As board members, most of us have an executive responsibility for a key component of the business but are all in it to bring success to the company. 

However, most of us are paid bonuses on achieving Objectives and Targets. Some of these are corporate, some are related to how our functions relate to corporate, and some are on our functions. 

Some of us know each other well, but the majority of the board are just colleagues, and prefer to keep it that way. 

We are all professional and are happy to extend goodwill to support each other when it earns a favour. 

The trouble is – that when any of us have something to lead which his cross domain – it can get a bit sticky of things aren’t going perfectly. 

For example, Business Services had a key customer problem which sucked in a whole load of testers from IT. As this was ‘customer facing’ we drop everything, right? Well yes, but this meant that the new CRM system for sales will now go live a month late, as the resources window just got gobbled up and the finance solution upgrade also has to get attended to. 

The problem for me as Sales Director is that I now miss my milestone for Sales Improvement, so I lose my Q4 bonus. And rather than slip the testing to delay the finance system upgrade a month – my initiative got kicked out a quarter so the FD gets her bonus. Oh, and yes, we can turn on the ‘new features’ for Purchase order issue (not exactly business critical. 



And yesterday – I found out the critical customer issue is on a client account worth a measly £20k per annum – but keeping it meant the Services Director and their team hit target for the year. 

Why can’t we be a bit clearer on all the options and impacts before we are all a little bit parochial?