2 days • Face to face learning
Chairing the Board
Gain the specialist skills needed to succeed as chair. Explore best practice, robust policy, composition, balance, and culture.
Richard Westlake
MA (Oxon), CFInstD, MAICD
Richard is a Chartered Fellow of the IoD, a Member of the AICD, and Managing Director of Westlake Governance Limited.
Richard has 30 years’ experience as a director and board chair and has been a facilitator for the IoD for more than 20 years. Based north of Wellington, he currently chairs the boards Crown Research Institute Scion (New Zealand Forest Research Institute Ltd), New Zealand Home Loans Limited and Hospice New Zealand. He is also President of the Kāpiti Districts Aero Club, echoing his first career as a fast-jet pilot in the Royal Air Force in the UK.
He has chaired a wide variety of organisations, including Careerforce Industry Training Organisation, Intergen Limited (now CapGemini), the New Zealand Telecommunications Forum, Standards New Zealand and Canterbury Opera, and he was the establishment chair for two state-owned enterprises, MetService and Quotable Value.
Among Richard’s previous board roles, he was a founding independent director of Kiwibank Limited, the first independent director of the Dairy Goat Co-operative (NZ) Limited and, until 2020, the only non-Asian director of one of the largest publicly-listed banks in the Philippines, RCBC, where he was appointed by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Richard carries out governance advisory assignments, board reviews and training throughout New Zealand, South-East Asia and Australia, and provides expert witness evidence on corporate governance practice in complex and sometimes high profile proceedings. He developed and owns the FICKS® Governance Framework and he is the author of the IFC publication Guidance for the Directors of Banks (2013) and of possibly the only blog written specifically for Board Chairs, at www.chairingtheboard.com.
