I enjoy solving difficult tasks in unfamiliar territory!
Matthias Weber is Chief Financial Officer of Hexal AG, based in Holzkirchen, Bavaria. He also holds four Supervisory Board mandates within the Group, two of them as Chairman and one external mandate as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the listed company Softing AG in Haar near Munich. The internal mandates are two-tier co-determined supervisory boards in Germany, Slovenia and Austria as well as a joint venture based on the Anglo-Saxon one-tier model in Ireland. Weber began his professional career with an apprenticeship as a banker at Landesbank Stuttgart and subsequently studied business administration at Saarland University (Dipl.-Kfm.) and Henley Business School in London (MBA). After gaining initial experience in venture capital, he moved to Novartis in Basel, where his career then took him to several foreign posts as Chief Financial Officer in France, the UK and Eastern Europe.
Matthias Weber’s growing interest in questions of strategy and leadership increasingly steered him away from financial issues and working with figures and towards new strategic tasks and interacting with people. “I am increasingly growing out of traditional financial tasks such as accounting and controlling, and at Hexal AG I take care of governance and representing our company in front of decision-makers from politics, for example. I simply enjoy dealing with new topics and interest groups enormously,” Weber tells us.
For Weber, working as a member of the Supervisory Board is exactly the right platform for new tasks and challenges. The fact that external Supervisory Board work is much more time-consuming, as he himself tells us, does not stop him from wanting another mandate. Weber thus provides the best proof that you grow with your tasks. In order to equip himself for his Supervisory Board duties, he immediately completed the “Financial Expert” certification and skipped the “Qualified Supervisory Board” certification. After 20 years as CFO, this is legitimate and has also been approved by Deutsche Börse.
1. what was your motivation to become certified as a qualified Supervisory Board member? And how did you come to work on the Supervisory Board in the first place?
I am primarily interested in Supervisory Board work for one reason: I am forced to familiarise myself with completely new structures on this board. As a member of the Supervisory Board, I am supposed to supervise, but I can’t tell the managing director what to do – at least not in the usual way of a superior. Nor can I deal with an employee representative on the supervisory board using the traditional tools of a manager. Instead, I need to understand their motivation, their concerns and then find the best possible consensus with them. Good supervisory board work, especially as chairman, therefore requires not only professional expertise but also a great deal of skill in dealing with people and good intuition.
I decided in favour of the certification for two reasons: Firstly, my studies were quite a few years ago now, and there has been a corresponding amount of change in the regulations. Something like the German Corporate Governance Code, for example, was unthinkable at the time of my studies. Gabriele Bornemann’s training programme enabled me to brush up on all these topics quickly and effectively. On the other hand, certification is viewed very favourably when awarding supervisory board mandates, and Deutsche Börse’s certificates have an excellent reputation. Of the possible course providers, Gabriele Bornemann from Management Alliance convinced me from the very first contact due to her individuality and flexibility in organising courses.
2. what do you think are currently the biggest challenges in the work of the Supervisory Board?
One of the biggest challenges in the work of supervisory boards in Germany is to reduce the information gap between the management board and the supervisory board. This is because in the German two-tier model, the supervisory board – with the exception of the audit committee – has no opportunity to request information directly from the company. Good co-operation with the auditor can be helpful here, as the auditor is coming under increasing pressure in the “post-wirecard world” to carry out detailed audits and obtain a realistic picture. Particularly in the case of external mandates, a supervisory board must first build up its knowledge of the company and the market step by step. This is a long process and takes time! In the Anglo-Saxon world, the solution is different. Here, the executive board and management work closely with the supervisory board in joint board meetings. However, the control function performed by a German supervisory board is much better guaranteed.
In addition, the many and tight regulations and the limited number of meetings mean that there is little room for manoeuvre for value-enhancing measures. It is important to be patient, as experience is also built up here, which in turn makes it possible to free up time for questions and impulses “outside of day-to-day business” – for the big issues of the future. This is also an argument in favour of supervisory boards being active for longer than one term if possible.
3. what is your personal tip for successful networking in the supervisory board community?
Obtaining a mandate – and this applies to both external and internal mandates – can be exhausting and time-consuming. And: for mandates, the existing contacts with headhunters or industry colleagues that you have built up over the course of your career are usually of little use. You need to make new contacts and take a very targeted, strategic approach. Realise who actually brings names into play in the end. These are the owners, but also existing supervisory board members.
4 What do you want to achieve and change as a supervisory board member?
Only when I have done my duty and ensured that the company and its bodies work and perform in accordance with compliance rules can I move on to the freestyle. And for me, that means making a sustainable contribution to increasing the value of the company. To this end, I consciously try to create space in the limited (meeting) time available to make this contribution through nominations and as a sparring partner on strategic issues. My training as a business coach, where I learnt to effect change through targeted questions and follow-up, certainly helps me here.
I look forward to further discussions and suggestions on how a supervisory board can contribute to increasing value.