Why Every Board Has a Behavioural Blind Spot and How to Find Yours
- Jul 21
- 7 min read
Gillian is the Managing Director of Emerge Development Consultancy, which she founded 28 years ago. She is a Master Executive Coach for global CEOs and Managing Directors, an international speaker, and an award-winning leader. Recognized as a leading UK Female Entrepreneur in 2020 and Leader of the Year in 2023, she was named Businesswoman of the Decade in 2024.
Over the last 30 years, since founding my consultancy, one of the things I have loved most has been working with boards. In that time, one pattern has stayed remarkably consistent: it is rarely a board's competence that lets it down. Directors are, almost without exception, capable, experienced, well-informed people. What determines whether a board is genuinely effective is something harder to see than experience or qualifications: how it behaves in the room.
I have had the privilege of working with a hugely diverse range of boards and senior leadership teams, and I have sat in on discussions where every individual director was sharp, credible and well-intentioned, yet the collective outcome was weak. What was the issue? Groupthink went unchallenged, a dominant voice went unquestioned, and a dissenting view was raised once, quietly, and never followed up. None of this shows up in a skills matrix. All of it shows up in a crisis.
Regulatory frameworks and codes of governance have become considerably more sophisticated over the years in describing what a board should be composed of. They have far less to say about how a board should behave once its members are in the room together, and that is precisely where most of the risk I have encountered in practice actually sits.
This is what led me to develop a simple diagnostic model for board behaviour, one I now use regularly in my facilitation work. I call it the Behavioural Governance Index. It does not replace the usual tools of board evaluation, such as skills audits, tenure reviews and independence checks. It sits alongside them, asking a different question: not who is in the room, but how the room actually behaves and which dynamics either enhance or derail decision-making.
A leader who struggles to invite challenge behaves differently in a one-to-one setting than a whole board does collectively, but the underlying dynamic, a discomfort with dissent and a preference for closure over enquiry, is often strikingly similar. Boards are simply teams with higher stakes, shorter meetings and considerably less time to build trust in the room. I have spent much of my career facilitating this kind of work with teams, yet boards, in particular, rarely make time for it. The behavioural patterns that shape whether a team thrives do not disappear at board level. If anything, they matter more because the decisions carry further and the room has fewer chances to correct course.
Nine behaviours, one wheel
The Behavioural Governance Index is a useful tool for discussion. It scores a board across nine behavioural dimensions, each rated from one to ten: curiosity, courage, trust, independence, accountability, perspective, adaptability, evidence and learning. Plotted together, they form a wheel rather than a bar chart, and that shape matters. A board does not need to be strong everywhere. In fact, very few are. What it cannot afford is a significant gap, a dimension where the wheel collapses inward while everything around it looks healthy.
I started to examine behaviour as much as I listened to the content of the discussion, and here is one important observation: boards often do not have clearly defined decision-making criteria. This means that a majority of nods or loud statements is taken as a “yes”, while outside the room, at the coffee machine or later by email, a different conversation emerges.
That collapsed point is where risk concentrates. I have seen boards with excellent strategic thinking and real financial rigour that were nonetheless slow to challenge a persuasive chief executive, simply because courage and independence were quietly underdeveloped. On paper, nothing was wrong. In the room, the conditions for a serious blind spot were already in place.
One refinement I have found particularly useful is scoring the board twice: once through its own self-assessment and once through independent observation, often mine as facilitator, the chair's, or the senior independent director's. The gap between those two views is often more revealing than either score alone. A board that rates its own courage highly, while an outside observer sees something closer to comfortable consensus, has just identified its next piece of work.
The other dimensions tend to reveal themselves in quieter ways. A board weak on evidence may still discuss data at length but not always interrogate it, treating a well-produced chart as the end of the conversation rather than the start of one. A board weak on adaptability will revisit a prior decision as though changing course were itself a kind of failure, rather than a sign that the board is paying attention. A board weak on learning will experience the same near miss more than once, often with a faint sense of familiarity in the room that nobody quite names. None of these issues appears as a crisis in the moment. They accumulate quietly, which is exactly what makes them dangerous.
What the mitigations actually look like
Diagnosing the gap is only useful if it leads somewhere. In practice, I have found that the response needs to differ depending on whether a score is genuinely low or sitting in the uncomfortable middle.
A low score usually means that a mechanism simply does not exist yet. A board scoring poorly on independent judgement, for instance, often has no formal practice of recording dissent and no habit of testing whether silence means agreement or simply reluctance to speak. The fix here tends to be structural: building something new into how the board operates, as a standing practice rather than a one-off conversation.
A mid-range score is a different problem. The behaviour exists, but inconsistently. I have worked with boards where genuine curiosity was visible in some meetings and entirely absent in others, often depending on which items were on the agenda or which directors happened to speak first. Here, the work is less about invention and more about discipline: making an occasional good habit into a reliable one.
Here is how this plays out in practice
I have used this distinction directly in facilitation. With one board wrestling with a persistently low trust score, the intervention was not a training session on trust, but a change to how the agenda itself was structured: protected time without executives present and an explicit invitation from the chair to raise concerns before, rather than during, a vote. Within two cycles, the self-assessment and the external observation had moved measurably closer together.
With another board, the issue was not courage but a specific pattern: the same one or two directors consistently absorbed the role of challenger, while others stayed comfortably quiet. Resolving the problem involved suggesting a rotating responsibility for raising the difficult question on major decisions, so that challenge became a shared function of the board rather than a trait belonging to a couple of individuals.
A third example illustrates the same point from a different angle. A board I worked with scored respectably on accountability in aggregate: decisions were made and actions were noted, yet outcomes were rarely revisited once the immediate decision had passed. Each quarter, the board met, and review after review showed limited movement on actions, particularly around culture change. The gap was structural: nothing in the board's rhythm asked, “What happened as a result of what we decided last time?” Adding a standing item at the start of each meeting, with five minutes spent reviewing the outcomes of the previous quarter's major decisions, made accountability something the board did together, on a schedule, rather than something left to whoever happened to remember.
Why this matters beyond the boardroom
This is why the diagnosis matters. The gap between competent and genuinely effective so often comes down to something this simple: does the room behave in a way that allows its collective intelligence to surface, or does it quietly suppress it without anyone quite realising?
Policies and governance are a big part of board success, but it is much harder to write a policy that produces genuine curiosity or the kind of trust that survives real disagreement. These things cannot simply be mandated into existence. They have to be built deliberately, meeting by meeting, in ways that are visible enough to measure and specific enough to act on. That is the gap this model tries to close, not by adding another compliance requirement, but by giving a board and its chair a shared, practical language for a set of dynamics that everyone in the room can sense but few have a structured way to discuss.
Read more from Gillian Jones-Williams
Gillian Jones-Williams, Emerge Development Consultancy
Gillian is Managing Director of Emerge Development Consultancy, which she founded 25 years ago. She is a Master Executive Coach working with many CEOs and managing Directors globally. She is also an international speaker and in 2020 was named by f: Entrepreneur as one of the leading UK Female Entrepreneurs in the #Ialso campaign. In 2024 she was awarded Businesswoman of the Decade by the Women’s Business Club. Gillian founded the RISE Women’s Development Programme, which is delivered both in the UK and the Middle East, and in Saudi and is her absolute passion. If you want to know more about our Diversity and Inclusion solutions, or leadership and management development, please get in touch. We are working with many organisations on their Diversity and Inclusion interventions, strategies, policies and programmes. For more information, contact us on 01329 820580 or via info@emergeuk.com. She is a Certified Non-Executive Director and has spent three decades working with boards and leadership teams on the behaviours that determine how well they function together.
