FIP 75: Board Effectiveness with Charity Chanda Lumpa

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Today we continue our podcast takeover series with Tamsin Jones of The Boardroom Africa. Her guest today is Charity Chanda Lumpa, the first female Board chair for Zanaco, who shares her thoughts on board effectiveness.

On this episode you’ll learn:

• How Charity was inspired by poor experiences with boards to start working on and advocating for board effectiveness, beginning with the on-boarding of directors. Charity thinks the three most important roles of boards are: (1) providing oversight (versus management), (2) making value-added decisions, and (3) handling gray areas.
• Charity thinks that boards should be diverse in a number of ways, including gender diversity, international / local representation, as well as board members that represent specific business expertise (such as marketing, finance, law, etc.). She emphasizes that the board should possess all the skills to help the social enterprise or company achieve its strategy. Such diversity can be maintained by establishing diversity policies, succession planning, and purposeful hiring.
• Noting how one of the main responsibilities of the Board is to provide oversight, Charity also talks a lot about how to instill a performance culture in a company. Charity shares her experience in establishing performance indicators and reward mechanisms based on trends analysis that management puts in place based on a framework that is being provided by the board.
• As the Chair of a board, Charity feels her role is to be a sounding board for the CEO and providing support when needed, not to really meddle in the internal management of the company. She also highlights the importance of having established terms of reference for the board, a board charter, and purposeful on-boarding of each director to ensure that roles and responsibilities are clear.

Links to Resources:

• Zanaco
• SOS Children’s Village Zambia
• Norton Role Fulbright resources on board effectiveness
• King IV Summary Guide

Connect with Charity:

• Charity on LinkedIn
• Charity on Twitter