The board was strong on finance and thin on operations
The board of an infrastructure asset was appointing a new chair. Its directors had been put there largely by the financial sponsors that own the asset, so the table was heavy with financial expertise. That had fitted the earlier phase, when the capital structure was the question in front of the board. The asset had moved past that phase. What it now needed was somebody who had operated infrastructure of this kind and could challenge the executive team on delivery, not only on returns.
Finding that person is harder than it sounds. The obvious candidates are already known to the sponsors, which usually means they are already represented around the table. A non executive director sits inside the board, votes, and carries the responsibility for what it decides.
We searched against the gap, not the standard profile
We worked with the nomination committee to define the appointment around what the board was missing rather than around a standard chair profile. That definition set the search: operating record first, board visibility second. We then looked outside the sponsors’ networks on purpose, because inside them the same names come round again.
The people we approached were former infrastructure chief executives, former board chairs and former regulatory leads, chosen because each had run or overseen assets like this one rather than because they were already visible on boards. That produced candidates the sponsors had not considered, which is the point of running a search rather than holding a conversation among themselves. Candidates cleared our compliance framework before introduction, with sector conflicts checked carefully, since infrastructure boards are closely interconnected.
The new chair had run assets like this one
The asset appointed a chair with direct operating experience of comparable infrastructure, from outside the sponsors’ immediate network. The appointment changed the quality of the board conversation rather than simply filling a seat: challenge on delivery became specific, because somebody at the table had done the job being discussed.
The search also surfaced people better suited to future board appointments than to the chair itself, so the process produced a pipeline for the next seat as well as the appointment it was run for.
