Most CEOs manage their board. The best ones lead it.
After years of working with CEOs, and having been one myself, I've come to believe that the board relationship is the most underinvested area of CEO performance. Not because CEOs don't care about it. They care enormously. But caring about it and actively leading it are two very different things.
I know this from my own experience. Early in my CEO role I had a strong board relationship and we delivered together. But looking back, I was too conclusion-focused. I hadn't taken them on the journey with my thinking. I was busy proving my capability and not considering that I could also ask for input and help. I caught on, but it took longer than it should have.
Most CEOs are so consumed by running the business that the board relationship becomes transactional. A meeting to prepare for, a paper to land, a room to manage. They report to the board rather than lead it. They keep directors informed rather than genuinely aligned.
The board relationship is not a soft metric. It is a commercial one. And yet many CEOs treat it as an obligation rather than an asset.
The stakes are real. And the gap is more common than most CEOs would admit.
What directors actually see
Over the past few years I have interviewed experienced board directors and pulled together the common threads around how clearly they see the board/CEO relationship from the other side of the table. Most CEOs have no idea what that picture looks like.
The foundation, as Aliza Knox (former APAC lead for Google, Twitter and Cloudflare and now a non-executive director) puts it, is the CEO-chair relationship. That's where the real communication happens, and that tone spills into everything else. When the CEO is comfortable enough with the board to share what's really going on, the relationship works. When they're not, the board is operating on incomplete information. And that's when things go wrong.
What the relationship looks like when it's working is equally clear. Kate Spargo, non-executive director at Sonic Healthcare, CIMIC and the Geelong Football Club, describes it as genuine partnership. Enough trust to have hard conversations, enough role clarity that nobody is treading on toes, and enough communication between meetings that nothing lands as a surprise in the boardroom.
What breaks it is just as consistent. Leanne Caret, former president and CEO of Boeing Defence Space and Security and now a board director at (John) Deere and RTX, is direct: if a board hears about something significant through the media before hearing it from the CEO, "that's a foul."
And Nichelle Maynard-Elliott, independent director at Xerox and Lucid Group, names the quality that separates the CEOs boards truly back from the ones they merely monitor: "generous with success and stingy with blame." The CEOs she's observed earning genuine board trust take the blame when things go wrong, even when it's the team's call, and hand the credit back when things go right. That's what creates the conditions where a board genuinely backs a CEO.
The board relationship rarely fails dramatically. It erodes quietly through under-communication, through assumed alignment that hasn't been tested, through a CEO so consumed by running the business that the relationship becomes purely transactional.
Three things that will build the board as an Asset
Have the real conversation before the formal one. By the time you're in the boardroom, it's too late to be testing ideas. The work happens in the one-on-one with your chair, the conversation before a significant agenda item, the informal check-in that keeps the formal meeting free of surprises. If your board is ever caught off guard in a session, the relationship has a gap - even if the meeting itself goes smoothly.
Show your logic, not just your conclusion. Boards don't just want to know what you've decided. They want to understand how you got there. The options you considered and discarded, where your uncertainties sit, what you're watching. Walking them through your reasoning builds the kind of trust that holds when things get genuinely hard.
Treat transparency as a discipline, not a response. The CEOs with the strongest board relationships share difficult news early, in their own words, with context. They don't wait until the board asks. They don't bury the issue in a footnote. A board that is never surprised is a board that remains a genuine strategic asset.
Where do you sit?
The board relationship is one of the few areas of CEO performance that doesn't show up in a dashboard or a quarterly result. It builds slowly, erodes quietly, and matters most in the moments when everything else is also hard.
If you want to assess where your board relationship sits, alongside seven other critical areas of CEO performance, the CEO Scorecard is structured fifteen-minute diagnostic. Click here to access.
If you are interested in the Board Director Series, Aliza Knox, Leanne Caret, Kate Spargo, Nichelle Maynard Elliott.
