understand the exposure.
• Legal needs to protect the organisation.

Each participating department or business unit needs to approve its involvement. The problem is rarely one obviously unnecessary approval. Governance has not been designed as a coherent organisational system. It has accumulated – and the resulting system may have become more powerful than the leaders it was intended to support. It is the cumulative effect of them all. Is the governance beast cowering the innocent organisation?

“Does this sound like us?”

• Some of the warning signs are familiar:
• decisions that should take weeks are expected to take months
• many people can stop an initiative, but few feel able to authorise progress
• the same issue is considered by several forums
• committees revisit decisions made elsewhere
• consultation is treated as a requirement for consensus
• assurance activity is repeated because different parties do not trust one another
• leaders remain accountable for outcomes but cannot navigate the machinery quickly enough to deliver them
• nobody can explain or challenge the complete end-to-end decision process
• every individual control has an owner, but nobody owns the overall governance regime

The organisation may still be functioning. Meetings happen, papers circulate, approvals are recorded and processes are followed. But is it delivering the required outcomes at the pace the situation demands?

A lesson from a complex government portfolio

One of our partners encountered this challenge while helping to develop the governance model for a government portfolio. The initiative involved shared services across eight government departments. It therefore needed to operate across departmental boundaries while accommodating common delivery, department-specific transformation and different responsibilities for achieving benefits. The requirement was not to abandon departmental governance. Each department had legitimate accountabilities, constraints and interests. Nor was there necessarily one individual approval that could simply be declared redundant. The difficulty was the potential behaviour of the complete system. Existing norms about consultation, assurance, departmental consent, funding and approval could combine to create an end-to-end process in which many parties effectively possessed a veto. Decisions needed by the portfolio could potentially take months when the operational need was measured in weeks. The portfolio leadership risked becoming trapped inside the governance intended to support it. The work therefore considered the overall governance strategy, accountability across departments, governance forums, approval and escalation thresholds, business cases, assurance and the information needed to operate the model. A pragmatic approach to business-case development and approval was proposed to preserve effective oversight while responding more quickly to pressing departmental needs. Read the Matrix Portfolio case study. The broader lesson is relevant far beyond government: A collection of individually defensible governance arrangements can still produce an organisationally indefensible result.

How does governance reach this point?

Governance rarely becomes excessive because somebody deliberately sets out to obstruct progress. It usually grows in response to genuine concerns. How do these propositions sit with you?

• Weak leadership can lead to more people being involved in decisions because nobody is sufficiently confident about who should decide.
• Weak management can lead to more checks because the organisation does not trust work to be controlled properly at source.
• Unclear or unfair accountability can cause people to avoid decisions, escalate them or shelter behind committees.
• Previous failures can produce new controls without the controls introduced after earlier failures ever being reconsidered.
• Functions can optimise their own governance obligations without understanding their combined effect on an organisational outcome.

Over time, the regime becomes normal. People learn how to operate within it, but few retain the authority – or the visibility – to redesign it. The governance beast grows one reasonable addition at a time.

This is not an argument for a governance bonfire

When frustrated people encounter excessive governance, the instinctive response may be to abolish committees, remove approval stages and tell people to become more agile. That can be dangerous. Some controls may be compensating for real weaknesses in management, information, capability or trust. Removing them without addressing those weaknesses may make decisions faster, but it can also make them substantially less reliable. The challenge is not simply to reduce governance. It is to make governance purposeful, integrated and proportionate. For every significant accountability or governance activity, we should be able to explain:

• what decision or outcome it supports
• what risk or obligation it addresses
• who is accountable
• why that person or body has the appropriate authority
• what information is needed
• what assurance is proportionate
• how it connects with other governance activity
• how quickly the decision must be made
• what would happen if the activity did not exist

We must then examine those answers across the whole system, not one function or committee at a time. Perhaps we can even operationalise governance and accountability?

How Business Integrated Governance can help

Business Integrated Governance—BIG—looks at the arrangements connecting purpose, vision and strategy with decisions, change, operations and the delivery of value.  

It does not begin by assuming that the answer is another committee, another framework or another report. It asks whether the organisation’s leadership, governance, accountability, information, data, assurance, business support and organisational design work together as a coherent system. Applied to an important objective, portfolio or decision pathway, a BIG investigation could ask:

What are we trying to achieve?

The starting point should be the required outcome, not the existing process. What must the organisation accomplish, and how quickly must it be capable of deciding and acting?

Who is genuinely accountable?

Accountability must be explicit and fair. The accountable person needs sufficient authority, information, resources and influence over the matters for which they will be held to account. Where several organisations or departments are involved, their respective accountabilities and obligations must be made visible rather than left to custom and negotiation.

Which decisions are actually required?

A decision and accountability map can distinguish between:

• a decision
• advice or consultation
• assurance
• notification
• an escalation
• permission to proceed

Being consulted should not automatically provide a veto. Providing assurance should not silently become taking the decision. A committee should not repeat a decision that has already been properly delegated.

What information and assurance are necessary?

Decision-makers need reliable information, but more reporting does not automatically create better governance. BIG considers what each point of accountability needs to know and how trusted data and proportionate assurance can provide confidence without unnecessary repetition. If we operationalise governance – we can streamline it and make it more effective and quicker.

Who owns the whole system?

Firstly – do you even recognise a governance system? Individual functions may own their processes, but someone must be empowered to see and improve the complete governance model. This is an important role for Business Support. It maintains connections between strategy, accountability, decision forums, information, assurance and delivery as a Governance Beast, not just administering meetings.

The question for leadership

If this description feels familiar, the answer is not to blame the people operating the existing processes. Most will be meeting legitimate expectations and protecting the organisation as they understand it. The leadership question is more fundamental: Have we consciously designed and taken control of the Governance Beast needed to secure outcomes, or are arrangements governing us? If governance has become more powerful than leadership, asking people to work harder within the existing system will not solve the problem. We need to make the system visible, understand what it is protecting, clarify accountability and redesign it around the outcomes the organisation exists to achieve. That is a conversation worth starting—and a practical situation in which exploring Business Integrated Governance may help.

Join the discussion

There is no magic answer to purpose delivery. Sustained results require inspiration, but also hard work, joined-up behaviour, dependable information, clear accountability and repeated leadership attention. We have extensive professional knowledge. We have frameworks and methods. Technology can increasingly connect information across systems, and AI can help process evidence, identify relationships and surface insights. The remaining barriers may be structural, behavioural and political. That is why leadership matters. On 7 September, we will explore the leadership required to create an integrated capability – and the leadership required to operate it. The white paper and the five extracts are intended to inform that discussion, not close it. We want the experience and perspectives of board members, executives, strategists, governance professionals, portfolio and PMO leaders, finance, operations, risk, assurance, technology and everyone else interested in improving the connection from purpose to delivery – and back again. Reserve your place at the BIG Leadership session 7th September 7pm UK? :   Become a BIG Member (FULL or free) and gain access to fuller content: