There is an old wisdom in this country, told in different forms across our various languages, that I want to bring into the boardroom today.You can teach a turkey to climb a tree, but it is faster, cheaper, and far more reliable to hire a squirrel.I have used this saying many times in my work over the years, in different contexts, and it has never lost its force. The point of it is simple. Some qualities can be taught, and some cannot. When you are putting together a serious enterprise, your job as the one doing the hiring is to know the difference. You select for what cannot be taught. You train for what can. Reverse this and you have a turkey in the tree. You can spend years patiently coaxing it upward. The tree will be no more climbed at the end of the exercise than it was at the start.This is the practical wisdom that should govern every public sector board appointment in Nigeria, and almost the only one that currently does not. We are, as a country, in the habit of selecting board members for what can be taught and then, often, not bothering to teach them. We then wonder why our boards underperform. The wonder is misplaced. The boards perform exactly as the selection logic would predict.Today I want to make the case for what we should be selecting for that cannot be taught, and to put forward five qualities that, in my view, are nonnegotiable in any serious public sector director. They are not technical qualities. They are not academic qualities. They are not on most curricula vitae. They are qualities of disposition, of character, and of bearing, and they are the qualities that, in the boardroom, separate the directors who actually do the work from those who merely occupy the seat.What can be taught and what cannotLet me draw the distinction precisely, because it is the heart of the argument.The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. I have used this saying many times in my work over the years, in different contexts, and it has never lost its force. The point of it is simple. Some qualities can be taught, and some cannot. When you are putting together a serious enterprise, your job as the one doing the hiring is to know the difference. You select for what cannot be taught. You train for what can. Reverse this and you have a turkey in the tree. You can spend years patiently coaxing it upward. The tree will be no more climbed at the end of the exercise than it was at the start.This is the practical wisdom that should govern every public sector board appointment in Nigeria, and almost the only one that currently does not. We are, as a country, in the habit of selecting board members for what can be taught and then, often, not bothering to teach them. We then wonder why our boards underperform. The wonder is misplaced. The boards perform exactly as the selection logic would predict.Today I want to make the case for what we should be selecting for that cannot be taught, and to put forward five qualities that, in my view, are nonnegotiable in any serious public sector director. They are not technical qualities. They are not academic qualities. They are not on most curricula vitae. They are qualities of disposition, of character, and of bearing, and they are the qualities that, in the boardroom, separate the directors who actually do the work from those who merely occupy the seat.What can be taught and what cannotLet me draw the distinction precisely, because it is the heart of the argument.The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. This is the practical wisdom that should govern every public sector board appointment in Nigeria, and almost the only one that currently does not. We are, as a country, in the habit of selecting board members for what can be taught and then, often, not bothering to teach them. We then wonder why our boards underperform. The wonder is misplaced. The boards perform exactly as the selection logic would predict.Today I want to make the case for what we should be selecting for that cannot be taught, and to put forward five qualities that, in my view, are nonnegotiable in any serious public sector director. They are not technical qualities. They are not academic qualities. They are not on most curricula vitae. They are qualities of disposition, of character, and of bearing, and they are the qualities that, in the boardroom, separate the directors who actually do the work from those who merely occupy the seat.What can be taught and what cannotLet me draw the distinction precisely, because it is the heart of the argument.The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Today I want to make the case for what we should be selecting for that cannot be taught, and to put forward five qualities that, in my view, are nonnegotiable in any serious public sector director. They are not technical qualities. They are not academic qualities. They are not on most curricula vitae. They are qualities of disposition, of character, and of bearing, and they are the qualities that, in the boardroom, separate the directors who actually do the work from those who merely occupy the seat.What can be taught and what cannotLet me draw the distinction precisely, because it is the heart of the argument.The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Let me draw the distinction precisely, because it is the heart of the argument.The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. The things that can be taught include: the technical content of the sector the institution operates in; the financial literacy required to read a set of accounts; the procedural conventions of board meetings; the legal framework governing the institution; the structure of the regulatory landscape; the major risk categories the board needs to consider; the language of strategic planning; the conventions of committee work. Most of this can be acquired, by any reasonably intelligent person, within twelve to eighteen months of serious application. Some of it can be acquired faster than that.What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. What cannot be taught, in any timeframe that matters for a four-year board appointment, is the disposition with which a director shows up to the work. The instinct for independence. The willingness to ask the difficult question. The refusal to settle for the comfortable answer. The patience to sit with complexity rather than collapse it into the nearest convenient resolution. The courage to disagree publicly, in the room, when disagreement is required. The stamina to keep doing all of this across years, against social pressure, against political pressure, and against the considerable comfort of going along.These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. These dispositional qualities are formed by long experience, by character, by accumulated decisions made in many smaller contexts before the boardroom. They cannot be installed in a director after appointment. Either they are there on day one, or they are not. If they are not there, training will not put them there.The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. The most expensive induction programme in the world will not produce independence of mind in a director who does not bring it through the door.This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. This is why the selection moment is the only moment that matters. By the time the appointment is made, the dispositional questions are settled. You either have what you needed, or you do not, and you have it for the duration of the term.The five qualities you cannot teachI want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. I want to name the five qualities I believe matter most. These are the qualities I would test for, rigorously, before any public sector board appointment in Nigeria. If a candidate does not have them, the candidate should not be appointed, regardless of how impressive the curriculum vitae looks.Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Quality one, Independence of mind.This is the foundational quality. A director who cannot form a view independently of those around them, who cannot resist the gravitational pull of consensus, who cannot disagree with the Chair or the Chief Executive when disagreement is warranted, is not a director in any meaningful sense. They are an attendance.How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. How do you test for it? You look at the candidate’s track record. In their past institutional roles, did they take positions that cost them? Did they push back against superiors, against majority opinion, against received wisdom, in contexts where it would have been easier not to? Have they ever resigned from a position on a matter of principle? Have they ever lost a friendship over a professional disagreement? These are not perfect signals, but they are signals. A candidate whose entire career trajectory is one of accommodation is a candidate who will accommodate in your boardroom too.Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Quality two, Curiosity.A good director is, before anything else, curious. They want to understand how the institution actually works. They want to know what the operations look like, what the staff are dealing with, what the regulator is signalling, what the user of the institution’s services experiences. They are not satisfied with the management summary. They want to see the underlying material.You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. You can identify curiosity in a candidate by asking them, in conversation, about an institution they have served. The candidate without curiosity will give you the official narrative. The candidate with curiosity will tell you, at length, about the things that surprised them, the contradictions they noticed, the questions that were never satisfactorily answered. Curiosity is one of those qualities that is unmissable when it is present and unmistakable when it is absent.Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Quality three, Courage.Courage in the boardroom is not heroic. It is quiet. It is the willingness to say the difficult thing in a room where the social cost of saying it is real. It is the willingness to put on the record a view that is unpopular with the Chair, with the Chief Executive, with one’s fellow directors, or with the political authority that made the appointment.Related NewsEx-CDS backs Tinubu’s expansion of Army to 12 divisionsVIDEO: Nollywood actress Chidera Adiele cries out for help over brother’s mental health struggleAkwa Ibom gov signs 14 bills into lawCourage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Courage is hard to test for in advance, but it is not impossible to read. Candidates who have shown courage in their professional lives tend to have a particular bearing. They speak directly. They do not soften every assertion into a question. They have, in their history, taken positions that were not safe at the time they took them. Atedo Peterside, in his public commentary over many years, has demonstrated this kind of disposition. So has Fola Adeola in the institutions he has built and the standards he has insisted on. So have many others whose names the country would recognise. These are the dispositions you are looking for.Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Quality four, Public-interest instinct.Public sector board service is not private board service. The institution being governed belongs to the country. The decisions made in the boardroom have consequences for citizens who are not in the room and who will never know the names of those who made the decisions. A director who does not feel this weight, who does not understand that public sector service is a stewardship of public assets rather than a private opportunity, is unfit for the role.You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. You can read this instinct in how a candidate talks about previous public roles or public engagements. The candidate with the instinct talks about the work, the outcomes for citizens, what was attempted and what was achieved. The candidate without the instinct talks about themselves, the access they had, the contacts they made, the prestige they accumulated. The difference is unmistakable to anyone listening for it.Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Dora Akunyili, in her tenure at NAFDAC, exemplified this instinct in the most visible way. Her work was not about her. It was about the citizens whose lives were being shortened by counterfeit pharmaceuticals. She acted accordingly. The instinct was hers before the appointment. The appointment did not create it. It only allowed it to be expressed at scale.Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Quality five. Stamina for disagreement.Board service, done seriously, involves repeated disagreement over many years. A director who can disagree once but cannot sustain disagreement across multiple meetings, across the long arc of a difficult issue, across the social fatigue of being the one who keeps raising the same uncomfortable point, will eventually subside into the consensus.Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Stamina for disagreement is largely a function of character, but it is also a function of self respect. Directors who derive their sense of worth from their board appointment will eventually trade their independence for the continuation of their position. Directors who do not need the board appointment for their sense of worth, who came to it with an established life and an established reputation and could leave it tomorrow without loss, are the directors most likely to maintain disagreement when it is required. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for selecting senior, accomplished, secure individuals for public sector boards. They have less to lose by being honest, and so they are more likely to be honest.How we should be selectingIf these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. If these five qualities are what we should be selecting for, the practical implication is straightforward. The current selection process in our public sector tests for none of them. It tests, mostly, for availability, political alignment, sectoral representation, and surface impressiveness. None of these have any reliable correlation with the five qualities above. Some of them are negatively correlated.What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. What would a selection process look like that tested for these five qualities? It would involve serious reference work. Conversations with people who have observed the candidate across years. Examination of the candidate’s professional history for evidence of independence, courage, and public-interest instinct in action. Direct conversation with the candidate about specific past decisions, what they cost, and what they produced. It would be slower than the current process. It would be more rigorous. It would, in some cases, conclude that no candidate currently in consideration meets the bar, and that the search must continue. This is a feature, not a flaw.A serious selection process is willing to defer rather than to settle.The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. The objection that the country does not have time for this kind of rigour is not a serious objection. The cost of poor board appointments, compounded over decades, vastly exceeds the cost of slower, better appointments. The institutions we are governing are decades old and are intended to last decades more. Taking three additional months to select the right director for a four-year term is not a luxury. It is a basic obligation to the institution and the country.The work aheadI have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. I have argued previously that selection is the most consequential thing the country can change about its public sector boards. Today I have argued that the qualities to select for are the qualities that cannot be taught. In the next column I will name the competencies we cannot compromise on, which is a different argument, addressing what can be taught but must already be present.For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. For now, I want to leave the reader with the practical wisdom that opened this piece. You can spend years training the wrong director. You can invest in induction, in development, in mentoring, in coaching. You can produce a director who, at the end of it all, still does not have what the role requires, because what the role requires was never there to begin with.Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Or you can select the right director on day one. Someone with the independence, the curiosity, the courage, the instinct, and the stamina that the public sector boardroom demands. The competencies you can build. The disposition you cannot.Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Hire the squirrel. It is time to build.Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected]. Dr Bolaji Olagunju is the Founder and Group Chairman of Workforce Group, a human capacity and organisational performance firm founded in 2004 and operating across Nigeria and Africa. He is also the Founder of Philantify and the convener of Leadership That Works, a platform devoted to the question of what really works in leadership. His books include Hiring Right: A Matter of Life and Death for Businesses and Business Owners; The Seven Disciplines of Breakthrough Results, a public sector leadership playbook for DGs, CEOs, Permanent Secretaries, Directors and Senior Leadership Teams; and Blueprint for Capacity Development Excellence, a strategic framework for strengthening the institutions and professionals at the heart of Africa’s human capital. He writes here in a personal capacity.This series is intended to provoke serious reflection on leadership, governance, and institution building. He welcomes thoughtful engagements on the subject from all institutional leaders committed to building institutions that work. He can be reached via[email protected].