Research on board composition, board evaluation comparison and more

This report aims to show how the boards of the Danish C25 companies are composed and illustrate key changes over time. This is an important topic since having a diverse professional board encourages and solicits various perspectives in the decision-making process, hence contributing to safeguarding the company's future.

In support of the company’s purpose and long-term value creation, one of the relatively new Danish recommendations on corporate governance* is guideline 2.1.1.

Once again, Leadership Advisor Group has analyzed how well the Danish C25 companies are meeting the Corporate Governance Recommendations for conducting and reporting their board evaluations.

This year, 18 out of the 24 C25 companies (75%) have a published diversity policy with specific targets for the board, executive management and senior leadership level. This is more than triple the figure for last year, so it’s great progress!

To be among those with top class boards of directors, companies should continue to improve how they evaluate their boards and how they report the findings.

Research shows that having a diverse professional board of directors encourages a variety of perspectives in the decision-making process and therefore contributes to safeguarding the future of the company.

The Norwegian Code of Practice for Corporate Governance states in Section 8 that the composition of the board of directors should ensure that the board can attend to the common interests of all shareholders and meets the company’s need for expertise, capacity and diversity. Attention should be paid to ensuring that the board can function effectively as a collegiate body.

The Danish Committee on Corporate Governance (CCG) states that the composition of the board of directors must enable it to manage duties relating to strategy, management and supervision/control, and that “diversity increases the quality of the work and the interaction on the board of directors and ensures diverse approaches to solving the tasks of the board of directors”.

It is clearly stated in the new Danish Corporate Governance Guidelines section 2.1.1 that by end of 2021, the boards of all publicly listed companies should demonstrate that they have considered the company purpose and ensured and promoted a good culture and sound values in the company.

Our aim with this report is to generate, for the first time in history, an overview of how well the Danish C25 companies are complying with the recommendations to publish a diversity policy as well as to publish and achieve gender targets for the board and executive management.

This report presents topline summary of our analysis of the current (August 2020) board compositions of the 24 companies on the C25 index in Denmark. (The C25 refers to the 24 most traded companies in Denmark). This report covers the nationality of the board members (Danish / non Danish).

This report presents topline summary of our analysis of the current (August 2020) board compositions of the 24 companies on the C25 index in Denmark. (The C25 refers to the 24 most traded companies in Denmark). This report covers the types of experience of the board members.

We analyzed the boards of directors of the 25 most traded Norwegian companies to understand changes in composition, 2019 to 2020

We compared composition of the boards of directors of the 25 most traded Norwegian companies vs the 24 most traded Danish companies as of June 2020

To be among the companies with top class boards of directors, Danish companies should be evaluating their boards annually and with a high quality process.