Who represents the future in your boardroom?

Indian boardrooms are wrangling with challenges on many fronts—including Gen Z workplace ambitions on pay and progress that differ considerably from preceding generations. By 2030, Gen Z is expected to be 27% of India’s population, 36% of the workforce, and drivers or influencers of nearly $1.3 trillion in spend. As key stakeholders—both as employees and consumers—Gen Z needs a representation in the boardroom too. They are after all the future. But it is going to take more than “add a Gen Z director and stir” to effect real representation of the future in Indian boardrooms.

Stewardship by windscreen, not by rear-view mirror

Serving boardroom directors often get riled when I say that their predictable and safe credentials as retired CEOs and law firm and audit partners are of limited use in shaping the future direction of businesses. The key skill needed to navigate uncharted spaces in geopolitics, technology, climate risks, and societal shifts is not a skill—it is a temperament. That temperament does not lead to spending time on golf courses, but to courting and experiencing the chaos of daily life in a rapidly growing country. That temperament senses the shift in temperatures and tastes and preferences way before your retail offtake in Tier II cities or your high attrition in Tier I cities starts to disrupt the business. If as a serving senior director, you find yourself hamstrung in doing that sense check, perhaps it is worth bringing more than one Gen Z to your boardroom. They do not always have to be appointed directors; they can bring insights in other capacities—as advisors, as reverse mentors, as generational lighthouses. At the same time, boards should be wary of treating one Gen Z person as a spokesperson for an entire generation.

Valuing diversity beyond tick-boxes

True diversity, where present, challenges the status quo of assumptions that underpin the conversations in boardrooms. Eliciting the value of that diversity takes work. I draw a parallel from my experience of teaching in Indian classrooms for the last 15 years. The institutions where I have been teaching future-relevant skills draw their student bodies from Tier II and Tier III towns all over India. Students bring a range of experiences, levels of fluency in English, and varied familiarity with memetic elements and cultural references. In turn as their teacher, I continually fine-tune my case references and language, while not diluting the teaching of concepts. As more of India’s growth comes from Tier II and Tier III cities and peri- and semi-urban areas, boards governing for the future must widen their appointments beyond those who have grown up in the metros to those who bring insight from lived experiences in other parts of India. The work then is to listen actively and sincerely to the directors drawn from different backgrounds and age groups, who may save your organisation from reputational and operational risks arising from things otherwise unnoticed because they seemed too far from the boardroom.

Learning to look askance at some things said aloud

Would you appoint someone to your board who proudly says: “I cannot understand a balance sheet”? Indeed increasingly many can “read” a balance sheet using a Generative AI tool but to query whatever output comes back requires understanding how financial statements do or do not reflect the reality of a business. Why, then, do boards continue to tolerate directors who, for instance, still think that tech and cyber are the job for the CIO or a nominated “tech director”? Boards can no longer afford the narrow apertures of a single function or industry. Boards need those who have a finger on the pulse of many things and the ability to understand the impact of big and small developments on the organisations they oversee. If a single cyber resilience gap or supply-chain disruption can wipe out your business, it needs to be actively on the board’s agenda and not just the audit committee’s oversight of the risk register. For that to happen, boards hiring directors need to raise their game and that may well begin by raising their eyebrows at the unacceptability of some claims that declare a potential director not being fit for purpose in a modern Indian boardroom.

Planting a banyan tree

Boards need to balance short-term market pressures with the long-term systemic health of the organisations they oversee. That is the job. Boards that balance these demands successfully are the real stewards for the upcoming decades of India’s economic maturity and socially inclusive progress. Board directors who are willing to make decisions today that protect the organisations beyond their own terms of service are the ones truly representing the future in the boardrooms. Their stewardship seeks to serve future generations. It is akin to planting a banyan tree under whose shade one will never sit. It is an inspiring and abiding Indian motif to focus our minds should they wander from our job of stewardship—not always easy, but always rewarding and meaningful.

(The author is an experienced independent board director. Her book Uncharted Spaces. Reset the Agenda. Reimagine the Boardroom is out now. Views are personal.)