Every principle covered so far this quarter, the governance and management line, the first chief executive hire, delegations of authority, runs through one relationship in practice. The AICD's own Director Tools series describes it in exactly these terms: the relationship between the chair and chief executive is critical, an engaged business relationship where professional and personal trust and respect are paramount in an environment of constructive challenge. That is a precise description, and it is worth taking seriously that a governance body has judged this single relationship important enough to warrant its own dedicated guidance.
What the role actually requires, according to the aicd
The AICD's guidance on the chair's role describes the position as the bridge between board and management, ensuring board decisions are communicated to management through the chief executive, offering guidance without stepping into day-to-day operational detail, precisely the governance and management boundary discussed earlier in this quarter. Regular meetings between chair and chief executive are described as the norm, with updates from those conversations shared back with the full board. This last point deserves emphasis: the chair's regular contact with the chief executive is not a private channel that substitutes for board oversight. It exists precisely to feed board oversight, which is the entire difference between healthy chair engagement and the inner board risk discussed earlier in this quarter.
The counter-intuitive research finding
A frequently cited piece of research on this relationship, a study of eighteen board chair-executive pairs conducted in California and published through Nonprofit Quarterly, reached a genuinely counter-intuitive conclusion worth naming directly. The prevailing governance advice, clarify roles, document responsibilities, follow the job description, explained comparatively little about which partnerships actually worked well. What distinguished the strongest relationships was not adherence to formal role definitions but genuine trust, built through an ongoing process of give and take, with each party adapting to the other's style over time rather than defaulting to a fixed script. Reliance on rigid role structure showed up specifically in the lower-trust relationships, used as a substitute for genuine working understanding rather than a complement to it.
This does not contradict the delegations of authority and governance boundary discipline covered earlier in this quarter. Clear structure remains genuinely necessary. What the research adds is that structure alone does not produce a good chair-executive relationship, and a board that believes a sufficiently detailed role document will substitute for the actual relationship work is solving only part of the problem.
A precisely worded delegations document and a well-drafted chair role description will not, by themselves, produce a functioning partnership. They create the conditions for one. The partnership itself still has to be built, deliberately, by two people choosing to trust each other under pressure.
The asymmetry worth knowing about
Separate UK-based research from the Association of Chairs, surveying both chairs and chief executives on what makes their partnership work, found broad agreement on the fundamentals, open communication, mutual trust, clear boundaries, but a genuine gap on two specific points. Chief executives rated empathy and respect from their chair, and understanding and support more broadly, considerably more highly than chairs themselves rated those same qualities in self-assessment. The implication is not that chairs are failing at empathy. It is that chairs may be underestimating how much that quality specifically matters to the person on the other side of the relationship, precisely the kind of blind spot a genuine, ongoing relationship surfaces and a governance document never will.
Building the relationship deliberately, not hoping it develops
- Establish a genuinely regular, protected meeting cadence between chair and chief executive, not an ad hoc arrangement that erodes whenever both calendars get busy.
- Commit explicitly to a no-surprises standard in both directions, so neither party learns of a significant issue for the first time in a full board meeting.
- Feed the substance of chair-executive conversations back to the full board as a matter of course, keeping the relationship transparent to the governance body it ultimately serves rather than functioning as a private channel.
- Revisit how the relationship itself is working periodically, not just the organisation's performance, since the research above suggests the relationship's health is a genuine leading indicator of board health more broadly.
This series has spent this quarter building the structural scaffolding, the governance and management boundary, delegated authority, the first executive hire. The chair-executive relationship is where that scaffolding either gets used well or quietly bypassed. Get this relationship right, and everything else in this quarter becomes considerably easier to sustain. Get it wrong, and no amount of precise drafting elsewhere will fully compensate.
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Until next week,
Annie