The objectives of this study are to survey, post the latest Combined Code, current board practice concerning the appointment, evaluation and development of directors and performance evaluation of boards and their committees. The Company Secretaries of all FTSE 100 and 250 companies were invited to complete, online or on paper, a survey questionnaire designed to investigate several aspects of the performance of their Boards of Directors, including the impact of relevant parts of the latest Combined Code. The more positive findings (...) are that: the Code's principles yield discernible benefits for board and company performances; board performance is most affected by new appointments which has implications for director induction; New Directors' roles and competencies are well articulated by Nomination Committees; a majority use explicit performance criteria; a majority of directors commit 3 5 days per annum to their professional development. Areas for attention suggested by the findings are as follows: a minority translate explicit performance criteria into specific improvement targets; some ambivalence characterises public disclosure of board evaluation results; evaluation of Committees' performance is less rigorous than for Main Boards; the powers and responsibilities of Subsidiary/Divisional boards are not well defined; only a minority of Nomination Committees focus on Descriptors of High Performance; traditional methods of Director selection and induction prevail; Non-Executive Directors' suitability to coach their Executive Director colleagues or other members of the executive team; only one in seven boards uses External Facilitators to assist in benchmarking their performance. The implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Currently, there is great interest in leadership at the top leadership of the board and of the company. This paper describes a new instrument to assess top leaders and the research findings that support it, including those relating to Emotional Intelligence. The author contends that the assessment of leadership should be context-specific. The Leadership Dimensions Questionnaire (LDQ) was designed to measure 15 leadership constructs and the organisational context in terms of the degree of change faced by the leader. Three new (...) styles of Leadership, Engaging (Transformational), Goal Oriented (Transactional) and Involving (Participative) styles are proposed. LDQ has been widely used for identifying and developing top managers. Research findings will be presented from the Private Sector, a UK Retail Company (Managing Directors and Senior Managers) and from the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. The majority of leadership dimensions from the LDQ predicted actual performance of senior managers and officers. (shrink)