Boardroom Excellence - Governance, Risk Oversight & Executive Accountability

Introduction

Effective boards do more than approve decisions. They shape organisational direction, oversee risk, challenge executive thinking and ensure the organisation can achieve its objectives while remaining resilient and accountable. In practice, governance can become overly procedural (tick-box) or overly informal (founder-led, personality-driven) and risk oversight can drift into long risk registers that don’t change what leaders actually do.

This webinar takes a practical boardroom perspective, focusing on how boards and executive teams create effective governance, exercise meaningful oversight and make better decisions under uncertainty. Delegates will examine how boards maintain effective oversight without drifting into operational management, how to establish clear decision rights and reporting, and how to oversee risk using practical tools such as risk appetite, key risk indicators and assurance mapping.

Throughout, the presenter will use realistic examples to show what good looks like and how to respond when governance starts to fail.

What You Will Learn

This webinar will cover the following:

• What corporate governance is (and is not): the board’s role vs management’s role
• Why governance fails in successful organisations: unclear decision rights, weak information, ‘rubber-stamping’ and founder dominance
• Risk oversight as a strategic capability - balancing growth, resilience and stakeholder expectations in practice:
• Risk appetite and tolerances (making them usable)
• Key risk indicators (KRIs) and early warning indicators
• Exception reporting and board escalation triggers
• Risk registers vs board-level risk themes: how to make risk reporting decision-useful
• Assurance, control frameworks and board confidence:
• Management controls vs independent assurance
• Committees and what they should deliver (Audit & Risk, Remuneration, Nominations)
• Assurance mapping and identifying ‘blind spots’
• Culture and conduct as governance issues:
• Incentives, speak-up, psychological safety
• Recognising groupthink and ‘green dashboards’
• Practical boardroom examples and mini case studies, such as:
• Cyber incident response and disclosure decisions
• Client concentration risk and setting KRIs
• Whistleblowing allegations involving senior leaders
• A practical checklist: questions the board should ask quarterly to test governance and risk oversight

This pre-recorded webinar will be available to view from Monday 28th September 2026

Alternatively, you can gain access to this webinar and 2,400+ others via the MBL Webinar Subscription. Please email webinarsubscription@mblseminars.com for more details.