Those moments, when the tension is so thick in the Boardroom that you can cut it with a knife, tend to sneak up more often when the organisation is under pressure. They arrive without being calculated into the room.
I prefer to the called in prior to cultures becoming toxic, but I generally find myself called in when tension runs high between the NEDs and the executives – and most of the time both have legitimate reasons to be tense. Frustration is palpable and, before you know it, an us-versus-them atmosphere is created. I am often amazed at how a group of good people divides itself into camps where each considers the other not worthy of their trust. And often the cost of the tension to the organisation is not calculated or even acknowledged. Especially not when the organisation is in crisis.
In the face of a crisis, a Board facing sustained pressure has good reason to ask harder questions, particularly when performance has been deteriorating, and risks are multiplying. With stakeholders demanding answers more quickly than the organisation can produce, directors can hardly respond by becoming less demanding. In the process, however, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that governance quality depends on how that demand is exercised.
On the other hand, executives must provide answers and assurance while dealing with operational demands, competing priorities and, sometimes as a result of continuous strain, considerable fatigue. For them too, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that how they respond to the Board can make or break the trust relationship.
What is often missed is that, while a Board meeting may appear, on paper, to be a discussion about performance, risk or strategy, in the room, it is also a meeting between people responding to uncertainty, responsibility and scrutiny. Directors need assurance that the organisation understands its position and has a credible way forward, and the executives need guidance and support, and not continuous flagellation.
When pressure persists, both groups are likely to become more sensitive to what the other says and does. Therefore, a director’s legitimate question may be heard as an accusation or an insensitive attack. On the other hand, an executive’s incomplete answer may be interpreted as evasiveness. Neither interpretation is necessarily accurate. Both can shape what happens next.
This is one reason Board culture matters most when the organisation can least afford to ignore it.
The cycle that pressure can create
When in a crisis, the leadership can inevitably find itself in a vicious cycle that ultimately does not serve the organisation. So, a familiar pattern that plays out is the Board, concerned about results, increasing the frequency and intensity of its scrutiny. That can be magnified when the Board includes many individuals who naturally default to zeroing in on minute detail when having to deal with significant uncertainty. That is inevitable, but it can lead executives to prepare extensively for each meeting and feel that every gap in the information will be taken as evidence of failure. They, in turn, inevitably become more guarded in their responses. But then directors notice that answers seem carefully managed, and their confidence falls, so they ask for more detail and more frequent reports. Management spends more time preparing those reports and less time addressing the underlying issues. Each side sees the other’s response as confirmation of its concern, and the cycle can easily develop without bad faith on either side.
Directors believe they must fulfill their oversight duties. And they are absolutely correct. Executives may believe, also correctly, that they are working at above full capacity. Yet at the same time a relationship intended to help the organisation navigate difficulty begins to consume energy that the organisation needs elsewhere. It is easy to assign blame once this pattern has become entrenched.
It is, however, more useful to ask what sustains that pattern. Are requests for additional information prioritised, or does each new concern generate another report? Are executives bringing uncertainty to the Board early, or waiting until they have a polished answer? Does a difficult exchange end when the meeting ends, or does it influence how people approach the next one? Those questions examine the system of interaction. They do not relieve anyone of individual responsibility.
What pressure can do to judgment
Human beings do not set their responses to pressure aside when they enter a Boardroom. Research on stress and cognitive control gives us reason to pay attention to the conditions under which people are expected to think flexibly, regulate their reactions, and weigh competing information. That observation needs care. We cannot diagnose a director from an impatient question or infer an executive’s mental state from a delayed report.
The practical point is simpler: sustained pressure can make the behaviours a crisis requires harder to practice consistently. A director who feels urgency may press repeatedly for certainty, but the Board needs curiosity as well as vigilance. An executive who does not yet have certainty may try to sound more assured than the evidence warrants, but management needs candour as well as confidence. The Board needs management to be able to say: “Here is what we know. Here is what remains uncertain. Here is when and how we expect to know more.” That is not a weak answer if it is accompanied by clear ownership and a credible plan. It may be the most honest answer available.
Both parties need enough room to distinguish a genuine warning from a threat to their standing. That, of course, requires a good measure of awareness of how the crisis is augmenting their behaviour and the presence of mind to self-regulate in the moment. That is not easy and requires a fair amount of maturity. It not being easy, however, is not an excuse for poor conduct.
Challenge and support belong together
Boards sometimes treat challenge and support as opposite approaches. In a difficult period, this can produce an unhelpful choice: should the Board be tougher on management or more understanding of the demands management faces? An effective Board must do both.
Challenge means asking whether assumptions are sound, whether risks have been fully considered and whether commitments are being met. Support means understanding the conditions under which management is expected to deliver, and helping ensure that the organisation has the leadership capacity, resources and decision clarity it needs. Support does not mean protecting executives from accountability. Challenge does not require treating every setback as a character flaw.
Take, for example, a scenario where a deadline has been missed on a critical project. The Board needs to know why and what will happen next. But a combative posture is not always the most useful starting point. The answers to key questions will call for different interventions: Was the original deadline realistic? Did circumstances change? Were responsibilities clear? Were warning signs escalated early enough? Did the organisation have sufficient capacity? Was there an avoidable failure of execution? A Board that settles too quickly on one explanation risks prescribing the wrong remedy.
The same discipline applies when a submission is inadequate. Directors can identify the shortcomings precisely and explain what decision they cannot responsibly take without better information. That gives management a clearer route to improvement than a meeting in which frustration is unmistakable, but expectations remain vague.
The cost of making bad news difficult to bring
One of the strongest tests of Board–executive culture is what happens when management brings unwelcome information before it has become unavoidable. Does the Board focus first on understanding the risk? Does it ask what is being done and where its own decision may be needed? Or does the discussion move immediately toward a combative and punitive stance and finding someone to blame?
There are circumstances in which blame and consequences are absolutely warranted. For example, repeated concealment, negligence, and avoidable failures must be addressed. Head-on. But if every early warning is met as though it were an admission of incompetence, the Board may inadvertently encourage people to wait until they can present a more reassuring story. That does not work in the Board’s favour, and it is not good for the organisation. A Board cannot govern well with information that has been delayed, filtered or made to sound safer than it is.
This places a corresponding duty on executives. Candour is more than disclosing a problem once challenged. It includes explaining the significance of emerging information, making assumptions visible and distinguishing action already taken from action merely planned. Executives should not be expected to know everything. They should be expected to tell the Board what they do not know when that uncertainty matters. I recall from my CEO days that I lived by this motto: If the Board is surprised, it is because I am surprised. As soon as executives are aware of information the Board should know, the information should flow through – the Board should not be blindsided. The goal is a relationship in which bad news travels early enough to be useful. That is a sign of a healthy culture that can survive the crisis.
Watch the accumulated effect of Board demands
We cannot see ourselves in motion and therefore often miss that requests may overwhelm the people responsible for responding to them. Each request from a director may be reasonable on its own, but collectively, those requests can become a mountain. I have watched myself be guilty of not watching the mountain grow. A Board can help by deciding what information is essential to its oversight, what decision each request will inform and when an update is genuinely needed. The Chair and committee Chairs have an important role in coordinating requests so management does not receive conflicting or repetitive instructions from different parts of the Board.
This is particularly important when the organisation is already stretched. Reports have an opportunity cost. The question is not whether directors deserve information; they do. It is whether the reporting burden produces better decisions than the work it displaces.
Executives, for their part, need to explain capacity constraints honestly. “We cannot do everything at once” is the beginning of a prioritisation discussion, not necessarily a refusal to be accountable. In my capacity as CEO, I have had to do that on occasion. Tell the Board that the load is too heavy and their request will push the staff over the edge. Most of the time I found Board members willing to concede and prioritise, but on occasion I have had a Board member who stared himself so blind on what he wanted that he missed the impact on the broader picture. A Board that wants timely execution must be willing to make choices about what matters most.
Repair is a governance practice
Difficult conversations are sometimes unavoidable. A strong Board–executive relationship is not one in which nobody feels challenged or disappointed. It is one in which the participants can address a difficult exchange before it hardens into a lasting assumption about motives.
After a tense meeting, the Chair and Chief Executive may need to clarify what the Board was asking, what management understood, and whether either side believes the other has crossed a boundary. A committee Chair may need to explain why a particular submission was returned. An executive may need to acknowledge that information should have been better presented or should have been escalated sooner.
These conversations are sometimes dismissed as interpersonal housekeeping. In reality, they protect the flow of information and the quality of future decisions. Without repair, yesterday’s frustration can become tomorrow’s interpretation. So, a question is heard as hostile before it is completed and an explanation is dismissed before its evidence is considered. Over time, the relationship becomes organised around anticipated conflict rather than the organisation’s needs.
Questions worth asking
More often than not, I am called in to assist the Board when the relationship between the Board and management is already spiralling downward, if not outright toxic. Boards do not need to wait for a relationship to break down before examining it. As a matter of fact, it is good practice to focus on the Board’s culture and implement preventative measures. In addition to periodic culture assessments (which are distinct from Board performance evaluations) that focus on the human dynamics, regular conversations, separate from an immediate performance dispute, could ask:
- Can executives bring significant uncertainty to the Board without feeling obliged to manufacture certainty?
- Does the Board receive bad news early enough to act?
- Do directors explain what assurance they need and why?
- Are information requests coordinated and proportionate to the decisions at hand?
- When challenge becomes tense, do we address the underlying issue and repair misunderstandings?
- Are we allowing pressure to narrow our view of one another’s intentions?
The answers may be uncomfortable. They can also reveal improvements that no additional dashBoard will provide.
In a crisis, a Board–executive relationship does not need to be comfortable. It needs to be candid enough to withstand discomfort. Directors must retain the courage to challenge. Executives must retain the courage to surface unwelcome realities. Both need the discipline to notice when pressure is changing the way they hear one another.
The moment to examine that dynamic is before mistrust becomes the organisation’s default operating system.
If you are considering how you could be assisted in your organisation’s culture journey, either as the Board or the Executive team, read more about my work here: Board Services and Executive Support
