I WOULDN’T DO THAT IF I WERE YOU: Why You Should Never Make A Public Sector Board Appointment For Appointment’s Sake – (Boards That Work- Part vii) – By Dr Bolaji Olagunju

I wrote a book some years ago called Hiring Right. It made an argument that some readers found surprising at the time, although I think it has worn well in the years since. The argument was that hiring is not a routine activity to be delegated to whomever happens to be available. Hiring is the most consequential decision a leader makes, the upstream cause of most institutional outcomes, and the place where most institutional failures actually begin, long before they are visible. Get hiring right and most things become possible. Get it wrong and almost nothing can compensate.

I want to extend that argument today, and to apply it where I believe it does the most important work in the entire Nigerian public sector.

The appointment of a board member to a public institution is a hiring decision. It is the single most consequential hiring decision the country makes, repeatedly, on a scale that dwarfs almost any other personnel choice.

In our own case, we treat it as if it were the least serious.

This is the great inversion at the heart of our public sector. We treat the appointment of a desk officer in a federal agency with more procedural rigour than the appointment of a director to its board. We require certificates, references, examinations, panels, and probation for junior staff, and we accept a phone call, a memo, and an acceptance letter for the body that governs the entire institution. The pattern is so settled that we have stopped noticing it. We should notice it.

If we are serious about transforming the performance of our public institutions, this is where it begins. Not at the agencies. Not at the policies. Not at the funding. At the appointment of those who will govern. Today’s column is therefore a direct argument to anyone who has any influence over how public sector board appointments are made in this country, whether at federal, state or local level. I would not, if I were them, continue to do what is currently being done.

Four things we have collapsed into one

One of the structural reasons our public sector board appointments produce the boards we get is that we have collapsed four distinct activities into one. We call all of them appointment. We treat all of them as if they were the same thing. They are not.

The first is selection. Selection is the act of identifying who should be considered. It begins with a clear picture of what the institution needs from its board, what gaps the current composition has, and what kind of person would close those gaps. Selection is not a list of names. It is a search for the right fit against a specific brief.

The second is screening. Screening is the disciplined process by which candidates who have been selected are tested against the criteria. Have they done work of the kind required? Do they understand the sector? Do they have the financial, strategic and technical competencies the institution genuinely requires? Will they bring independence of mind, or will they be deferential? Are they currently in good standing professionally, ethically and legally? Screening is the work of testing the candidate against the brief, rigorously.

The third is due diligence. Due diligence is the deeper investigation that confirms what screening has indicated. It is the check of professional history, the conversation with previous employers and collaborators, the review of public record, the verification of credentials, the assessment of potential conflicts of interest. It is the work of finding out what is not on the candidate’s curriculum vitae.

The fourth is appointment. Appointment is the formal act by which the chosen candidate is given the role. It is, properly understood, the last and most ceremonial of the four activities. It is what is announced. It is what is gazetted. It is what makes the news.

In our public sector, in too many cases, we begin with appointment and work backwards, if at all. The name is decided, often for reasons unrelated to the work the institution requires. The announcement follows. Selection, screening and due diligence, if they happen at all, happen after the appointment has effectively been made, and they are reduced to formalities that confirm what has already been settled.

This is, with respect, the wrong order. It produces appointments that fail not because the appointee is a bad person but because the appointment never went through the required procedure in the right order. The institution gets a director, but the institution does not get the right director, because no one ever asked, in serious terms, what right would mean for this board, at this time, against this brief.

A positive Nigerian example

I want to bring in a positive example, because I believe in naming what has worked when it has worked.

When the Pension Reform Act was passed in 2004 and the National Pension Commission (PenCom) was being established, those responsible for building the institution understood something important. The board of the new commission could not be composed in the conventional way. The work was technical. The accountability was severe. The political and economic consequences of failure were national. The country was, in effect, asking this board to redesign and supervise one of the largest financial flows in the public sector, with implications stretching across decades.

The composition of PenCom’s founding board reflected this understanding. The qualifications required were specified. The skills profile was deliberate. The board that emerged had the technical depth, the independence, and the institutional standing to do the work the legislation was asking it to do. The result, over the subsequent years, was a pension system that has performed well by any reasonable measure, including international benchmarks. There have been challenges, as there are anywhere. But the architecture has held.

I cite PenCom not because it was perfect, and not because every appointment to its board over the years has been ideal. I cite it because it is a Nigerian example of what selection looks like when an appointing authority decides to actually do selection rather than to substitute appointment for it. The country can do this. We have done this. The question is whether we will do it consistently, across the public sector, as the standard rather than the exception.

The six questions before any appointment

I want to offer something usable. Six questions that any appointing authority, at federal, state or local level, could begin to ask tomorrow before making any public sector board appointment. The questions are simple. They are not new. But they are not currently being asked in any consistent way, and that is the problem we are trying to fix.

Question one. What does this board need that it does not currently have?

The starting point for any appointment is not who. It is what. What competence is missing? What perspective is missing? What independence is missing? What range is missing? Without an answer to this question, the appointment has no brief, and an appointment without a brief is an appointment without a purpose.

Question two. Does this candidate bring it?

Once the gap has been named, the candidate must be evaluated against the gap. Not against general impressiveness. Not against political alignment. Not against personal acquaintance. Against the specific gap the board has and the specific contribution the institution needs.

Question three. Will this candidate exercise independent judgement?

One of the most important questions, and the hardest to test, is whether the candidate will bring independence of mind to the room. The candidate may be technically competent. The candidate may be impressive on paper. But if the candidate will not, when the moment comes, disagree with the Chief Executive, the Chair, or the appointing authority, then the candidate is not adding governance value. They are adding only their attendance.

Question four. Has this candidate done serious work of this kind before?

Past performance is not a guarantee, but it is the single best indicator we have. A candidate who has served effectively on a comparable board, who has produced demonstrable institutional outcomes elsewhere, who has been tested in the kind of decisions this board will make, is a fundamentally different proposition from a candidate whose qualification is reputation alone. The work history must be examined. Not flattered. Examined.

Question five. What is the candidate’s standing, in three different rooms?

This is the integrity test. Ask, of any serious candidate, what is said of them by people who have worked with them closely, by people who have done business with them, and by people who have served alongside them in any institutional capacity. The three rooms produce three different views. A candidate whose standing is consistent across all three is a candidate of integrity. A candidate whose standing varies markedly between rooms is a candidate who needs more careful examination before any decision is made.

Question six. If this appointment fails, what will the country lose?

This is the final question, and the one that brings the stakes into focus. A public sector board appointment is not a private matter. It is a public asset, governed by people the country has entrusted with the work of stewardship. If the appointment fails, the country pays. Make the cost of failure explicit, in advance, and the seriousness of the decision becomes harder to evade.

Six questions. None of them exotic. All of them within reach. If every appointing authority in Nigeria committed to answering all six, on the record, before every public sector board appointment, the quality of our boards would shift visibly within a single appointment cycle.

What this would change

I want to be honest about what asking these six questions seriously would change. It would not simply improve appointments. It would also reduce the discretion of the appointing authority. It would make it harder to reward loyalty with a board seat. It would make it harder to balance political maps through governance bodies. It would make it harder to place people who have nowhere else to go.

These are the actual reasons the questions are not currently being asked. The honest position is to name this directly. The patronage capacity of public sector board appointments is real. It is significant. It is one of the levers by which political coalitions are maintained in this country, and any reform that reduces it will face resistance from those who depend on it.

But the question we have to put to the country is straightforward. Are public sector boards instruments of governance, or instruments of patronage? They cannot be both at scale. Whichever they are, they will produce the institutional results consistent with that purpose. If they are instruments of governance, the institutions will perform. If they are instruments of patronage, the institutions will continue to drift, regardless of every other reform we attempt.

We have made the choice repeatedly, by default, in favour of patronage. The choice can be made differently. The six questions are one way to begin.

The work ahead

I have raised the question of selection as one of the first things to be fixed because in my view it is the highest leverage question in the entire reform agenda. In the next columns I will go deeper on the cascade by which board selection determines everything else. I will write about why selection is, by my count, seventy to eighty per cent of the success of any institution. I will write about what we should select for that cannot be taught, and what competencies are non-negotiable.

For now, I will leave the reader with a single proposition. If you have any influence over any public sector board appointment in this country, whether as a Minister, a Governor, a Permanent Secretary, a regulator, a board chair making recommendations, or simply a citizen making your views known, ask the six questions before you decide anything. Ask them seriously. Insist on the answers. Refuse to proceed until the answers are clear.

The board sets the ceiling. Selection sets the board. Selection is the highest leverage thing the country can change about its public sector, and it can be changed any time the country decides it wants to.

The work begins where the talking ends.

Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity. This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via [email protected].