About Talk the Talk Sport
Talk the Talk Sport offers a range of services in governance and governance training. It also provides sport specific mediation and dispute resolution services.
Many sports bodies, whether national, state or at club level are, rightly, focussed on meeting the daily, weekly and yearly requirements of their members and their stakeholders. Membership management, organising competitions, dealing with staff and volunteers, training coaches plus myriad other duties, responsibilities and obligations. On top of these more day to day functions boards and committees of sports organisation are also required to deal with strategy and the survival of the organisation into the future, securing funding and of course managing relationships with a wide variety of partners.
Sports organisations which do all of the above also need to confront the all-too-hard elephant in the room. The elephant is a scary one because the word governance itself brings up all sorts of thoughts about constitutions, incomprehensible documents, legalese, lawyers, I-won’t-understand-a-thing and it’s just too difficult to even have to think about because I’ve got enough on my plate. Plus it’s going to cost – a lot. All these “fears” conspire to put dealing with the essential documents and essential procedures for board meetings and beyond into the too hard basket.
But it is good governance which underpins every successful organisation from the smallest local club (where the focus is on competition) to the largest professional sport and covers a range of considerations including the constitution, the policies which cover everything from doping, to IP, to selections, to eligibility, to integrity and beyond. Just as important is how the members of the board in particular behave vis a vis their obligations as committee members or directors vis a vis each other and the organisation as a whole.
The Governance Institute defines governance in this manner: Governance encompasses the system by which an organisation is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it, and its people, are held to account. Ethics, risk management, compliance and administration are all elements of governance.
The OECD defines corporate governance thus: Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.
The governance training will be hands on, face to face and interactive, in plain English with no legalese in sight. It will not be about being talked at: it will be a conversation about what works and what doesn’t, about who should do what and why and how to make the organisation function to its maximum capacity. The topics covered include the items in the list below plus much more.
- The role of the chairman and of the board
- Setting an effective agenda and the nature and structure of the reports
- Conflicts of interest
- Having minutes which capture the meeting without being a verbatim transcript
- Behaviour and manners at meetings
- Role of the CEO and staff
- Preparing or reviewing the constitution and underpinning policies
- Customer experience
- Groupthink
- How to be confident about your own voice as one amongst many
- Problem solving and questioning
- Strategic planning principles
- Board committees or Subcommittees and their role and purpose
- Identifying and managing risk
- Recruiting new board members
- Creating an induction process
- Assessing board performance
- Leadership
- Managing stakeholder and other relationships
As but some examples
Talk the Talk Sport also provides a constitution and document review service meeting legislative and just as importantly the practical requirements of the organisation.