A Treatment for Toxic Boards

When it comes to assembling a successful board, sometimes it seems like associations cannot win. They can do all manner of vetting and matrix-building and interviewing and onboarding; they can labor around staying focused and strategic; they can encourage preparation before meetings by making board books so simple they're effectively a page of emojis. And still, there will be that one board member who wrecks things.

You have heard that story plenty of times. So, have leadership experts Marianna Zangrillo and Thomas Kiel, who interviewed 120 board chairs about the challenges they have faced. As they write in Harvard Business Review, they’ve absorbed "many candid accounts about how a single director can make effective board work feel almost impossible."

Zangrillo and Kiel's research uncovered three main examples of problematic board members, whom I suspect are familiar to most CEOs. There are "passive passengers," chair-fillers who fade into the woodwork; "dominators" who treat every discussion as a zero-sum game and wrest control from colleagues, and "misguided experts," who see every issue through the filter of their particular area of specialization. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.