A study of successful board chairs across countries shows how they engage, enable and encourage boards
Effective chairs recognise their main task is to provide constructive board leadership
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Boards of directors often get media attention when something goes wrong. The board of VW, for instance, was recently in the news after it received a terrible corporate governance rating based on the 2015 emissions scandal and its fallout. Examples of how not to behave as a board are easy to come by.
Yet most boards are not like VW’s because they use good governance to work well. To find out what makes a board chair successful, the INSEAD Corporate Governance Initiative conducted 74 face-to-face interviews with experienced board chairs to produce a research project spanning nine countries – Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Since boards of directors are not always transparent, and the role of their chairs doesn’t come with a handbook, we hope this report will shed light on the workings of board chairs. Board chairs share various issues internationally, but how they lead their boards effectively was of particular interest in the study.
All board chairs surveyed considered that their main task is to provide effective board leadership. We found strong similarities in the way chairs from various countries define the job itself and the way they go about it. Chairs play three specific roles: engaging, enabling and encouraging, what we call 3Es leadership.
While the roles of engaging, enabling and encouraging intertwine and reinforce each other, our research uncovered specific practices that board chairs use to perform them individually.
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge
http://knowledge.insead.edu, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2023]