Six years ago, around 2019, while facilitating a board retreat for a regional insurance player, I posed a simple question to the directors: “How do you know when the board doing a good job?” One director replied, “We hold quarterly meetings on time.” Another director chimed in, “Our audit reports are clean.” And then another, “We have more than 80% meeting attendance rate.” They thought they had nailed it. I thought they were joking. They weren’t.
And that’s the problem.
Most board evaluations are superficial at best and performative at worst. They focus on compliance tick-boxes attendance, timely submissions, and committee structure. What they miss is the board’s actual impact on business outcomes. Governance has become a theatre. Everyone plays their part, and no one checks if the script is working. Do you have a board scorecard? Many boards do not! Do you have a board’s risk appetite? The answer is usually no! How do you drive a car with a revving but no dashboard to tell you the speed at which you are driving? How do you have a car without breaking system?
The insurance board I referenced earlier had overseen three failed strategy rollouts, rising claims ratios, and a ballooning cost base. But their evaluation? “Board functioning is satisfactory.” Why? Because no one asked: Did we challenge management enough? Did we steer strategy or simply nod through presentations?
To fix this, you start with the right diagnosis like any competent doctor. You don’t start treatment before the scan. A proper board review asks penetrating questions about value addition. Not just “Did we have a retreat?” but “Did we translate the retreat insights into strategic pivots?”
Take these instead:
a) What three decisions in the last 12 months did the board influence that materially changed our market position?
b) How did we respond to signals of market disruption before our competitors did?
c) What strategic assumptions did we last challenge that led to a course correction?
Boards must shift from ritual to relevance.
Here’s the leadership challenge: Most boards don’t want real feedback because real feedback creates discomfort. And leaders fear discomfort more than poor performance.
Leadership tool
Implement a “Board Impact Tracker.” After every meeting, each board member records one decision that added measurable value and one that didn’t. Review quarterly. If you can’t name a decision that mattered, your board didn’t govern. It just convened.
In the insurance board I mentioned, we introduced this tracker. Three directors resigned within six months voluntarily. The remaining ones got sharper, more involved, and finally asked the CEO for a strategy that could scale, not survive. Today, they’ve expanded regionally, with three consecutive profitable years.
Evaluate performance, yes. But only if you’re brave enough to change what you find. Otherwise, save the time. And the ink.
This tracker is not a tick-box exercise. It’s a mirror. The best boards I’ve worked with in agriculture value chains, for instance, used it quarterly and performance spiked not just in boardroom decorum, but in results on the ground. If your board isn’t tracking impact this way, it’s navigating with a blindfold
