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 predetermine
