Powerful insight, driven by experience
Our team comprises experienced and competent former CEOs, executives and founders from a wide range of company sizes and sectors, with strong board chair and non-executive director experience.
Great results, backed by our commitment
We’ll empower you to achieve a step-change in your performance and the value you add to your organisation, and we’ll support you through execution to ensure realisation of that value.
Some of our Clients
What Our Clients Say
“Global Shares engaged the services of Board Excellence to provide external evaluation and strategic consultancy to our Board and Executive team. Kieran’s collaborative style and easy manner proved key to positive engagement with all board members, which in turn enabled a thorough review of the board structure, its governance and effectiveness. The recommendations and findings presented to us by Kieran, were clear and structured. We would highly recommend Kieran and Board Excellence to any Board that wishes to improve their board performance, composition, and corporate governance.”
“Board Excellence, through Jonathan Westrup, completed a thoroughly professional Board evaluation of the Board of Management of Oberstown Children Detention Campus. In addition to identifying good practice and areas of improvement for the Board, the evaluation also provided some entirely fresh perspectives on our approach, linking recommendations to the organisation’s strategic direction in a most helpful manner. The evaluation exceeded expectations in every respect and I could not recommend Jonathan highly enough.”
“Our recent external board evaluation process with Board Excellence was a very thorough process, assessing our board effectiveness and performance in a wide range of areas. Kieran’s approach, while challenging and setting the bar high for the board, was very engaging, constructive and warmly embraced by the board. Kieran went the extra mile to understand our board, our dynamics as a board team, our strengths to build upon and identify opportunities to improve. We worked closely with Kieran to develop a practical roadmap based on the evaluation recommendations to drive sustained improvement in our board effectiveness, leveraging the deep experience and best practices Board Excellence have developed and we are already seeing the benefits of this. For any board looking to select a board evaluation practice to provide a robust honest evaluation of the board that adds genuine value, I warmly recommend Board Excellence.”
“Cirencester Friendly takes Corporate Governance very seriously and we undertake a triennial external review of the effectiveness of our Board. For our most recent review process we partnered with Board Excellence to conduct an independent review. The approach they took was thorough and robust and we worked closely with Paul George and Kieran Moynihan to produce an output that was practical and proportionate. The report contained a good range of findings and recommendations that recognised our Board was already effective but can be made even more so. We saw Board Excellence’s commitment to include follow-up work over a 12-month period as a key differentiator in the market. I would be happy to recommend Board Excellence to organisations looking for an independent and objective assessment of their Board.”
Meet the Board Excellence Team
Highly experienced board and governance experts combining experience as practicing Board Chairs and Non-Executive Directors with a strong track record in board/governance evaluations, training, consultancy, board recruitment and board dispute mediation.
Kieran Moynihan
As the founder of Board Excellence, Kieran has worked extensively with boards across Ireland, UK and internationally in a wide range of sectors and scale of organisations. He has over 20 years’ experience serving on boards as a CEO, executive director, non-executive director and board chair. He is currently the board chair of a number of internationally-focused companies across a number of industry sectors.
Kieran is an internationally-recognised thought leader in the area of board dynamics, effectiveness, performance and corporate governance. He is a regular contributor to leading international board publications and has developed ground-breaking new approaches to optimising the “people equation of the board”, the partnership between executive and non-executive board members and enabling the board to excel as a high-performing team.
Ros O’Shea
Ros is an experienced Non-Executive Director with a portfolio of board positions, including BlackRock’s funds in Ireland, the Bank of Montreal (Europe) plc, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and Pieta House. Previously Ros enjoyed a highly successful executive career, spanning almost 20 years, as a senior executive and trusted board advisor to FTSE100 companies, CRH plc and Smurfit Kappa Group plc, having trained as a Chartered Accountant with PwC.
Ros also lectures on the Diploma in Corporate Governance at the UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School and with the Institute of Banking and is the author of the book, “Leading with Integrity – a Practical Guide to Business Ethics”. She is a regulator contributor to news and print media on related topics and a respected authority on corporate culture and the role of the board, values-based leadership and ESG as an emerging board mandate.
Anne-Marie Taylor
Anne-Marie is a Non-Executive Director on boards including the Public Appointments Service, the UCD Governing Authority and the Irish Hospice Foundation. She is the Programme Director for Balance for Better Business, the government-sponsored, business-led initiative which aims to improve gender balance in Irish business leadership. She is co-founder of the Board Diversity Initiative which produces a directory of senior women suitable for board roles.
Most of her executive career was with Accenture where she held a number of local and global roles. In recent years she has led her own management consulting operation working on business transformation projects with clients across a variety of sectors.
Anne-Marie has a Diploma in Corporate Governance from the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. In 2020, she was shortlisted for National Trustee of the Year. She is also a qualified executive coach.
Chaka Nkofo
Chaka is an experienced Non-Executive Director with more than fifteen (15) years corporate experience serving on boards as CEO/Managing Director, Executive Director, Non-Executive Director, and Chairman of Board Committees (Audit, Risk, Nominations and Ethics). Chaka has worked across diverse portfolio’s (construction, real estate, trade and investment, development finance, services, manufacturing, water, petroleum, and energy) in both Executive and Non-Executive Director roles.
Chaka has also been conferred with a Chartered Director CD (SA)® designation by the Institute of Directors South Africa (IoDSA). In this regard, he is a regular Mentor on the Institute of Directors South Africa’s Mentorship Circles Programme for aspiring Chartered Directors. Chaka is a highly experienced specialist consultant in corporate governance, board effectiveness and training of board directors.
Eileen Cole
Eileen is a practicing non-executive director, an experienced executive and management consultant and provides corporate finance, mergers, acquisitions and company re-structuring support to executive and board teams in companies across multiple industry sectors.
She is an External Business advisor to the Department of Economics in University College Cork, Ireland for their MSc Economics of Business Practice programme.
Paul George
Paul is an expert in Corporate Governance, Reporting and Audit. Whilst at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), he was the Executive Director responsible for the development of the 2018 UK Corporate Governance Code, The Wates Principles of Corporate Governance for Large Private Companies and the 2020 UK Stewardship Code. He has spoken regularly on such matters at UK and international conferences, and to Government working parties and Select Committees.
Paul is an experienced board chair and has been an executive and non-executive director of a number of public, private and not for profit organisations. Paul is a chartered accountant and former KPMG partner and adviser auditor to many public and private companies across a range of industry sectors.
Martina Maher
Martina is an experienced Independent Non-Executive Director and consultant with a portfolio of board and committee positions in the financial services, sustainability, and not-for-profit sectors. Previously, she had a highly successful executive career of over 25 years in leading organisations such as KPMG, Bank of Ireland Group plc, the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) and AIB Group plc. Martina is a Chartered Director (Institute of Directors), a Chartered Accountant having trained with Deloitte (London) and holds a Law Degree. Her areas of expertise include governance, strategy, risk management and internal audit.
Pat McGrath
Pat is an experienced board chair and executive with significant international experience. He is the former CEO and current non-executive deputy chair – international development of the PM Group, a global engineering and project management company with over 2,000 employees operating in over 30 countries.
He has a distinguished board chair track record in Ireland and is currently chair of a number of internationally-focused companies across a variety of industry sectors.
Sue Bonney
Sue is an experienced Board member, with a track record of senior Executive and Non-Executive and Chair roles in organisations ranging from professional services, to corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Previously as a Vice Chair and Head of ESG at KPMG UK, and now as an independent adviser, Sue has a particular focus on ESG working with the Boards of some of the UK’s largest and most important organisations on their strategic response to the responsible business and ESG agenda, prioritising material issues with maximum impact and fully incorporating the principles of good governance.
A Board member at The Forward Institute, Sue also works with senior executives to help them develop a future focused lens on their business to equip them as highly effective leaders of tomorrow and change agents of today.
Steve Masters
Steve is a highly experienced accountant with excellent governance, regulator relationship management and problem-solving capabilities. He was an audit partner with KPMG UK for over 20 years and brings significant experience of advising Boards and Audit Committees – including FTSE-100 and FTSE-250 groups, large private companies, private equity backed companies and not-for-profit groups. Earlier in his 35-year career, Steve was Group Financial Controller for a FTSE-100 group which helped develop his progressive approach to the partnership between an Executive Team and its Board.
Steve is also an experienced trustee who sits on two charity boards – chairing the Finance Committee for one of them.