Improving the effectiveness of a sporting body’s Board

The client and what they needed

Wiltshire Cricket is the official governing body for cricket in Wiltshire. In partnership with the England and Wales Cricket Board, it works to grow, promote, and develop cricket at all levels across the county’s population. Wiltshire Cricket delivers coaching, organises leagues, runs programmes to increase cricket’s inclusivity, and administers the Wiltshire County Cricket Club.

Having recently recruited a number of non-executive directors (NEDs), Wiltshire Cricket wanted to increase its Board’s operational maturity and effectiveness. To support this journey, Wiltshire Cricket selected Hand & Millar for our extensive governance and assurance expertise.

Capabilities we delivered

Governance Enterprise risk management Stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement Facilitation Learning and development Collaboration principles derived from our ISO 44001 certification

The solution

Hand & Millar’s governance experts began by undertaking refresher research in board best practices, particularly for sporting bodies and charitable organisations. Interviews with key stakeholders including the Chairman and CEO enabled us to agree terms of reference, identify areas of strength and areas for development, as well as scope the review and define the method of assessment.

We followed up this initial scoping by designing and distributing a questionnaire to the wider board about topics including the effectiveness of:

Strategy and culture;
sub-working groups;
roles and responsibilities;
Risk and performance management; and
meeting content, facilitation, and records.

We also observed a number of board and sub-working group meetings to understand how these operated in regular practice.

We produced an interim report, consolidating all of our findings alongside a list of initial recommendations. Following this interim report, we carried out a skills audit to help further refine the definition of roles and responsibilities.

To ensure on-going support, we facilitated regular reflection sessions as the report’s recommendations were implemented, and re-assessed board members’ sentiment change from their initial questionnaire responses.

The benefits

Hand & Millar’s rapid deployment and delivery of review results meant that the Wiltshire Cricket board was able to put in place a number of improvements, including:

Stabilising the standing agenda of board and sub-working group meetings, ensuring consistency of scrutiny across the organisation’s operations;
Raising the quality of board papers and the timeliness of issuing them, supporting better, more informed decision-making;
Maturing risk practice, helping the board better to respond to early warnings and prioritise areas of risk;
Putting place a conflict of interest policy and register, improving transparency and accountability in decision-making.

Hand & Millar continues to work with Wiltshire Cricket on phase 2 of its board effectiveness journey.

Hand and Millar supported Wiltshire Cricket with the development of our strategy consultation process and also in producing a company vision statement. I was hugely impressed with how quickly Hand & Millar developed a full understanding of the nature of our business and what we were trying to achieve through our strategy process.

Pete SykesManaging Director