Boards: The Right Person To Lead One
The best chairman or chairwoman is a mentor, sounding board, and listener.
If you’re constructing an advisory board for your business, you need to be clear about its role and judicious in the choice and range of directors. But there’s no decision more important than who leads your meetings.
This can’t be you. Why not? Because to get the best out of your board, the directors or advisors need to feel able to challenge and question you. That’s a lot less likely to happen when you run the meeting. What you want is someone you trust, preferably someone you admire and who has the success of the business as his or her only goal. This is a mentoring role, not a career steppingstone.
The best chairman I’ve ever worked with was excellent at silence. He managed discussions very thoroughly but largely kept himself out of them. He made sure that no one was left out and he ensured that the questions raised by advisors got an answer. This didn’t mean that he kept himself out of the debates. But he listened as hard for what wasn’t being said as he did to what was. He was also not afraid to make an argument that was counter or oblique to the main trend. People quickly came to trust him because he stopped the board from being too conformist. This is a rare and great gift. If everyone is thinking the same way, you aren’t getting the best from the talent you’ve assembled.
Many people imagine that a good board is one in which everyone gets along and there isn’t any conflict. This is true for publicly-traded companies too. In both cases, they’re wrong. Conflict is how thinking happens in groups. No conflict, no thought. What you want in your chairman is someone who isn’t afraid of conflict and knows how to do it well.
Continue reading this article at INC.com after the break!
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