The 4 Pillars Of Good Corporate Governance

By Author: Akansh
Total Articles: 67
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Every business, whether small or big, is focusing on corporate governance management. Business owners have realized that an effective corporate governance strategyhas a huge role to play in enhancing profitability. Most businesses have undertaken designing systems, policies and procedures to create a line of authority and responsibility, so as to provide transparency to stakeholders at all levels. Essentially, corporate governance strives to balance bottom line and sustainability.

The cornerstones of good corporate governance are:

External Stakeholders - External stakeholders means all those people related to your business but are beyond the internal workings of your business. External stakeholders include suppliers, customers, vendors and the community at large. An essential element of corporate governance managementis recognizing your external stakeholders and strategically managing your relationships with them. External stakeholders are the ones who will judge your products or services based on quality and pricing and create word-of-mouth publicity. They key to growing your business is to keep your external ...
... stakeholders happy.

Internal Stakeholders - Internal stakeholders refers to all the individuals who are within the business and a part of its day-to-day machinery. Internal stakeholders include shareholders, employees, Board of Directors and management. In the long term, these are the people who will define the growth and success of your business and hence it is important to build and maintain strategic relationships with internal stakeholders. The key is to always keep your internal stakeholders informed and motivated. This would make them want to contribute their best to the business and work towards keeping the external stakeholders’ interests.

Accountability - Once you have clearly defined your external and internal stakeholders, the next step would be to chalk-out accountability plans for each of these groups. Accountability is not limited to financial matters but extends to following the law, disclosing results of business matters to key stakeholders and keeping business practices transparent and ethical.Accountability is all about managing obligations of individual stakeholders and the business.

Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR)-CSR means taking responsibility for the impact of your business on the environment, society and community. CSR is also called a corporate conscience as it serves as a self-check for the business’ social performance. Essentially, a socially responsible business incorporates legal conduct with ethical standards while identifying its place in the community at large. Some examples of CSR initiatives could be sponsoring a school team, donating to a charitable cause, investing in a non-profit organization. Small businesses can actually benefit by adopting good CSR practices as it would help increase their visibility in the community. CSR is the fastest growing area of corporate governance management.

Corporate governance is the system of rules practices, and policies by which a company is directed and controlled. In today’s volatile business environment, conducting a sustainable business needs a management that creates a corporate governance strategythat can effectively mitigaterisk. A good corporate governance strategywould focus on shareholders’ rights and equitable treatment, timely communication and collaboration with stakeholders and transparency in any disclosures - financial, operational, sustainability.

Author Bio-Akansh Malik writes this article, giving you a detailed understanding of corporate governance strategy and its importance. He advises companies to have a strategy in place for good corporate governance so that it results in sustainable growth.