Strategy and Governance > 

Governance

High standards of governance are key to maintaining the trust of investors and all stakeholders. Importantly, all sustainability-related structures, processes and management systems are integrated, ensuring that our business operates in a transparent and accountable way.

Corporate Governance

Ford’s Board of Directors is guided by our Corporate Governance Principles, Code of Ethics and charters for each Board Committee, all of which are publicly available in the Corporate Governance section of our corporate website.

 Read more about Corporate Governance in our Annual 10-K report (pdf, 13.4MB)

Sustainability Governance

We follow our Creating Value Roadmap (CVR) to continually improve our performance and deliver on our One Ford plan. We use a variety of governance systems and processes to manage the different aspects of sustainability across our business. These are summarized throughout this report.

In addition to ensuring that we act responsibly in the interests of our shareholders, we must also have accountability for our wider impact on the world around us.

Board Committees

Sustainability and Innovation Committee

  • Primary responsibility for reviewing strategic sustainability issues
  • Evaluates and advises on innovations that improve our environmental and social sustainability, and the strategies to bring them to market

Other Board Committees include Audit, Compensation, Nominating and Governance, and Finance.

Executive Management

Group Vice President of Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering (SESE)

  • Primary responsibility for sustainability issues
  • Oversees the Sustainability & Vehicle Environmental Matters group, the Environmental Quality Office, the Vehicle Homologation & Compliance group and the Automotive Safety Office
  • Leads a multidisciplinary senior-level team to oversee our actions in response to our climate change and sustainable mobility strategies

Other executive and group vice presidents across our functional areas also have responsibility for sustainability-related issues.

Function Areas

Sustainability and Vehicle Environmental Matters

  • Coordinates our companywide sustainability strategy and activities
  • Leads our sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement
  • Collaborates with other functional areas and skill teams to integrate sustainability throughout the company

 For further information, download our Corporate Governance Principles (pdf, 136kb), 2016 Proxy Statement (pdf, 3.25MB) and Code of Ethics (pdf, 34kb)

Key Business Processes

We have a number of key governance processes that enable us to manage issues that cut across functional areas.

Creating Value Roadmap

The CVR process is the model for how we run the company. It contains the management processes that we follow to continually improve our performance and deliver our One Ford plan.

Fully integrated into how we run the business, it enables us to continually monitor the ever-changing global business environment for risks and opportunities – including those related to sustainability – and use this analysis to inform and adjust our strategies as needed. It also creates stronger accountability for setting, tracking and reporting progress against our goals, objectives, revenue targets, and other financial indicators and stakeholder satisfaction. The CVR process is institutionalized as Policy Letter 25. This helps to ensure we implement sustainability-related risk assessments, planning, strategy implementation and performance reviews consistently around the world.

We monitor progress against objectives throughout the year, using the processes set out below. These allow us to respond to new internal and external developments in a timely manner and use these evaluations to inform adjustments to our management approaches where necessary.

  • Business Plan Review (BPR): The senior leadership team (representing all skill teams and business units) hold weekly BPR meetings to review our management of sustainability and other business issues. Ford’s sustainability scorecard is reviewed alongside our business units’ scorecards at these meetings

  • Special Attention Review (SAR): The SAR process brings the senior leadership team together to review significant matters in more detail, and to develop action plans and strategies to address more specific risks and opportunities

  • Additional governance forums: Other forums, including the Strategic Programming Meeting, Product Matters Meeting, Quality and Productivity Meeting, and Executive Personnel Committee, enable us to review key elements of our business, make long-term decisions and develop strategic inputs to the Board of Directors

Business Plan Development and Compensation

As part of our annual business planning process, Ford’s business units develop scorecards to track their performance. Sustainability targets are integral to companywide achievements and are translated into product manufacturing and financial performance metrics. These metrics form part of the performance assessment for managers at various levels of the company and affect their compensation. Executive compensation is affected by the company’s performance in a range of areas, including sustainability.

  Read more about our approach to ethics and compliance