This week, Monique Leroux, corporate director, senior advisor at Fiera Capital and speaker at the Leadership Institute, answers our questions about leadership.
What needs to be done to modernize boards of directors?
My answer will be classic. As a first step, there must be an awareness on the part of the CEO, the president and all board members of the importance of inclusive leadership. There are all sorts of diversities, but the male-female dimension is fundamental. If you can’t reach that, it’s hard to reach the rest. Beyond setting rules, there is a question of state of mind where we recognize the advantage and the need to have a board that represents the stakeholders of our organization.
If you had to pick one thing that needed to be changed urgently to ensure there was more equity, inclusion and diversity in your field, what would it be?
It is really the “education” element that needs to be changed in our schools. To have more girls taking math, engineering, and technology paths. From secondary school, girls must develop leadership geared towards action and ambition.
Often the best in science will go on to health science and become a doctor. There is no parity problem here. While in the harder part of science, we still have a lot of work to do.
For women who have leadership roles in society today, we have a responsibility to lead others, to encourage others and to support others. I am convinced of that.
What do you think of the current leadership styles?
For me, there is a difference between management and leadership. You can have an excellent manager, who will manage very well with knowledge, experience, organization and his head. But when you talk about leadership, you have to add a dimension which is the heart. There are comparatively competent people, but you will see that one of these people will get you with their look, their conviction, their chemistry and their heart. This is where we will add empathy and benevolence. A good leader, beyond directing, organizing and stimulating, is capable of inspiring. When you breathe in, you are calling on emotion, and the emotion is going to seek connection with people.
That being said, to turn your question upside down, can someone who is just empathetic and caring be a good leader? The answer is: not necessarily. Can the person who is only benevolent and empathetic run a business well in a crisis situation? I do not believe.
When you were Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Desjardins Group, you had an image of the ideal leader that corresponded to a T surrounded by a circle.
The best leader is someone who has, in the vertical bar of the T, a skill that he can bring as a contribution to the team (journalism, finance, engineering, technology, human resources). Then, in addition to his job, this leader is able to understand the strategic issues and the connection of all the vertical silos that you have in an organization. Make the connections between technology, IT systems, human resources and customers, for example. It’s the horizontal bar of the T. Finally, when you add a person who is able to go and connect the heart, his complete environment, all the stakeholders, there you have someone who has a very important potential for achievement. Because you have both the skill, the strategic vision and the ability to shine in your circle, in your environment.
It’s a very simple image, but all the more important today, because organizations, companies and state corporations need to have managers, but also leaders who have this very broad capacity. There are people who are good specialists, but will have difficulty acting cross-functionally.
You participated in the report The Future of Canadian Corporate Governance: A Reasoned Approach to Meeting Rising Expectations of the Board. How can we improve the state of governance of our companies and organizations?
Several elements emerged from the report, three of which strike me as more significant. The first is to set the ambition of being at least 30% or more women. The second is that a company or an organization must consider all of its stakeholders, both the state, if it is a state corporation, shareholders, customers, employees and communities. It cannot look only at the shareholder. As a board of directors, this leads us to develop with the management team a strategy of social, environmental and governance responsibility.
The third element is having a CEO or “CEO” who has this open-mindedness and this ability to form management teams that will be extremely robust. We do not have a logic of having CEOs who will serve ad vitam æternam mandates. The mandates must be between 8 and 12 years (the average is currently 9-10 years) so as to be able to create a dynamic, an impetus of the moment and a continuous refreshment. It’s the same thing for boards of directors.