“An effective Board of Directors is a place where people work as a team, speech is free, and no-one gets bored.” It is with these words that Éric Bourdais de Charbonnière, founder of the Corporate Governance Club, introduced the event attended by circa 100 Alumni on 17th April in Paris.

One definition of soft skills is: “ability to behave, be and interact with others effectively depending on context”.

Ralph Goldet, PhD in Economics in Economics & Management: “The combination of roles of board members”, and JF Phan Van Phi (H84), Member of the Board of HEC Alumni, gathered for this roundtable 4 seasoned board members and/or chairpersons: Laurence Antiglio (H86), Laurence Debroux (H92), Gauthier Faivre (M04) and Michel de Rosen (H72).

They exchanged about their experience on boards in various countries and how the soft skills about which they wrote in our latest book: Dictionnaire vécu de la gouvernance / How boards work: lessons from experience (Humensis, Oct.22, foreword by Prof. Michael E. Porter) helped them: Dare, Collective, Intelligence,Availability and Emotion.

More specifically, they shared concrete examples about how they became board members, how they built their mandates, how what they do aligns with their beliefs and is useful to the group, and how they have reached collective, accepted decisions, especially as non-executive directors.

There were takeaways for everyone, including the fact that soft skills are contextual, and often help to unlock difficult situations!

 

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