EDITORIAL: THE STATE OF BOARD EFFECTIVENESS IN 2025

The fourth annual Board effectiveness: A survey of the C-Suite from PwC and The Conference Board gauged the perspectives of more than 600 top executives at a wide range of companies and found that only 30% of C-suite executives rated their board as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ with a massive 92% wanting at least one of their board directors to be replaced.

For one of this month’s reports, Board Intelligence combed through the data from over 1000 board members, executives, and governance professionals to see if this level of frustration was justified, what the blocks to board effectiveness actually are and what boards can do to improve their performance.

The first finding they had was that board directors themselves are raising concerns about their board performance. For example, 74% of directors believe their board should spend more time on their organisation’s big-picture vision and goals. And, year-on-year, the proportion of directors who think their board is stuck in the weeds is rising —from 71% in 2022 to 80% in 2024.

They then looked at the quality of the information provided for the boards. Too often board packs fail to deliver what directors need —being poorly written, badly structured, and over-long. When board packs don’t hit the mark, they not only waste valuable preparation time, but they also make it hard for directors to navigate the discussions and decisions on the agenda with confidence.

Board packs are increasing in length, the average board pack for a £500m+ turnover business is now 294 pages long, up from 267 pages in 2023. And in addition 55% of directors said that they receive their board packs under five working days before their board meetings, with 20% rarely or never getting the pack on time.

The research also showed how thinly boards are now stretched, and how often their efforts are focused on the wrong things. The average board meeting for a £100m+ turnover business now lasts 3 hours and 48 minutes and covers 11 agenda items. That means, at best, each item gets only 21 minutes of discussion time. Hardly conducive to thinking rigorously or reaching considered conclusions.

Although boards today are actively looking to improve their effectiveness, they are still held back by a lack of evidence about the drivers of that effectiveness. Helpfully, with boards’ increasing use of technology and the emergence of AI tools that can gather and analyse a wide range of datapoints about board performance and operations, directors now have the capacity to put the drivers of their own performance under a microscope, as they would the drivers of organisational performance.