Is your organization operating as effectively as it could?

If you’re being honest with yourself and your team, the answer is “probably not.” The natural follow-up question, then, is: What do we do about it?

According to corporate governance expert Nygina Mills, well-governed organizations have several things in common. Among them are well-defined goals and strategies to achieve them, diverse governing boards, clear accountability processes and ethical standards, effective communication, and technology-forward operations.

Let’s explore each of these attributes and best practices to implement them in any enterprise.

1. Establish Short, Medium and Long-Term Goals

Begin by establishing short, medium and long-range goals for your organization. With regards to corporate governance, these goals should focus on improving operational excellence throughout the enterprise and positioning for an array of potential macro- and microeconomic scenarios. Uncertainty is unavoidable in business, but you can do more than you realize to reduce it by setting realistic, time-defined goals.

2. Develop Actionable Strategies to Achieve These Goals

Next, develop actionable strategies to reach your goals. These strategies will most likely take the form of a series of tactical road maps covering each goal. You may also wish to develop road maps for specific sub-goals within each overarching goal, or for sub-process owners to pursue specific milestones or tasks within them. Although it’s never wise to lose sight of the end objective and get bogged down in details, granularity accrues to your benefit here.

3. Recruit Board Members With Diverse Backgrounds, Experiences and Subject Matter Expertise

Long-range planning is only as effective as those tasked with executing it, of course. With that in mind, it’s important to recruit board members with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and subject matter expertise. While no board is perfect or entirely without blind spots, having a diverse and deep board is your best defense against unanticipated competitive or internal threats.

4. Establish Firm But Fair Accountability Standards for Employees, Executives and Directors

Of course, no matter how good your governing board looks on paper, it won’t function to its full potential without clear expectations and accountability standards. This is true for other roleplayers within your organization as well, from C-suite executives all the way down to frontline workers.

As you work to establish accountability standards up and down your organization, you could do worse than to follow these guidelines from Harvard Business Review:

• Set clear expectations for the individual and the role
• Understand what capabilities are needed to meet these expectations and ensure you have the right person for the job
• Lay out clear performance metrics
• Provide open, honest, straightforward feedback
• Set clear consequences for failure to meet expectations or abide by standards of conduct

5. Develop Strong External and Internal Communication Protocols

Effective internal and external communication protocols are crucial for any well-functioning organizations. They are important not just during crisis scenarios, when it may be to your benefit to bring in outside specialists, but for day-to-day operations as well. Employees perform better when they are looped into developments that relate to their work.

6. Integrate Technology Into Your Governance Processes

A well-run organization is always evolving. Today, this means staying on the leading edge of technological change and adopting new ways of doing things into both your operations and your corporate governance processes.

Note that this does not mean blindly and hastily integrating unproven technologies. It does mean being proactive about how you approach technology so that you’re able to take advantage of clear value-enhancing opportunities as they come.

What’s Next for Your Team?

If you can effectively implement these six guidelines in your organization, it’s very likely that you’ll notice a significant improvement in its operational performance. Perhaps not immediately, or even next quarter, but the change will be apparent as time progresses.

With your company set on a more sustainable course, you’ll have more freedom to implement additional changes to improve its operations and competitive position. As the pace of technological innovation increases and old business models fall by the wayside, it’s crucial that you stay one step ahead of your peer organizations.

But that won’t happen if you don’t first attend to the basics outlined here.