Governance Adviser, Beyond Governance
In short: Your first board meeting will feel less familiar than the papers suggest. Expect the discussion to wander off the agenda, finance and audit terminology you have not met before, and a tight deadline for the minutes afterwards. Nobody expects you to follow everything.
Before I attended my first board meeting, I thought I was prepared.
I’d read the agenda.
I’d gone through the board papers.
I’d helped compile and circulate the pack ahead of the meeting, so I knew what items were being discussed, what decisions required approval and what papers were simply being noted.
I can still remember arriving early, finding my seat and watching people gradually take their places around the table.
On paper, I felt ready.
In reality, I wasn’t prepared at all.
I wasn’t unprepared because I hadn’t done the work.
I was unprepared because I had no idea what it actually felt like to sit in the room.
Like many people attending their first board meeting, I imagined a formal environment full of highly intelligent senior people discussing important matters at a strategic level.
In fairness, that part turned out to be true.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how out of my depth I would feel.
At the time, I was working in a company secretarial role.
I knew governance.
I understood board processes.
I could organise meetings, prepare papers, coordinate approvals and support the administration that sits behind a board meeting.
What I didn’t yet understand was the business itself.
My day-to-day role wasn’t focused on strategy, fundraising, transactions or financial performance. I wasn’t involved in discussions about where the organisation was heading or the decisions required to get it there.
Then I walked into my first board meeting.
Suddenly I was sitting across from the CEO, the CFO and senior leaders discussing finance, audit, investment and strategic priorities.
Despite all my preparation, I quickly realised there was a lot I didn’t understand.
I remember looking around the room and wondering how everyone else seemed to speak a language I hadn’t fully learned yet.
If I’m being completely honest, I felt like I didn’t belong there.
I’d interacted with senior leaders before. I’d emailed them, chased signatures and coordinated written resolutions.
That all felt familiar.
But sitting at the same table while high-level strategic discussions unfolded around me felt very different.
For the first time, I experienced genuine imposter syndrome.
Who was I to be sitting in this room?
What if someone asked me a question?
What if I missed something important?
What if everyone realised I didn’t understand half the terminology being used?
Of course, nobody was thinking any of those things except me.
But when you’re early in your career, it can be easy to assume everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing while you’re the only one trying to keep up.
One thing people don’t tell you about board meetings is that discussions don’t always follow the script.
The agenda might suggest one thing.
The actual discussion can take an entirely different route.
A director asks a question.
Someone raises a concern.
A conversation takes an unexpected turn.
Before long, the discussion has moved into territory you weren’t expecting.
I spent a good portion of that first meeting trying to keep up.
Whenever a term came up that I didn’t understand, I’d put a question mark in my notes and move on.
There were a lot of question marks.
Not because people weren’t speaking English, but because they were speaking the language of finance, audit and business strategy, and I simply hadn’t been exposed to enough of it yet.
The entire time I maintained what I hoped was a professional poker face.
Inside, my brain was doing something very different.
At times, keeping up felt like a full-time job in itself.
“What does that mean?”
“Can somebody please explain that acronym?”
“Wait… when did we move onto this topic?”
Even now, years later, there are still moments where I wish boardrooms came with a rewind button.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that nobody understands everything during their first board meeting.
Experience doesn’t arrive overnight.
It develops through exposure, repetition and curiosity.
What surprised me most was that the meeting wasn’t actually the hardest part.
The real challenge came afterwards.
I had three working days to produce the first draft of the minutes.
Suddenly all those notes, question marks and discussions needed to become an accurate and professional record of the meeting.
I knew the theory behind minute-writing.
I’d drafted routine minutes before.
But producing board minutes from my own notes after a complex meeting was an entirely different experience.
I quickly learned that good minutes aren’t about writing everything down.
They’re about understanding what matters. We’ve covered what board minutes need to contain, and how they get approved, separately.
One thing I was particularly grateful for was that I wasn’t doing it entirely alone.
The Deputy Company Secretary had attended the meeting alongside me and was also taking notes. Knowing there was another set of notes to compare against was incredibly reassuring. If I missed something, there was someone I could ask. If I didn’t understand a point, there was somebody who could help clarify it.
Not everybody gets that support during their first board meeting, and looking back, I was very fortunate that I did.
The review process also helped enormously.
After drafting the minutes, I was able to circulate them to meeting contributors and clarify anything that needed checking.
Those question marks I’d scattered throughout my notes suddenly became much less frightening.
I could verify terminology, confirm points and make sure the final document accurately reflected the discussion.
Looking back, the biggest thing I wish I’d known is this:
You don’t need to understand everything on day one.
You won’t know every acronym.
You won’t understand every financial term.
You won’t immediately follow every discussion.
And that’s okay.
As I attended more board meetings, I became familiar with the organisation, the people, the rhythm of discussions and the types of issues that regularly appeared on the agenda.
Over time, what once felt intimidating became familiar.
Today, I still attend board meetings, but I experience them very differently.
The confidence came gradually, one meeting at a time.
So if you’re about to attend your first board meeting and you’re feeling nervous, remember this:
The people around the table aren’t expecting you to know everything.
They’re expecting you to learn.
And that first meeting is where that learning begins.
Looking back, I didn’t leave my first board meeting feeling like I’d mastered it.
I left feeling like I had a lot to learn.
That turned out to be exactly what made it such an important experience.
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Tanya Asimiea is a Governance Adviser at Beyond Governance. She holds an LLB, an LLM in International Commercial Law and Dispute Resolution, and an LLM in Corporate Governance, and works with boards, committees and senior leaders across a range of sectors.
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Evon Chung is a Chartered Governance Fellow who has spent more than a decade bringing order to some of the most complex corporate structures in the world. As Manager of Global Corporate Services at Deel, she oversees the governance of around 350 entities across 125 jurisdictions, leading an international team of sixteen lawyers and governance professionals. Before Deel she held senior corporate secretarial roles at The Law Debenture Group and Eversheds Sutherland, running multi jurisdictional projects for FTSE 250 and Fortune 500 clients.
She has also sat on the other side of the exam paper. Some years ago, as a Subject Matter Expert for the Institute, she set and reviewed questions for the foundation level examination. She no longer does so, and her work with Campbell’s is purely as a tutor. The insight stays with her, and few tutors understand better what an examiner is looking for.
Evon came to governance by accident. An engineer by training, she joined a charity board of seventeen trustees, none of whom had a governance background, to help write the minutes. A few years later a law firm invited her into corporate secretarial work, and she never looked back. In a previous life she was a volunteer emergency ambulance technician, which taught her to stay calm under pressure, decide quickly on incomplete information, and know when to lead and when to hand over.
She teaches strategy as a form of storytelling. Her students arrive knowing the words and leave able to use them.
“Strategy is not about execution. It is about direction, intent, and asking the bigger questions.”
Steven Jones has spent his career making governance work where it matters most. As Deputy Director for Governance & Accountability at the Department of Health and Social Care, he leads the teams responsible for the governance of one of the UK’s largest government departments, supporting Ministers, the Departmental Board and senior leaders through periods of significant organisational change. His work spans corporate governance, board effectiveness, risk, accountability, public appointments and legal compliance, with responsibility for governance frameworks affecting millions of people.
Before joining DHSC, Steven led governance across some of government’s most complex programmes, including the UK’s border response during COVID-19, Brexit preparations at the Cabinet Office, and corporate governance for HM Revenue & Customs’ largest business group. Alongside his public service career, he founded Disability Connect Mentoring Scheme, advising organisations on disability inclusion and accessible leadership, and serves on Transport for London’s Independent Disability Advisory Group.
Steven teaches Company Law from the perspective of someone who uses it every day rather than someone who simply studies it. He believes the biggest misconception is that company law is about compliance alone. The rules matter, but the real question is why they exist, who they protect and what happens when the law reaches its limits. That is where judgement begins, and where governance professionals earn their value.
He describes governance simply: it is about who has power, how they are held to account, and what happens when they are not. Once students understand that, the legislation stops feeling like a collection of disconnected rules and starts making sense as part of a much bigger picture. His aim is for every student to leave not just knowing directors’ duties, but being able to explain them, apply them and use them confidently in practice.
Away from governance, Steven is a mentor, disability advocate and podcast host. He is also, somewhat unexpectedly, a partly qualified counsellor and the owner of a tortoise called Frank.
“People often think governance is just about board meetings. It is not. It is about who has power in an organisation, how they are held to account for using it, and what happens when they do not.”
Jamie Hunt is a barrister and a Fellow of the Chartered Governance Institute who has spent his career at the demanding edge of regulation, governance and risk. He is Director of Governance and Legal at the Royal Institute of British Architects, where he leads governance, legal, risk, data protection and procurement, advises the board, and serves as the organisation’s Designated Safeguarding Lead. He also advises Social Work England on complex fitness to practise matters. Before RIBA he was General Counsel at the Security Industry Authority and Head of Legal at the ACCA.
He earned his Chartered qualification through the Fast Track route and passed with distinction. He brings deep experience of risk to the module he teaches, having advised audit and risk committees and senior risk officers on operational, reputational and strategic risk across regulated organisations.
Jamie is also a natural teacher and examiner. He trains advocates for the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, lectures in advocacy at the University of Westminster, and serves as Lead Examiner for the Bar Standards Board professional ethics examination. He previously lectured in Corporate Governance and Boardroom Dynamics at Campbell’s College. Students gain an instructor who understands risk as a practitioner and knows exactly how to prepare a candidate for assessment.
John McLean is a chartered company secretary and a Fellow of the Chartered Governance Institute, currently Head of Governance and Company Secretary at Great Places Housing Group. He has built his career in complex regulated settings, advising chairs, boards and executives across corporate governance, risk, data protection, safeguarding and quality. Before housing he managed national programmes at NICE and led performance and compliance roles across local government.
He earned his Chartered qualification the recent and the hard way, completing the programme between 2023 and 2025 with distinctions in both Company Compliance and Administration and Boardroom Dynamics. He now tutors both at Campbell’s College.
John is a law graduate who fell for governance because, by his own admission, he is nosey. He likes to know how decisions really get made. He describes the work as less admin and more drama with a very good audit trail, full of personalities, politics with a small p, and the occasional plot twist. He teaches the human side of the boardroom as seriously as the rulebook, because he has watched perfectly compliant boards descend into chaos the moment nobody is willing to challenge anything.
There is one more thing. Out of university and in debt, John paid it down by winning more than fourteen thousand pounds across Weakest Link, Supermarket Sweep, Eggheads and The Chase. He has a gift for retaining information, much of it useless, all of it ready.
“If it is not written down properly, it did not happen. Or at least not in a way anyone can defend.”
Richard Poole is an accounting and finance specialist with more than twenty years spent teaching and marking the ICAEW, ACCA, ICAS and CIMA qualifications. As Managing Director of RJP Financial he lectures for providers worldwide, and he teaches financial reporting at Queen Mary University of London, where the PwC Flying Start programme he contributes to was named PQ Programme of the Year in 2025. He has helped write one of the most widely used taxation texts in higher education and built online courses now sold around the world.
He found financial accounting hard when he first learned it. That memory shapes how he teaches. He reassures students that there is no such thing as a silly question, and he uses plain explanations and real stories to make daunting ideas stick. He treats a set of accounts not as debits and credits, but as a story waiting to be understood.
His interest in governance came later, sharpened by hearing Erika Eliasson-Norris speak about her experience, which made him want to understand the field more deeply. Away from the classroom he is a lifelong sportsman who played semi professional football, and he draws his energy from team sport.
“Instead of seeing accounts as a series of debits and credits, think of them as a story waiting to be understood.”
Evon Chung is a Chartered Governance Fellow who has spent more than a decade bringing order to some of the most complex corporate structures in the world. As Manager of Global Corporate Services at Deel, she oversees the governance of around 350 entities across 125 jurisdictions, leading an international team of sixteen lawyers and governance professionals. Before Deel she held senior corporate secretarial roles at The Law Debenture Group and Eversheds Sutherland, running multi jurisdictional projects for FTSE 250 and Fortune 500 clients.
She has also sat on the other side of the exam paper. Some years ago, as a Subject Matter Expert for the Institute, she set and reviewed questions for the foundation level examination. She no longer does so, and her work with Campbell’s is purely as a tutor. The insight stays with her, and few tutors understand better what an examiner is looking for.
Evon came to governance by accident. An engineer by training, she joined a charity board of seventeen trustees, none of whom had a governance background, to help write the minutes. A few years later a law firm invited her into corporate secretarial work, and she never looked back. In a previous life she was a volunteer emergency ambulance technician, which taught her to stay calm under pressure, decide quickly on incomplete information, and know when to lead and when to hand over.
She teaches the Foundation Programme the way she would have wanted it taught to her — starting from first principles, building confidence early, and making sure no student feels out of their depth for long.
Marieclare Peter is a Chartered Governance Fellow who has built her career at the meeting point of governance, sustainability and financial services. She is Deputy Company Secretary of Monzo Europe, where she designs and runs governance frameworks for the board and its committees, and she advises senior leaders across banking on governance that keeps pace with a fast moving world. Her work spans board effectiveness reviews, transformation programmes and the thoughtful adoption of emerging technology, including AI.
She is twice a winner of the DMJ Governance Hot 100 as a Governance Trailblazer, and she won the ICSA Tom Morrison Essay Prize. Her MSc in Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, completed with distinction, included research into the experience of company secretaries, a role she believes is still widely misunderstood. She is also an examiner for the Institute in another subject, so she knows the standard from the other side of the exam paper as well as the front.
Marieclare arrived in governance by a well told accident. She learned early that she would not make a great lawyer, spotted a trainee company secretary role, and has stayed for nearly a decade. The film The Big Short sharpened her sense of why governance matters and how badly its absence can end.
Away from the boardroom she runs on curiosity. She once ran a cake business, plays piano and sings, is learning Spanish, cooks in a kitchen for people who are homeless, and is devoted to her two cats.
“Anything that is governed requires governance. And governance directly correlates to outcomes.”
