Only 37% of CEOs say their board has their back.
That's a Spencer Stuart figure from 2025, and it stopped me. Because it means most CEOs are sitting across from the most experienced group in their professional life, the people meant to support them, and feeling they're on their own.
I know a CEO who spends too many Sunday nights building a hundred-page board deck. Not because he wants to. Because the board keeps asking for more. More detail, more backup, more slides to pre-empt every possible question. So he gives them more, every quarter, and walks into that room armoured. And he told me he still dreads it every single time.
Here's what I said to him. Every extra slide you add doesn't make the board trust you more. It trains them to ask for more. You think you're satisfying them. You're teaching them to manage you.
There's a reason the board is the one relationship almost every CEO gets wrong. It's the only room in your professional life where the power is inverted.
Everywhere else in the company, you're the most senior person present. In the boardroom, you're not. They can remove you. And that single fact quietly shapes everything: how you prepare, what you share, how much you hold back.
It makes CEOs reactive. You stop leading the moment you walk into that room and start defending. The board asks for detail, you supply it, and each round tightens the same dynamic: they examine, you justify.
A hundred-page deck doesn't signal command. It signals a CEO who has accepted the role of the managed, not the leader. And the more thoroughly you answer every question, the more questions they feel entitled to ask. You can't deck your way out of a trust problem.
Underneath it all is one confusion.
Most CEOs mistake governance for relationship. Governance is the formal machinery, the quarterly meeting, the papers, the votes. It matters. But if the only time you engage your board is inside that formal rhythm, you don't have a relationship. You have a series of exams. And nobody feels safe walking into an exam every quarter with people who can end their career.
The best CEOs I work with have flipped this.
For them, the board meeting is almost boring, in the best possible way. Nothing surprising happens in the room, because everything real happened before it.
Every one of those moves asks you to be more exposed, not less. That's exactly why most CEOs never make them, and never discover what a board can be. They're so busy defending against the board that they never get to lead it.
And it costs them. Companies are 60% more likely to hit or beat their growth goals when the board works in close partnership with the CEO (Spencer Stuart).
A well-led board is one of the biggest assets a CEO has. Experience and judgement you can't buy, and air cover when things get hard, all sitting right there. Most leaders never touch it.
So this week, one question:
Are you preparing to defend yourself, or preparing to lead a room? Your board can always tell which one you're doing.
If this is the relationship you want to get right, I'm going deeper on it live.
I'm running a free 45-minute masterclass for CEOs, The Power Seat: how to turn your board and executive team into your most powerful allies. The board is one half of it. Your executive team is the other. And there's a third relationship that quietly shapes both, which almost nobody names. We'll get to that on the call.
Places are limited, CEOs only, to keep the conversation real.
👉 Register here: https://luma.com/vebl8wxp
Andrea
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.