Governance
High standards of governance are essential if we are to maintain the trust of all our stakeholders. Importantly, all sustainability-related structures, processes and management systems are integrated within the business, ensuring our business operations are transparent and accountable.
Corporate Governance
Our Board of Directors is guided by our Corporate Governance Principles, Code of Ethics and charters for each Board Committee. These are publicly available in the Corporate Governance section of our corporate website.
Read more about corporate governance in our Annual 10-K report (pdf, 13.8MB)
Sustainability Governance
To continually improve our performance and deliver on our plans, we are guided by our Creating Value Roadmap. Across our business we employ a variety of governance systems and processes to manage the different aspects of sustainability, and these are summarized throughout this report.
As well as 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 global skill teams to integrate sustainability throughout the company by aligning with the most relevant and actionable United Nations Sustainability Development Goals where we make the largest impact
- Chairs the leadership forum to govern skill teams’ now, near and far sustainability goals and metrics
Key Business Processes
Key governance processes enable us to manage issues that cut across functional areas.
Creating Value Roadmap Process
Our Creating Value Roadmap Process (CVRP) is the model for how we run the company. It contains the management processes we follow to continually improve our performance and deliver on our plans.
The CVRP, institutionalized as Policy Letter 25, enables us to continually monitor the ever-changing global business environment for risks and opportunities, including those related to sustainability, and use the resulting analysis to inform our strategies as needed. It also creates stronger accountability for setting, tracking and reporting progress against our goals and objectives, revenue targets, other financial indicators and stakeholder satisfaction measures.
The processes set out below allow us to respond to new internal and external developments in a timely manner and use these evaluations to adjust our management approaches where necessary.
Business Plan Review (BPR): The senior leadership team (representing all skill teams and business units) holds meetings on a regular basis 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 senior leadership team reviews significant matters in more detail, and develops action plans and strategies to address more specific risks and opportunities
Business Plan Development and Compensation
As part of our annual business planning process, our business units track their performance using scorecards. Sustainability targets are integral to companywide achievements and are translated into product manufacturing and financial performance metrics. These metrics contribute to performance assessment for managers at various levels of the company and affect their compensation.