Protect · 04
Executive Programs
Standing engagements covering a leadership team rather than a single person. Anyone conducting diligence reads the executives and the institution together, so defending them separately leaves the obvious gap open.
An investor conducting diligence on a company searches the company, and then searches the people. A journalist writing about an organization profiles whoever leads it. A regulator examining a firm examines the individuals who signed. In every case the institutional record and the personal records are read as one document.
Which is why protecting a company's presence while leaving its executives' presences unmanaged achieves considerably less than it appears to. The weakest individual record becomes the accessible line of inquiry, and it is usually the executive nobody thought to check: the CFO with a namesake, the founder whose earlier venture ended badly, the board member whose Wikipedia entry stopped being accurate in 2019.
A program covers the team as a set. Each individual receives the appropriate combination of audit, structural work, and published record. The entity receives its own. And the relationships between them are made explicit, so that the connections a diligence process will draw anyway are drawn from accurate material.
Programs also cover the parts of the work that only exist at team scale: a response protocol agreed before it is needed, so nobody improvises at eleven at night; and transition planning, since executives arrive and depart, and both events are reputational moments for the individual and the institution.
When it applies
The situations this is the right tool for.
Preparing for a transaction
Diligence will examine every named executive. Better to know what it will find before it does.
A newly assembled leadership team
Each arrival brings an existing record, and the combination has not been read as a set before.
A regulated industry
Where individual conduct records attach to the institution's standing as a matter of course.
Post-crisis rebuilding
The institution and the individuals both need rebuilding, and doing them in isolation produces inconsistencies.
An executive transition is planned
Both the departure and the arrival are reputational events with a documentary tail.
The board has asked the question
Increasingly a standing governance item rather than a crisis response, and it deserves a documented answer.
Process
How the work runs.
Team-wide baseline
Every named individual and the entity, audited on the same standard, so results are comparable across the team.
Exposure ranking
Where the accessible weaknesses actually are, which is frequently not where leadership assumes.
Individual work plans
Different people need different things. A uniform package across a leadership team wastes most of the budget.
Entity-level architecture
The organization's own resolution and structured record, with the executive relationships stated explicitly.
Response protocol
Agreed in advance and written down: who is called, who speaks, what is not said, and in what order. Drafted when nobody is under pressure.
Program reporting
On a defined cadence, in a form suitable for a board paper, including what has not improved.
Before you engage
Where the limits are.
A program requires genuine participation from each individual covered. An executive who declines to engage cannot be meaningfully protected, and we will report that rather than produce work that implies otherwise.
We also will not use a program to conceal conduct. Where an individual's record reflects something ongoing and material, that is a governance matter and not a presentation problem.
Nor can a program manufacture consensus. If an organization's leadership genuinely disagree about the facts of an episode, no amount of coordination will produce a coherent public record.
Questions we are asked
- How many people does a program cover?
- Typically the named executive team and the board members whose records are publicly attached to the organization. The right number falls out of the exposure assessment rather than being set in advance.
- Do individuals have their own confidentiality?
- Yes, and it is important. An executive's personal matters are not reported to the company. Where an individual's private situation is relevant to the program, the boundaries are agreed explicitly at the start, in writing.
- What happens when someone leaves?
- It is addressed in the transition planning, because a departure changes both records. Whether the individual continues privately with the firm afterwards is entirely their decision.
- Can this be reported to the board?
- Yes. Program reporting is produced in a form suitable for a board paper, with documented baselines, defined measures, and honest statements of what has not moved.
- What does this cost?
- The fee is stated in a written proposal before any work begins, scoped to what the assessment finds. How that is arrived at is set out in full on the How We Work page.
Related
Mechanisms that often run alongside this one.
Is this your situation?
One conversation, in confidence, with an honest reading of whether this mechanism is the right one, including when it is not.