How Chairs Drive Board Performance

Effective board leaders build relationships, showcase expertise, set high standards, and seek differing views.

Boards spend significant time ensuring they have the right mix of skills and experience around the table. However, composition is only part of the performance equation. Board performance depends on how those capabilities are collectively brought to bear. The chair plays a central role in making the board a strategic asset for the organization.

How can chairs translate the strengths of individual directors into stronger board performance? There are four actions the chair can take.

Set the board and management up for collaboration. The chair serves as the board’s orchestrator and leader among peers. He or she helps decide what merits the board’s attention, maintains strong working relationships among directors and with management, builds a special rapport with the CEO, and ensures important issues surface in the right forum. Chairs serve as the bridge between the board and leadership when hard decisions must be made. 

Yet in Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) 2025 Global Board Culture and Director Behaviors Study, only 67 percent of respondents said directors on their boards often or always cultivate relationships with the CEO, and 52 percent said the same of executives beyond the CEO. The study also found that spending more time on board priorities does not necessarily translate into results.

That means chairs should:

1. Shape the board agenda around the issues that matter most. Work with the CEO and committee chairs to determine what warrants full board attention, what belongs within a committee, and where a topic would benefit from directors’ discussion rather than a management update. Protect time for forward-looking strategic issues and decisions where the board can add the most value.
2. Facilitate strong connections across directors and management. Build relationships with the CEO, individual directors, and committee chairs between meetings. Stay in regular contact to understand where differing views on key issues are emerging, ensure important committee issues reach the full board, and keep communication between the CEO and directors open.
3. Use executive sessions deliberately. Give independent directors space to compare perspectives, raise concerns, and discuss issues without management present. Make sure important themes are communicated to management appropriately so these sessions strengthen dialogue with the CEO rather than create distance.

The chair doesn’t need to be involved in every board or management interaction. Effective chairs maintain enough visibility into the issues and dynamics across the board and management to know when to step in and when to give others room to lead.

Turn individual expertise into better board decisions. Boards are built around the expertise directors bring. High-performing boards ensure that directors build on each other’s thinking. 

The best chairs distinguish between directors’ personal expertise and the experience most relevant to the issue at hand. However, RRA’s 2025 survey finds that 89 percent of respondents said directors on their boards often or always apply their personal expertise to board issues, while only 71 percent said chairs effectively draw out other directors’ relevant expertise.

A chair’s instinct might be to let conversation flow. But without active facilitation, discussion can drift toward what directors have seen before rather than what is most relevant to the issue at hand. The result can be a series of individual comments rather than relevant, action-oriented conversation. 

Strong chairs:

1. Prepare to use the expertise in the room. Before an important discussion, identify directors with especially relevant experience and engage them with targeted questions.
2. Connect and sequence perspectives. Bring in relevant voices early, then ask directors to react to or build on one another’s thinking. Assess where consensus is forming and where meaningful differences of opinion remain.
3. Keep expertise at the right altitude. Experienced directors may move quickly from advising to problem-solving. When discussion becomes overly operational, redirect it toward board-level thinking. Ask: What assumption are we testing? What trade-offs does management need to consider? What risk should the board understand?

Chairs must be equally thoughtful about their own expertise, knowing when their experience adds value and when to create space for someone else to speak. Strong chairs ask questions before demonstrating what they know, then synthesize directors’ contributions.

Set and reinforce a high bar for contribution. High-performing boards need directors who take responsibility for how they contribute, not simply whether they prepare for board meetings. That means all directors should be open to receiving candid feedback, adjusting how they contribute as the board’s needs change, and addressing behaviors that weaken the board, such as dominating discussions or veering too far into operations.

RRA’s 2025 research found that 51 percent of respondents said directors on their boards often or always solicit honest feedback from fellow directors. Only 43 percent said chairs often or always provide constructive feedback. Peer accountability can be difficult on boards, where directors may be more accustomed to giving feedback than receiving it. That makes the chair’s role especially important in establishing an expectation of continuous improvement. 

Chairs can reinforce that expectation by taking the following actions:

1. Make the standard explicit. Define what good director contribution looks like. Set expectations around preparation, independence, quality of questions, listening, and how directors use their expertise.
2. Give feedback soon after a concerning behavior occurred. Don’t wait for an annual board evaluation. When a negative pattern emerges, address it privately and specifically.
3. Reinforce what’s working. When a director surfaces an uncomfortable issue constructively or helps reframe a decision, acknowledge the contribution and make clear why it was valuable to the board.

Chairs need to hold themselves to the same standard by seeking feedback, receiving criticism without explaining it away, and adjusting when the criticism is valid. They should also ensure there’s a credible mechanism for directors to assess the chair.

Create the conditions for independent judgment. High-performing directors challenge assumptions, exercise independent judgment, and consider different perspectives. Yet just 69 percent of the 2025 RRA survey respondents said directors on their boards often or always demonstrate an independent perspective and avoid groupthink, and 68 percent said their chairs actively seek different points of view. 

Chairs can help by making productive challenges both expected and safe. They can:

1. Seek out difference deliberately. Rather than rely on general invitations for comments, identify relevant perspectives and invite them directly in a gracious manner. Bring quieter directors in before a few voices dominate and, before closing a discussion, ask what views or assumptions have not yet been considered.
2. Hold back their own view at the right moments. Frame the issue and ask questions before offering a strong conclusion. The chair’s authority can unintentionally anchor the discussion, so delaying sharing his or her own view creates room for more independent thinking.
3. Make challenge safe and valuable. When there is dissent, make space to understand the reasoning. Keep disagreement focused on the issue, rather than on personalities, and distinguish productive dissent from repetitive debate.

Chairs also need to model the behavior they expect from others. When challenged, they should respond with curiosity rather than defensiveness and be willing to reconsider their own views. The goal is a boardroom where directors can test assumptions and challenge one another’s thinking.

Ultimately, board performance is measured by the quality of the board’s judgment in the decisions that matter most. An effective chair helps directors challenge assumptions, make full use of the expertise around the table, and reach better-informed decisions.

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.