Robert founded Mainwaring Search in 2002 after fifteen years in board practice at two global search companies. The company works exclusively at board level: chairs, non-executive directors and committee chairs for listed companies, private businesses of scale and the occasional national institution.
Six people in London, deliberately. Robert holds the Board & NED chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
The first ninety days tell you, and almost nobody uses them properly. The ones who succeed spend that time listening and the ones who don’t spend it announcing.
You can predict a great deal from what they did in week three. I have started asking referees precisely that question, and the answers are wonderfully revealing.
At board level the work was never finding names. Everyone knows the names; there are only so many people who have chaired an audit committee through a restatement.
What the machines have done is make the research instant, which strips the mystique off my profession and quite right too. What is left is the part that was always the job: judgement, discretion, and telling a chairman something he does not want to hear.
Presence. Boards fall for it repeatedly. The director who commands the room in the interview commands the room in every meeting thereafter, whether or not they have read the papers.
The most valuable director I know says one thing per meeting, and it is always the thing.
At board level the honest word for it is collegiality, and it is both real and dangerous. A board must be able to work together; a board that enjoys working together too much stops asking each other difficult questions.
I have learned to worry when a nominations committee tells me everyone got on tremendously.
Directors who understand technology as owners rather than tourists. Every board now has one presentation a year on AI; the boards that matter have someone who can ask the second question.
Chairs run the succession of every role except their own. The average board can tell you who the next chief executive is and goes silent when you ask who the next chair is. It is the last taboo in governance, and it is where I make half my living.
The non-executive market is rational to a fault: it prices reputation, and reputation lags reality by about five years. People are appointed for what they were and removed for what they are.
When what the board needs is a conversation, not a candidate. A surprising number of searches are really a disagreement between the chair and the chief executive wearing a job specification as a disguise. The useful service is saying so.
The non-executive numbers transformed, genuinely. The FTSE boardroom of 2006 and the one of 2026 are different rooms, and search played its part late but played it.
The executive pipeline is the unfinished half, and boards know it. The grid filled in; the corner office is taking longer.
Sixty-forty the company, though at board level the ratios shift: a non-executive’s success is perhaps eighty per cent the board they join. The same director is wise on a good board and wallpaper on a bad one.
A chair for a family business in crisis: retired, written off, twelve years out of an executive seat. Every adviser in the room wanted a name from the current lists.
He had seen the exact crisis twice before. The business is still in the family, which was the entire brief.
“What should a board be embarrassed about?”
How little time it spends on the only two decisions that are unambiguously its own: who runs the company, and who sits at the table. Everything else is oversight. Those two are the job.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.