In June 2025, the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Magazine published a useful article on ‘How boardroom face-offs can improve strategy.’
The author’s thesis was simple: the best decisions rarely emerge from easy agreement. They come from robust, respectful challenge. Or, in the words of my most influential teacher from school – ‘If we’re all thinking the same, someone’s not thinking.’
The author lists five keys to a healthy board culture, which the Chair must lead –
1. Accept the discomfort of people disagreeing with us;
2. Listen to every voice;
3. Remain relentlessly curious;
4. Don’t assume you’re always right – easier said than practised; and
5. Set a healthy tone for everyone in the boardroom.
It’s stimulating to sit in a boardroom where these form part of the board’s DNA. But what about those boards where directors don’t all play naturally by the same rules, or who forget the ratio of ears to mouths we’re born with? Some experienced directors become impatient with directors slower to reach the same (ie their) view. Conversely, newer directors may feel nervous about disagreeing with a director twice their age, with many years more experience on the Board
Over the years, I’ve come across several ways to help bridge this gap.
1. Debate Judo:
We often feel uncomfortable when someone disagrees openly with us – ‘You’re wrong, I’m right.’ This approach often leads to each of us talking past the other, not listening but butting in to promote our view. It seldom leads to a constructive way forward.
If you don’t agree with the previous speaker, but feel awkward for whatever reason about confronting them, try this instead: ‘Clearly we disagree on this. Help me understand your view.’ This will probably catch your colleague off balance – they’re expecting a push back, but you draw them in – and can create the best chance of them becoming more conciliatory. They may even ask you to do the same. Whether it results in total alignment, you haven’t conceded your position, nor necessarily accepted the opposing view, but you’ve opened a path to a constructive discussion, with your differences acknowledged.
2. ‘Here’s what I wrote’:
We’ve all known directors who fit the description ‘often wrong, but never in doubt.’ This is precisely when you need to speak up.
For those newer or less confident board members reluctant to disagree with a more experienced member, especially if they’re responding to a point made confidently and strongly, here’s an extension to ‘Debate Judo’:
While you’re reading your Board pack before the meeting, physically write down your thoughts and initial views. Then, in the boardroom, if you find yourself disagreeing but uncomfortable about saying so directly, you can say, ‘Here’s what I wrote when I was reading the pack … it’s clearly different. Help me understand your view.’
Again, this is non-confrontational and more likely to lead to a reasoned discussion than a head-on disagreement, especially between two Board members of varying experience and confidence.
3. Watch for the quiet one:
As in a medical triage tent, the loudest voices at the table may not be the ones in greatest need of being heard – although you may have heard their views several times by this stage.
An astute Board Chair will look for the quieter director – who has watched the discussion range around the table, with varying degrees of heat – but hasn’t yet offered her or his view. I used to work with a Chair who had an uncanny knack of picking exactly when to invite this director to speak. So often it was exactly the circuit breaker we needed – her question cut straight to the issue, or her comment shone a completely new light on the subject under discussion.
Watch for the director’s body language – that half smile, brief frown or raised eyebrow, which gives you a clue that they have a view worth hearing.
Sometimes, of course, there’ll be some other reason for a director remaining silent. Are they disengaged, unprepared or out of their depth? Whichever it is, you’ll need to address that too – probably outside the meeting.
4. The Devil’s Advocate:
A wise Chair I know had built his Board into a very effective governing unit. But he sensed that the directors all got along so well with their colleagues that they had become reluctant to disagree with one another.
Before the start of the meeting, the Chair would ask one director to play Devil’s Advocate for the day. This job was to challenge the majority thinking or emerging consensus, to ask the uncomfortable questions and question the unspoken assumptions. Used sparingly, this was a neat way of keeping directors alert, making sure they thought about the matter, rather than simply agreeing with the previous speaker or with the CEO’s recommendation.
Wisely, also, he chose the day’s ‘agreeable disagree-er’ carefully: sharing the task around the room, so nobody became type-cast, and not selecting a director who was known as a strong proponent for matters on that day’s agenda.
The four approaches I’ve outlined are designed to strike a healthy balance between outright conflict around the board table and descending into group-think, where it becomes socially unacceptable to disagree with Board colleagues or – sadly, more often – a dominant Chair.
The key for you as Chair is to build sufficient trust and mutual respect among your directors, so that when one speaks the others listen and consider, even when it may be uncomfortable to do so.
Then your job is to pick the moment to summarise and draw the Board to a collective position, from which you can make your decision.
Disagreeing agreeably is not about being polite for its own sake and we won’t always get it right, but we’ll have given ourselves the best chance of doing so. That’s the most we can hope for when we’re making complex decisions, on limited information, about an unknown future – which, surely, is the Board’s job.
Chairing the board 