Ctrl + Alt + Govern

Governance audits often emphasise the role of leadership within effective governance. Understandably so, leaders provide the highest level of authority, with ultimate responsibility and ensuring strategic direction and oversight. However, I think we are missing an equally important contributor to effective governance – the role of the administrator.

While I was completing my dissertation, I found that the administration for each of the boards I reviewed was markedly different. Not only in terms of record keeping, but also in terms of minutes, agendas, and action logs which all appeared in different formats and with varying levels of detail. Some of the minutes provided listed no job titles or organisations for attendees, some minutes were written almost verbatim, and some were looser notes. Given that these were from a single organisation, I was surprised at the range of quality in the documents provided.

Administering governance and meetings is not new to me. Professionally, I have been involved board administration and transcription for a decade, previously within the NHS, then the Police, and now within HMPPS. My mum studied at a polytechnic college to become a secretary and this administrative prowess ebbed down to me, in part due to the typing “games” (formal training exercises) she used to make undertake as a child, so it was no surprise that was where I ended up. Despite administration being a traditional skill and long-standing expertise, finding consistent standards for administering boards is challenging (with the exception of templates for strategic documents such as terms of reference, delivery and action plans, etc – those can be found are in abundance).

During my dissertation, I tried to understand why there was such variety in the quality of minutes and administrative support provided and discovered that administrative and office support is consistently in the “top ten most difficult skills” to recruit to, and the second most difficult to find in 2024, according to the Manpower Group¹. They suggested that the reason for this decline is due to the role reshaping in response to “technological proficiencies”¹, however I think it a bit more complicated than that.

As mentioned, my mum studied secretarial skills in formal structured higher education. At school, as a girl, she was steered towards these classes reflecting the entrenched gender norms that linked women to clerical and secretarial work. With the rise of personal computers, secretarial courses became replaced with business administration courses, where skills being taught changed from organisational and administrative to more technical, such as use of tools such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint. No longer are there any formal routes which provide traditional secretarial skills.

In addition to a lack of formal routes, administrative roles are often treated as peripheral within organisations, with the invisibility of these roles meaning their impact is rarely measured or understood. The assumption that technology can replace skilled administrators compounds the problem, something which will only grow as we see an increase in the use of tools such as co-pilot meeting transcription. Good administration requires judgement, discretion, contextual understanding and nuance. These are qualities which cannot be automated.  

When it comes to governance, administration is the glue the holds everything together. It’s fine to have an excellent chair and attendees who show up and contribute, but if administration is poor decisions get lost, actions stall, and accountability erodes. An organisation’s governance is only as strong as the systems that support it, and those systems depend on skilled administrators who bring structure, clarity, and continuity to complex processes, ensuring that everything sticks.

¹ Brook Street (2025) The 2025 talent shortage: Where are the admin and clerical skills? Available at: https://tinyurl.com/42jxfypm