Is your board too polite to be effective?
Effective boards foster a climate of constructive challenge where directors can disagree without weakening trust.
Boards today face sustained pressure on multiple fronts: geopolitical shifts, the pace of artificial intelligence, cyber security and data governance concerns, and heightened regulatory and stakeholder expectations.
Under sustained pressure, boards must balance competing demands, including control and collaboration, trust and vigilance, harmony and honest challenge, and short-term results and long-term resilience.
How a board balances challenge and harmony depends on its culture, which in turn shapes its effectiveness.
Yet, boards rarely fail because of open conflict over issues. More often, they fail because of what goes unsaid. Tensions beneath a composed exterior can diminish a board’s effectiveness long before any visible rupture occurs.
Board conflict climates shape effectiveness
A 2024 study by Marilieke Engbers and Svetlana Khapova of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, based on data from 17 Dutch boards, is instructive. Boards need both cognitive conflict and cohesiveness to be effective. Boards that avoid conflict may be cohesive but not effective. The study identifies four board conflict climates arising from how boards manage the tension between conflict and cohesion.
1. In a compliance climate genuine cohesion is perceived, but this rests on a strict adherence to roles and agenda: each director defers to whoever is seen as responsible for or expert in a given topic, leaving available expertise and dissenting views unused.
2. In a pseudo-cohesive climate, the board appears united but isn’t truly aligned. Directors privately disagree, voice doubts informally, and exchange concerns on calls, despite well-organised meetings. This climate obscures real issues.
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3. In a conflict climate, disagreements are public, but relationships suffer. Directors openly challenge one another, and trust diminishes, causing the board to divide into factions.
4. In an agree-to-disagree climate, directors openly debate while maintaining strong relationships. Disagreement is seen as a normal part of work, not a sign of fractured cohesion. In this environment, board diversity can add value.
This is the climate that effective boards aim to foster.
Board conflict management styles shape board climates, which may shift among these four types depending on the issue at hand, the level of pressure, and the chair.
Recognising the climate a board is in at any given moment is an important step in shaping board effectiveness.
What goes unsaid in the boardroom
PwC US’s 2026 Annual Corporate Directors Survey shows that over half of directors believe at least one peer should be replaced, yet many hesitate because of collegiality, awkwardness, and board leaders’ reluctance to discuss difficult topics.
Often, the opportunity to raise these issues is lacking.
In difficult boardroom situations, a director’s concerns may go unspoken, not due to a lack of a director’s voice, but as a patterned response to a relational environment.
Directors may privately doubt a decision but assume others are fine with it, so no one challenges it.
Research by Engbers and Khapova in May 2026 describes how unspoken tensions take hold on boards through four self-reinforcing stages, a pattern the authors call the spiral of the unsaid.
It begins with a trigger. A director notices something that doesn’t sit right: an awkward question, a chief executive’s stressed tone, or an important issue crowded out by the agenda.
Silence follows. Rather than naming the concern, directors dismiss or downplay it, or attribute it to a colleague’s personality, individualising what is often rooted in unshared, unchallenged assumptions. The concern then shifts to informal channels.
It surfaces in corridor talk and private calls, while board meetings remain calm. The real conversation happens elsewhere.
Over time, the unspoken accumulates and eventually breaks through – as overt conflict, a director’s departure, or a loss of trust that no single meeting could create.
When directors feel they lack sufficient expertise on a topic, such as artificial intelligence and cyber risks, they tend to defer to others or focus on procedural matters and amplify silence in the boardroom.
The role of the chair is central to whether disagreement becomes a constructive challenge that strengthens decision-making or a source of destructive tension that undermines board effectiveness.
Building an agree-to-disagree climate
Boards can foster a climate in which disagreement is productive rather than suppressed. Regular collective board reflexivity and shared norms for conflict are important because implicit assumptions and fault lines can silently shape decisions.
Three practices can help boards recognise and discuss interpretative differences.
First, identify the tension before debating the answer. How directors position themselves vis-à-vis each other and management, such as agency and stewardship, is key. For example, is it balancing growth vs risk, or confidentiality vs transparency?
This shifts the conversation from who is right to what the board is navigating.
Second, distinguish understanding from decision-making. Allocate time to analyse an issue before acting to prevent agenda saturation.
Third, monitor side conversations. If crucial discussions occur outside meetings, the board isn’t fulfilling its role. Consider asking what’s being discussed informally that should be raised in the meeting.
The boards best equipped for the next cycle are not necessarily the most harmonious, but those that can tolerate disagreement long enough to learn from it and reflect. Effective boards make room for important, sometimes uncomfortable, questions.
The writer is a Governing Council member of the Singapore Institute of Directors.
