Deeper Dive: Role of the Chair
Behind every high-performing board of directors is an equally high-performing board chair whose “duty,” according to Don Lowry, chair of the board of Capital Power, “is to be level-headed and comfortable thinking the unthinkable—based on a strong grip of the purpose of your enterprise.”
Chair involvement and engagement, in areas such as agenda setting or working with management, informed the full extent of our main report. However, when we asked our interviewees what they regard as the most important aspects of the role of the chair in the current environment, many of them landed on a number of the same key points.
One area, the chair-CEO relationship, we’ve broken out into a separate Deeper Dive, “Working with the CEO.” The remainder are presented below. The first three roles can be considered either new or rapidly evolving in significance. The other two are fundamental responsibilities taking on added importance as the speed and complexity of change continues.