Board Evaluation
Making a board evaluation that the board actually acted on.
A publicly listed company had run an annual board evaluation for five years. The report was thorough. The recommendations were reasonable. Very few of them ever moved. The chair asked for something different.
The situation
A board that took governance seriously and still couldn't turn its own evaluations into behavior. The scores went up. The room didn't change.
The question we set out to answer
“What is this board actually good at, where is it quietly avoiding, and which two behaviors — if changed — would raise the quality of every meeting?”
How the work was done
- 01
Ran the Leadership Assessment on directors individually.
- 02
Applied the Cultural Profile to the board as a group — how it decides, disagrees, and lets in dissent.
- 03
Held one-on-one debriefs with the chair and each director.
- 04
Framed the evaluation output as two specific behavioral experiments for the next four meetings, not a report.
What changed
The following year's evaluation showed measurable movement on the two behaviors. Directors described the difference in individual, specific terms — not survey averages.
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Meeting agendas restructured around the two behaviors.
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Two directors who had been considered 'quiet' turned out to be actively holding back — and stopped.
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The chair said, unprompted, that the board finally felt like a team.
The principle behind the case
“A board evaluation is only useful if it points at something the board can practice. A score is not a practice.”