Committee Rotation
Photo by Justin Kern

Director “refreshment” has become a very hot topic in the governance community.  Investors increasingly are calling for replacing longer-serving board members with newer directors, possibly in order to achieve greater board diversity, possibly to get some fresh blood (or fresh thinking) on the board, or possibly to achieve other goals.  There is also increased talk about the use (and appropriateness) of age limits, term limits and other processes to assure regular board turnover.  For example, Institutional Shareholder Services has suggested that a director serving more than nine years may no longer qualify as independent.  As part of this discussion, questions have also been raised about the need for “committee refreshment” – rotating directors off and on committees to keep them fresh and receptive to new ideas.

Governance practitioners have been grappling with the issue of board and committee refreshment for many years, even though the objective may not have been called “refreshment” until recently.  For example, corporate secretaries and others have scratched their heads as to how to enforce age limits, how to decide when those limits should be waived or raised, how to grapple with the political and personal issues that can arise when the age limit is waived for one director but not for another, and whether term limits would be preferable to age limits.  Recent discussions have also generated pushback from companies and their directors that age and/or long tenure may generate greater, rather than less, independence; after all, a director with 15 or more years of service who has overseen two or more CEOs may feel far less dependent upon the current CEO than a director who has joined the board only recently.

These and other concerns are challenging enough at the board level, but they can be far more challenging at the committee level.  In an era when much of the substantive, detailed work of the board is handled by committees, and committee service increasingly calls for subject matter expertise, refreshing a committee is not as simple as putting Mr. or Ms. X on the committee when Mr. or Ms. Y retires.  The qualifications and abilities – and, in some cases, expertise – of the replacement need to be considered before he or she can be used to fill the vacancy or simply “rotated on” a new committee.


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