If you look after a holding, you know the situation: a parent company, several subsidiaries, perhaps a foundation. Each entity has its own board, its own meeting dates, its own minutes - but often the same secretariat, and frequently the same people sit on several boards. This is exactly where most of the chaos arises in practice.
The real problem is mixing
Email inboxes and shared drives do not distinguish between companies. The invitation for the subsidiary ends up in the same folder as the parent's strategy paper, the distribution list is copied from the last meeting, and at some point someone receives documents that are none of their business. That is not just untidy: board members owe duties of loyalty and care to their company. Documents wandering between entities are a compliance risk - at the latest when the interests of parent and subsidiary are not aligned.
Principle 1: every company is its own world
Legally, parent and subsidiaries are separate entities with their own governing bodies and their own duties. Your tools should reflect this structure instead of blurring it: one organisation per legal entity, with its own members, its own document storage and its own minutes. Our walkthrough board meetings in holding structures shows what this looks like in practice.
A cleanly separated document hub per company also means: articles of association, regulations and minutes live where they belong, and a subsidiary's auditors see only that subsidiary.
Principle 2: overview without mixing
Separation must not make multiple mandates unmanageable. Anyone sitting on three boards needs a complete view: Which meetings are coming up? Where are items still open? A multi-board dashboard lays this overview across the separated organisations without softening the data boundaries - each person sees only what they have access to in the respective company.
Principle 3: rights follow the structure, not chance
In holding structures, permissions are rarely identical: the parent's chair may sit as an ordinary member on the subsidiary's board, the CFO is a guest for a single agenda item, the external adviser sees exactly one dossier. Maintaining such constellations by hand through individual grants goes wrong over time. Roles and groups that reflect the structure work better - we wrote up how this works in detail in Getting board access rights right.
A short checklist for practice
- One organisation per legal entity - no collective "group" folder for everything.
- Derive distribution lists from the structure, don't copy them from the last email.
- Solve multiple mandates with one overview, not with parallel filing systems.
- Invite guests deliberately instead of opening up entire meetings.
- Check once a year whether roles and access still match the real structure.
Conclusion
Holding governance rarely fails for lack of will - it fails on tools that don't know structure. If you map the separation of the companies technically and lay the overview on top, you get both: clean conditions per entity and the complete view across all mandates.