What do you do when the boardroom looks less like a governance engine and more like a retirement home for political allies, loyalists, and old-school insiders?
Let me take you to a board session I facilitated two years ago for a national enterprise in the agriculture value chain. The chair had just introduced a newly appointed director. The CV was… polite. But when the new director was asked about the company’s climate exposure and agro-processing transformation agenda, he replied, “I’m still reading myself into it.” Fair. Until he repeated that same phrase in every meeting for six months.
Here’s what most boards won’t say out loud: appointments are rarely about competence alone. They are negotiated. Traded. Rewarded. And sometimes flat-out imposed. In this case, three directors had been nominated not because they were strategic thinkers or had risk oversight experience but because they had “served the movement faithfully.”
What happened? Strategy execution stalled. Risk appetite was a topic for consultants, not board dialogue. And the CEO, once energized, began making decisions unilaterally, knowing the board didn’t have the bandwidth to challenge his assumptions.
Now, before you roll your eyes at political appointees, ask yourself what your board appointment process is optimizing for? If you don’t have a nomination policy backed by a skills-gap diagnostic, you’re not building a board, you’re assembling a social club with agendas.
We turned the tide in that case with three interventions.
First, we implemented a mandatory director induction and impact review. Every new member had to outline how their expertise aligned with one of the board’s strategic priorities. No vague speeches. We lobbied the appointing authority to understand the key skills needed so that only folks with such skills would get the opportunity.
Second, we introduced a two-tier nomination matrix:
Tier 1 for strategic alignment (sector knowledge, governance, risk oversight);
Tier 2 for diversity, independence, and ethical grounding. You had to check both tiers, not just one.
And third, we empowered the Board Evaluation Committee to publish a board heatmap a visual of competence vs influence. It made the deadwood visible. Uncomfortable? Yes. But reform followed.
Every weak board was once a well-meaning board hijacked by connections over competence. If your board feels harmonious but underwhelming, ask: Who here would I bet the company on in a crisis?
And if the answer is “not many,” you already know what to do.
