Curt Merlo/theispot.com
Many companies around the world have made significant progress in adding a higher proportion of board directors from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as women and people of color. But despite the increased diversity, many boards lag on inclusivity — that is, ensuring that diverse voices are actually heard and that all board members are able to contribute to decision-making.
In our interviews with more than 25 board and committee chairs and 20 nonchair board members, a contradiction emerged: Chairs overwhelmingly believed that they led inclusive boards, but many board members disagreed.
This pattern mirrors findings from a recent Egon Zehnder global survey of board directors.1 While most chairs reported that they create inclusive spaces, only half of board members said their boards were actually inclusive. Men were significantly more likely than women to agree that they “can bring their full selves to the boardroom.”
This disconnect between what chairs and directors perceive matters. A board can be diverse — which means that people with a variety of different perspectives, backgrounds, and demographic profiles are seated around the table — without being inclusive. Without explicit inclusive leadership from the chair, a board that is diverse can actually see its effectiveness reduced rather than enhanced. Research on groups and teams shows that when a wider range of perspectives enters a discussion without being accompanied by enabling conditions, communication breaks down, factions form, and decision-making slows.2
Boards today face complex strategic challenges, including geopolitical uncertainty, climate risk, disruptive technologies, stakeholder activism, and rapid shifts in consumer value systems. They need the cognitive diversity brought by different lived experiences, disciplines, and backgrounds. But to benefit from that diversity, chairs must create environments where all directors feel able to speak up — even when their perspectives challenge prevailing views.
Defining the Inclusive Board
In our interviews, we asked the question “What does an inclusive board mean and look like to you?” The answers we received can be distilled into the following definition: An inclusive board is one where every board member feels respected, valued, and empowered to contribute, regardless of background, identity, or expertise. An inclusive board fosters a culture in which diverse perspectives are actively solicited and thoughtfully considered, ensuring that all voices are heard. Importantly, an inclusive board does not mean that everyone’s input has equal weight in decision-making; rather, it ensures that decisions are enriched by the breadth of input and made transparently, with clarity around how and why certain viewpoints shape certain outcomes.
However, we discovered that many chairs unintentionally overlook certain behaviors that meaningfully shape their boardrooms. The unintentional part is really important: Every chairperson we talked to expressed their intention to create inclusive boardrooms. And the nonchair directors with whom we spoke emphasized that even in the least inclusive boardrooms in which they sat, there was never the feeling that the chair wanted to exclude certain people or voices. The chairs just weren’t aware of the implications of their actions or failure to act.
Based on our interviews, we identified five overlooked behaviors that any chair, regardless of personality, leadership style, or cultural context, can implement to foster a more inclusive board. These aren’t the obvious behaviors — such as “ensuring that everyone speaks once” or “asking good questions.” They are less visible, more structural, and more consequential behaviors that the board members we interviewed consistently identified as shaping inclusion. And these behaviors span before, during, and after meetings. When chairs use the behaviors intentionally, they shift boards from simply looking diverse to harnessing their diversity in the discussions they have and decisions they make.
Previous research has suggested that the inclusivity of boards is dependent on the chair’s traits.3 But we have witnessed inclusive (and non-inclusive) boards run by chairs who are introverted, extroverted, analytical, relational, hierarchical, consensus-seeking, and everything in between. Inclusion is not about who the chair is. It’s about what the chair does.
Five Ways Board Chairs Can Act More Inclusively
The board members we interviewed repeatedly highlighted a consistent set of behaviors that shaped their feelings of inclusion, but the board chairs overlooked, underestimated, or misunderstood those behaviors. Here are the key ways chairs can ensure more inclusive board meetings:
1. Use pre-meeting calls to understand perspectives, not to control them. What happens before the meeting itself matters. Pre-meeting calls with individual directors ahead of board meetings are de rigueur for many chairs. But the purpose and format of those calls vary widely — and matter greatly. Some chairs and board members cited pre-calls as detracting from inclusivity, while others cited them as contributing to inclusivity. Pre-calls during which the chair tries to align with certain members ahead of time, expresses their views on specific positions that they want the board to take, or discourages dissent on certain issues all detract from inclusivity. As one seasoned board member told us, “I am terrified to learn that board members voice their views in pre-calls versus in the boardroom and that they do not dare speak up [in the meeting].”
Pre-calls can better promote inclusivity when they are used to review the upcoming agenda to ensure that, based on the directors’ perspectives, nothing is missing. They may also be helpful in mapping the landscape of opinions and, in particular, to surface “quiet voices” and then encourage the more reticent to speak up in the actual meeting. Finally, they are also helpful in building relational trust, especially with newer members who might need to socialize certain ideas before putting them in front of their peers.
For such pre-calls to enhance inclusivity, board members need to be confident that the calls occur with all members, not a select few. If chairs contact only some directors and not others, they’ve created a second board within the board.
2. Frame agenda items for discussion, not presentation. How chairs introduce agenda items shapes who speaks, what gets surfaced, and whose voices carry weight. Board members described two typical approaches — one oriented to presentations, and the other to discussion.
In the former scenario, the chair walks through a topic, outlines key considerations, and only then asks for input. This structure tends to bias the group toward the presenter’s framing, limit dissenting voices, reinforce hierarchical dynamics, and reward directors already aligned with the dominant perspective.
A chair who is oriented toward discussion will introduce the topic, state why it matters, and open the floor to the others before offering a personal perspective. This invites more diverse viewpoints, encourages questioning and constructive disagreement, allows lower-status members (those with a non-CEO background) to speak without contradicting the chair directly, and signals that the decisions are not predetermined. While our interviewees noted that discussion-style meetings can feel messier, they consistently reported that they lead to better decisions and greater inclusion.
One former chair and current board member who sits on the boards of multiple publicly listed companies told us that when he chaired, ahead of the meeting, he circulated a one-page summary on each issue describing why it mattered to the company, and the CEO’s and/or executive team’s perspective on the topic. He then indicated whether it was a topic that was merely up for discussion (and, if so, why it was on the agenda) or whether the board would be making a formal motion on it. He also indicated the time that would be allotted for the agenda item so that directors would know how much discussion would be possible.
Chairs should open the conversational space before narrowing it, and delay their own viewpoints until the board’s perspectives have surfaced. They can also separate discussion from decision-making.
3. Demonstrate hearing, not just listening. All of the chairs we spoke with said that they not only invite everyone to speak up but also signal active listening through nodding, making eye contact, and so on. In fact, active listening was the most common inclusive behavior mentioned by chairs. Nonchair directors told us that these cues are insufficient. Instead, they look for deeper indicators that their contributions were heard, valued, and integrated.
One important way of doing this is to call on directors based on their expertise. Several directors shared stories about meetings in which their domain expertise (such as sustainability, cybersecurity, or AI) was directly relevant to the agenda — and yet the chair did not invite their perspective. At the same time, chairs should avoid confining directors to their perceived expertise. Some chairs believe that they are being efficient by calling on directors only when a topic aligns with their past functional role or domain of expertise, but board members said that this practice reinforces silos, discourages cross-disciplinary thinking, restrains growth and contribution, and sends subtle signals about who “belongs” where.
Likewise, chairs should signal that everyone has their full attention. The most exclusivity-building behavior that directors cited was chairs appearing to favor certain board members by giving them more time to speak, asking them more follow-up questions, making more eye contact with them or smiling at them, and making more frequent references to them (“As Jackson said …”).
4. Ensure that seating arrangements reflect equal distribution of power. Physical space, especially in a boardroom, communicates status and relationships. When it came to creating inclusive board environments, the chairs often had one thought about what led to inclusive seating while the directors had another. More than three-fourths of the chairs we talked to said that they explicitly think about where they sit relative to the other directors. Specifically, they said that they are careful not to sit at the head of the table — a position that denotes power and authority. But when we talked with board members, they mentioned that it was where others sat (relative to the chair) that made the difference.
Most board members preferred assigned seating over free seating. In the latter case, they told us, the higher-status members gravitate toward the chair, while newer members or those from underrepresented groups end up in more peripheral seats, which results in limited side conversations and static influence channels. Directors advocated for assigned seating that is regularly rotated. This disrupts power clusters by preventing the same individuals from forming an inner circle, distributes proximity to the chair, and enables varied informal interactions. New seating leads to new side conversations during breaks. One board member sat on a board where, at every break, the seats were rotated. She said that this provided a new dynamic that allowed for different conversations to emerge within the different seating constellations. However, if there are members of the board with hearing impairments, the chair should ensure that they are regularly seated in a central location so that they don’t miss out on the conversation.
5. Ensure that all members have access to the same information and people. Inclusivity extends beyond meetings. The board members we spoke with also highlighted the importance of equal access to internal stakeholders and information.
Some chairs grant members unfettered access to company executives and employees, whereas others require directors to route all interactions through them. Directors did not express a preference for one model over the other. What mattered most was consistency. Boards became less inclusive when some directors had informal access and others did not; certain members were quietly gatekept.
Directors also emphasized the importance of equitable access to information — particularly committee-level documents. Most chairs said they shared these documents broadly, beyond just the committees for which they were intended. But many nonchair directors reported that only half the boards on which they were serving actually consistently received committee documents. Without question, committee chairs need deeper knowledge and awareness of certain issues on their desks. And when chairs share the documents exclusively within committees, it creates information asymmetry, signals whose perspectives matter, reduces some members’ confidence to speak during discussions, and introduces a hierarchy of insiders versus outsiders. We also heard that inclusivity is enhanced when committee chairs are required to give a comprehensive update during the broader board meeting on what they discussed in the committee. The rule of 6:1 is a good one: Each 60-minute span spent on an item in committee should have a corresponding 10-minute update in the broader board meeting.
Two Additional Practices That Boost Inclusion
Beyond the five core behaviors mentioned above, chairs and directors described two additional practices — neither of which occur around meetings — that meaningfully strengthen inclusive boardrooms: explicitly measuring board inclusiveness and providing board members with opportunities to receive training to fill knowledge gaps.
There are a couple of ways that we have seen chairs effectively measure board inclusiveness. The first is to do it during annual conversations with directors, and the second is to have an outside party measure it through a survey or interviews.
Chairs typically hold yearly one-on-one conversations with directors. Few explicitly ask about inclusion, but those who do generate richer insights and deeper trust. Effective questions can include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Over the past year, when did you feel most included or heard in board discussions? Why?
- Were there times when you felt that your voice was overlooked or undervalued? What was it that made you feel like your voice wasn’t heard or valued?
- Have you ever hesitated to speak up on the board? When was that, and what kept you from speaking up?
- To what extent do you feel that your background and experience are recognized on the board? What is it about the board that leads you to feel this way?
- Do you possess experiences, skills, or perspectives that you feel the board has not tapped into?
- How connected do you feel with your fellow board members outside of formal board interactions? What might make you feel more connected?
- Are there any formal or informal board practices that you think unintentionally exclude some members?
- What support or changes from me, as the chair, would help you feel more engaged or valued on our board?
Such questions normalize conversations about inclusion without making them political or personal. They can also surface board members who might feel less included. And they signal that the chair explicitly cares about the topic.
Another option is to have an outsider, such as a board assessment consultant or academic expert, conduct surveys and interviews. For one board, we surveyed the directors about specific inclusion behaviors, including balanced participation and evidence of listening. At the start of each subsequent meeting, the chair reviewed the aggregated results with the full board and invited discussion of any patterns that required attention. Over time, this consistent feedback loop helped members adjust their own behaviors, reduced dominance effects, encouraged quieter voices to contribute, and fostered a shared sense of accountability for how the group listened. As these listening norms improved, the board became more forward-looking and able to engage in strategic initiatives that strengthened the organization’s prospects.
Helping members close expertise gaps is essential as boards increasingly face complex topics — AI, sustainability, cyber risk, geopolitics — on which only a few directors might feel confident contributing. Some boards even provide their directors with an education budget. One director described staying silent during AI discussions because she felt unqualified and uninformed. Recognizing this, her chair sponsored optional AI training for all directors. Afterward, more directors felt empowered to contribute to these discussions. By investing in learning, the chair democratized influence. This expertise gap can also apply to knowledge about the company. Providing newer board members with onboarding briefings about the organization, its history, and its current strategy can bring them up to speed and allow them to feel more confident to speak during meetings.
Traditional assumptions about strategy, governance, technological readiness, and stakeholder expectations are shifting rapidly. The boards most likely to navigate these shifts successfully will be those that fully capitalize on the diversity of thought sitting around their tables. But that cannot happen without intentional inclusive leadership. We repeatedly heard that inclusion is not an outcome of good intentions; universally, the chairs we spoke to and heard about had good intentions. Inclusion is the output of consistent, conscious behaviors. The encouraging news from our research is that the intention is there and all behaviors that we cited above are accessible, learnable, and controllable. And incorporating those behaviors is unmistakably the chair’s job.