The City Values Forum
In the mid-2000s a number of corporate scandals took place in the City of London that were widely considered to reflect the lack of an appropriate culture to underpin decision making by Company Boards. At that time, corporate culture was rarely a major issue for Boards of Directors, who assumed that the Executive Team was managing a strategically aligned culture.
In order to address this deficiency, the City Values Forum was initiated by WCoMC in 2012 with the support and encouragement of the Financial Reporting Council. Its remit was to develop a new guide for Boards on Governing Culture.
A guide to Board leadership on purpose, values and culture
The guide was launched at a Mansion House conference in September 2016, along with papers from the Institute of Business Ethics, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and the FRC itself as part of an initiative to ensure that Boards and Executives recognize their accountability for the culture of their organisations.
Sir Win Bischoff chaired the conference and wrote the foreword to the Guide. It is a practical resource with questions for the Board to ask itself, a roadmap providing Boards with an assessment of their maturity and a series of case studies and quotes around what we termed our Six Pillars of Culture Governance: INSPIRING purpose and values, ALIGNING purpose, values, strategy and capability, PROMOTING AND EMBODYING purpose and values; GUIDING decisions using purpose and values, ENCOURAGING desired behaviours, and ASSURING progress is being achieved. Although the Guide was commissioned by the FRC, it has been written to apply to organisations in all industry sectors.
Authored by: Past Master Patrick McHugh and Past Liveryman Richard Finn.