Pressure-Testing Your Board Evaluation

Are your board assessments producing insights that support improvement? Here’s how to pressure-test the process to surface hard truths and drive real change.

For large public company boards, having an evaluation process is not the same as getting value from it. PwC’s 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Survey shows that many directors do not believe their boards’ assessment processes tell them what they need to know. In fact, 78 percent of respondents said their boards' assessment processes don’t capture the full picture of director performance.

Many evaluations focus largely on the mechanics of governance, such as agendas, committee structures, and information flow. However, mechanics do not always indicate whether the board operates at the level the moment requires.

A strong evaluation helps board members answer harder questions: Is time spent discussing the right issues? Does the board have the capabilities the company will need over the next several years? Are boardroom dynamics helping directors make better decisions or are they getting in the way?

Boards should also consider a more fundamental question: Are we using this evaluation to improve performance, or is it assessment theater: directors going through the motions with no discernible benefit?

The Most Difficult Issues to Surface

Effective boards are shaped not only by individual members but also by how those directors prepare, interact, challenge one another, and deal with difficult issues.

Yet, the issues that boards need to confront are usually the hardest to bring to the surface. These include the following:

• Director contribution and engagement. Is every director contributing in the way the business now requires? Are directors engaged between meetings and not just during them?
• Boardroom participation. Is debate encouraged early enough to improve decisions? Are certain voices too loud or too soft? 
• Forward-looking governance. Is the board spending enough time on future risks, opportunities, and strategic choices, or does it mostly react to near-term developments?
• Board culture. Is a culture of collegiality making it harder to say what needs to be said?
• Board–management relationship. Is the board–management relationship an asset to leverage or an obstacle to manage?
• Director behavior. Is there a way to deal directly with behavior that weakens discussion or decision-making?

Another recurring, difficult issue is board refreshment. According to the PwC survey, more than half of director respondents believe at least one fellow board member should be replaced for some reason. Across our work advising boards, many directors tell us they have long recognized the need for a change in composition, but they haven’t known how or felt comfortable enough to address the issue.  

How to Make Board Assessments More Useful

The most cited reason boards hesitate to refresh their boards, according to PwC’s survey, is collegiality and personal relationships. The very dynamic that makes boards function—trust built over years of working together—can be what prevents them from making needed changes.

Some assessments of individual directors are not designed to encourage candor. Many boards still approach these evaluations cautiously, worried that they will damage relationships or that the assessment will be seen as a process intended to push someone off the board.

A 2025 Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom publication on board effectiveness noted that these assessments tend to work best when framed as a tool for development, not punishment.  That framing matters: When directors understand that feedback is intended to strengthen performance rather than force an exit, they are more likely to engage with it constructively. 

Boards can make the process more useful by pairing annual assessments with periodic check-ins by the independent chair, lead director, or governance committee chair so that concerns are addressed before they become entrenched relationship or performance problems.

External facilitation can help, but many boards choose to keep evaluations in-house. Though an outside facilitator isn’t necessary every year, there are moments when independent support can make a real difference: after a strategic shift, during CEO succession, when boardroom dynamics feel off, or when the board needs a candid read that an internal process likely can’t provide.

Boards also should think carefully about whether they get enough management feedback during the evaluation process. According to PwC and The Conference Board’s 2025 survey of C-suite executives, only 32 percent of respondents believe their boards have the right mix of skills and expertise to guide their companies forward. In addition, the survey reveals a growing concern that some directors cross too far into management’s role.

Even when evaluations surface meaningful issues, boards don’t always act on them. Common themes and issues can persist year over year.

To avoid this, directors should ask themselves the following simple questions:

• Does the evaluation process review what will matter over the next three to five years, or does it just repeat last year’s discussion?
• Does it look at how the board behaves, not just how it’s organized?
• Does it gather honest feedback?
• Are results used to inform refreshment, succession, onboarding, and committee leadership decisions?
• What changed after the last evaluation?

If the answer to the last question is “Not much,” the board may have an action problem more than an evaluation problem. Below are a few practices directors can use to address this:

Assign ownership. Every meaningful action coming out of the evaluation should have a clear owner. Board leadership—typically the independent chair, lead director, or governance committee chair—should own the overall follow-through, while specific actions can be assigned to the relevant committee chair or director.

Set a timeline. If no one knows when the board expects progress, the issue can easily slip into the background. Some actions may require immediate attention, such as adjusting meeting agendas for the next board cycle, while others, such as succession planning or refreshment, may require a multi-quarter timeline with clear milestones.

Discuss progress. Regularly revisit agreed-upon actions, rather than waiting until the next annual evaluation. For many boards, this means a brief governance committee or executive session check-in at least quarterly, with more frequent discussions occurring if the issue affects board composition, leadership, or board–management dynamics.

Prioritize a few changes. A small number of concrete, high-value actions are more likely to produce results than a long list of diffuse recommendations.

Build findings into the board’s regular work. Evaluation outcomes should not sit in a standalone report. Instead, they should shape the board calendar, executive sessions, committee priorities, director development, and future board composition discussions.

Be willing to adjust course. If a change is not working, revisit it directly. The discussion should focus less on assigning blame and more on whether the board chose the right action, assigned the right owner, set a realistic timeline, and created enough accountability for follow-through.

Evaluations should help boards become more honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and more deliberate about what they need to do next. The value of an assessment is not in the process itself but in whether it helps the board make better decisions, have more candid conversations, and take action where it is needed.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent the perspective of NACD.

Russell Reynolds Associates is a NACD strategic content partner, providing directors with critical and timely information, and perspectives. Russell Reynolds Associates is a financial supporter of the NACD.