Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Depending where you're based. We have a truly international event today and next couple more days. Thank you for choosing this session.I know there are several sessions at the same time. I really appreciate that you joined this session specifically. Look, I put this session together with a title from the driving seat, to the boardroom, what no one tells you, about leading, without a title. The session is based purely on my personal, experience. I decided to talk about the transition from executive role to nonexecutive role when you become a board member. And, I hope you will find some of my thoughts, helpful. We are not having a lot of time, but I will focus on what really mattered for me in the very beginning of this journey.

So a quick, introduction of myself. I started my career long time ago in telecommunications. From 2011 till, 2020, I spent time in digital native, companies, that, developed with high speed growth, different verticals, marketplaces, ride hailing, food delivery, mobile entertainment, navigation, many verticals. So I call myself a digital native expert, and, I worked alongside with, talented engineers, product managers, data scientists. So actually embrace digital and tech culture from first hands. Then I had couple years of entrepreneurial experience. Had my own startup for a couple years. Started, scaled, failed during COVID, tons of experience. And for the last six years, I've been working for the private equity fund and I helped our portfolio retail companies to go through digital transformation, applying my previous, digital tech data experience and creating value, establishing that competence and culture within those companies.

And within that role, I also, had a role and have a role of, being board members in those portfolio companies. So originally, I was invited as an expert to bring, tech digital domain expertise. I was not trained to be a board member. I didn't have governance corporate governance trainings back then. So I learned from my peers. I learned through my own mistakes. Later on, I went through official and, very good, corporate governance trainings. And by the way, if you're reflecting about that, there are many companies, many schools, business schools who are offering this, so there is no issue to access this knowledge. But I think the biggest insights and learnings come from own mistakes and learnings.

So I'll share it today a little bit, and I something that I wish I, I knew, when I just started my own path. So, for the next fifteen, seventeen minutes, I will share my thoughts. I'm trying to share just only my only slide that I prepared. Let me let me try doing that if I'm not gonna fail in this. This this entire screen now. Window. Let me try. Let me try. I hope it works. Applications. Oh, here it is. Share. Okay. For a second I'm now gonna see For a second I'm now gonna see your comments. I hope you see this. So this is the structure of what I'm gonna talk about, today. We'll talk about basically five points. The first one is about making this shift from exec to non exec role. Basically, from actions to questions.

The second point I wanna talk about today is the information gap. That's the reality for board members. And, the third one would be, the duality of, the role of the board member, which is challenge and support in the same breath. Then, of course, we'll cover the tech topic. It is a tech event, So we'll talk about navigating through, complexity of managing tech topics in a non tech boardroom. And, of course, we'll touch on people and how to increase your influence through people, where actually you don't have direct influence. So that's the plan for today. I'm back to this full screen mode so you can see me clearly. And let's start with the first one. And the first one is making the shift from executive to non executive roles. So here's the things.

I genuinely believe it's the hardest part, in this transition because as a non executive, you obviously come from executive, from management roles. And interestingly, when I've been an executive, I saw that board members have ultimate power, because obviously they are above the CEO, above the, management board, maybe only below the shareholders. But to some extent it is true and not true because when you talk about signing off budget, signing off key positions, or signing off strategy, yes, the board has power. But if you look at this topic from actionable point of view, board members probably the least engaged and less at least powerful people because it's not the board members who are in the driving seat as I mentioned in my in the title of this session. It is the CEO. It is the management. It is the executive. It is any person in the organization, but not you as a board member. And making the shift from an acting role to an advising role or oversight role is incredibly hard.

For example, with my active background, it was very difficult just to start listening, give advice and limit my engagement to sessions that were held only, once in two months, for example. That's an average dynamic for board meetings. Sometimes even less, sometimes even once, per quarter. And it comes with practice, but you must understand that you are not a manager anymore. You are not head of engineering, you are not head of data, you're not head of e commerce or MD or CEO. You are not in that position and you need to let the management team to do their job. So here's the thing as an executive you are paid to know act and deliver and as non executive as a board member you are rewarded to ask the right questions.

So basically, that's your value that you can bring to the board, to the company, and to the management, team. At the same time, you're not gonna know everything. So your sessions with the management team will be quite limited, but you need to make your own priorities. What really matters at the board level where you really think you should address, attention of the board for decisions. And, look, it's difficult to do in the beginning, but just listen to the signals, start, paying attention to how much time you dedicate, and how much time you spent with executive teams, how many questions you ask, and try to focus on the most important, topics. The second topic I would like to cover today is information gap. That's another unpleasant reality for board members. As an executive, you you can dig deeper. You can collaborate with your teams cross functionally. You basically deal with information flow every day.

So the more you know, the better, the more informed decision decisions you make real time. As a board member, you cannot know everything. You will know a very small fraction from what you used to know as, as an executive. And it's tough because you always will be asked to make serious decisions having minimum information. But it doesn't mean that you're gonna make those decisions being blind. What I would advise in this case is establish frameworks, with, the chair of the board, with the CEO, with, other board members' support to get additional information you truly need to make those decisions. For example, if you act in tech domain, you would notice that on average board, boards cover, pretty standard, information. That would be financial performance. That would be, organizational changes. That would be strategy or key projects. And let's imagine you need more information on technology since that would be your domain of expertise.

And look, you can ask, to introduce this topic update, twice a year, for example, so the whole board have access to this information. Or, for example, you're saying that you should address cybersecurity threats topics. And, look, you can talk to audit committee and include this topic there. So you are not the only one who asked this question, but it is part of the process. And it is, shared with the whole board, and you just contribute, your opinion, there because obviously technology, AI, data, cybersecurity, all these topics that refer to our tech domain in broad sense are more and more important, these days. So the third point is balancing, challenge and support at the same time because look the board has dual mandate. You hold management accountable but you empower them to deliver. If you only challenge them and if you challenge them over and over again, the, the management team at some point might be afraid of you and they will stop bringing you difficult topics And they might bring you only soft topics, safe topics.

So you don't wanna go that direction. On the other hand, if you only support the CEO and the management team, then you might be labeled at some point as, as a softie, and then they will take advantage of it, and they will. Trust me. So that's why it's a very fine line that you can find how to balance that. And look, for example, how how how to do it in practice. You can, utilize not only your your board meetings, time, you can also utilize your one on one with CEO, one on one with the chair of the board. Don't forget that you also can align between board meetings with other board members, and, you know, you will share your concerns with them, and they can ask similar questions that bother you as well. So you are not the only challenger in the room and vice versa. They might share different perspectives and understanding of issues that you think are issues.

And maybe they can convince you in the opposite opinion and give you comfort making certain decisions that you didn't consider before. So don't underestimate the power of alignment and conversations and work as a board member outside of the boardroom and outside of those dedicated official board meetings that normally take place in official agenda. So the fourth topic I would like to address is actually, navigating tech topics in non tech boards. So look, I'm very happy for all of us that, these days with all the evolution of the importance of digital technology, data, cyber, AI, everything in these domains. Shareholders, companies, boards, they invite tech professionals to boards and basically elevate the importance of these topics to the highest level. At the same time, you might find yourself quite lonely in that boardroom because the typical board composition would be somebody with finance expertise, somebody with, HR expertise, somebody with commercial, somebody with pure industry expertise and you probably will be the only person unless we're talking about truly tech company, on average.

That would be your mission to be the voice of technology. And here's the tricky part. Other board members probably won't be tech savvy. And they either will be not prepared to talk about tech topics, they might be they might have fear of those topics, or they might be bored going into details of those topics. So in this situation they might ask you to be the expert in the room and almost delegate decisions in tech domain to you. And he'll and I genuinely think it's a trap because as soon as you will cover these topics lonely, you know, you become responsible. This is not what you want. You are not a manager. You are not an executive. You wanna help them to understand these topics, and share this responsibility with them so they understand the consequences of the decisions in tech domain.

To do that, you need to help, to translate all the tech domain specifics into business. For example, it's very often when tech topics are not discussed in details with the whole board. Too many details, too specific, too many abbreviations. So in this situation, for example, you can ask for deep dive, separately with IT or tech team and then report back to the whole board what you understood. Or if you have the whole session together with the whole board, you can help to translate this tech world into business outcomes. And one important thing that I wanna highlight, if you ever walk into this room, boardroom as a tech expert, you absolutely have to learn how to speak business language because that's the key to let other board members be engaged and understand how to make those decisions. And it's your mission to help the rest of the board to understand the consequences. Be it investment in technology, ROIs, be it choosing the platform or the right partner.

You have to educate an ongoing situation an ongoing basis your peers in the board. So, the last point I would like to touch on today is about people. Obviously, there is no growth, no change or transformation without people. But here's the difference. When you are in a driving seat as executive, you deliver by doing things yourself or guiding other people, doing things. But as a board member, you don't have that privilege. So, what you can do, you can build connection with, those people in organization who use you might find very helpful for delivering the results. And I do not mean only the CEO or C level executives because as we know, in many situations, the real change, happens a level or two levels below on the level of good middle management and knowing those people, those, change agents or advocates of key initiatives would be very good for you.

Obviously with, permission of the CEO, so it's comfortable. And establishing, less formal relationship with those, change agents would be very helpful. And don't come there only with, formal questions. Try to help those folks, those executives to navigate through complexity. Listen to them. And you that might help you to connect what you've seen in board decks, what you heard in one on one, one to one with a CEO, what you've seen during all the committees you had, what's really going on in the organization and how the programs that you planned or the strategy is landing.

And it might be a great help, for those people as well to deliver long term results. Well that's that's what I would mention today. I know it's very brief. Just a brief catch up. The first one is really the shift from executive to non executive. Don't forget to survive in the real, information gap, trying to navigate through the process and focusing only on the important information and questions. Try to find a balance supporting and challenging the executive team. Don't forget to help your other peers in the board to understand the tech topics in a business language and try to establish relationship not only with those people whom you see in the boardroom, but also with those change agents who are crucial for the result. Well, I think that's it.