Kirsty McManus, Director of Professional Development Services at the Institute of Directors says director development must go global.
For HR leaders, leadership development has always required a careful balancing act. Senior leaders need time and space to build the judgement, confidence and perspective required to lead effectively, but stepping away from the day-to-day operations is never easy, and it must deliver real value.
This tension is particularly acute when it comes to directors, who are accountable for decisions that carry significant strategic, financial and reputational weight. And as businesses increasingly operate across geographical borders, those decisions have much wider-reaching implications.
We live in an era of accelerating global interdependency. Supply chains cross continents, regulatory frameworks are shaped by international precedent, and geopolitical risk is increasingly landing high on the boardroom agenda. And yet, director development for many organisations remains rooted in a single domestic context – across one legal landscape, one set of market assumptions and one cultural frame of reference.
While this is no doubt valuable, it doesn’t sufficiently prepare boards with the skills needed to interact and compete on a global scale.
The risk of domestic-centred development
When learning is too narrowly domestic, it can leave boards underprepared. Directors may become fluent in the governance norms of their own market, but lack the comparative perspective needed to understand and learn from how similar issues are approached elsewhere. That matters because many of the challenges facing today’s boards aren’t confined by national boundaries.
Directors may be considering expansion into new markets, managing suppliers across several regions, responding to international investor scrutiny or assessing risk in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment. In each case, they need more than technical knowledge of their own system. They need to understand how governance, accountability, regulation and board behaviour vary across jurisdictions – which many director development programmes simply don’t deliver.
This isn’t only relevant to multi-national organisations. Even organisations with a largely domestic footprint can be exposed to international dynamics through supply chains, customers, funding, technology, regulation or workforce expectations. For HR leaders, that means global awareness shouldn’t be seen as a specialist requirement for a small group of internationally mobile executives. It’s increasingly part of the baseline capability required at board level.
Why comparative perspective matters
The value of international learning isn’t simply in directors acquiring knowledge of other regulatory regimes. Its deeper value lies in helping leaders to question assumptions and avoid defaulting to familiarity.
When directors learn only with peers who share the same legal environment, market norms or cultural expectations, certain ideas can go unchallenged. But what feels like ‘the way boards work’ may in fact be only the way boards work in one particular context.
Learning alongside directors from different jurisdictions can disrupt that. It allows leaders to hear their own environment described from the outside and to see familiar problems reframed through a different lens. That experience can be uncomfortable, but it’s also where some of the most valuable development happens.
A director wrestling with short-term performance pressure, for example, may find that the same tension between immediate results and long-term value creation exists across multiple markets. Another may discover that a governance challenge they’ve considered primarily through a domestic regulatory lens has been approached differently, and perhaps more effectively, elsewhere.
They need leaders who are not only technically capable, but also curious, adaptable and alert to the limits of their own assumptions.”
For boards, this breadth of perspective can sharpen decision-making. It encourages directors to look beyond inherited assumptions, test their thinking more rigorously and consider a wider range of consequences, before reaching a conclusion. In complex environments, that ability isn’t a soft benefit, it’s a core governance capability.
The role of peer learning
While formal content is important, some of the most powerful learning at director level comes from peer-to-peer interaction.
A room of experienced directors, from different sectors, regulatory environments and organisational cultures, offers a kind of conversation and learning that simply can’t be replicated through theory alone. Every participant brings real boardroom judgement, practical dilemmas and lived experiences.
For HR leaders deliberating development for senior leaders, this point is critical. The value of a programme isn’t only in the curriculum, but in the environment it creates. Who’s in the room? What perspectives are represented? Are participants being exposed to people who will challenge their assumptions, or only to those who will reinforce them?
The strongest peer learning environments allow directors to engage openly and honestly. IoD’s Global Certificate in Company Direction, as an example, is designed specifically to enable global leaders to share both expertise and experience in this way, which also creates professional networks that endure long beyond the programme itself.
Adopting a more global approach to director development
The gap between where boards operate and where they’re being developed is becoming harder to ignore. A domestic-centred approach may once have been sufficient for many organisations, but it’s increasingly misaligned with the realities of modern business operations.
Boards need directors who can think across borders, understand different governance contexts and learn from peers whose experiences challenge their own. They need leaders who are not only technically capable, but also curious, adaptable and alert to the limits of their own assumptions. This is exactly what the IoD’s Global Certificate in Company Direction was designed to tackle.
The boardroom may still be physically located in one place, but the decisions made there are shaped by forces that extend far beyond it.
To find out more about IoD’s Global Certificate in Company Direction, visit: https://www.iod.com/professional-development/chartered-director-programme/global-certificate-in-company-direction/
