Hope is not a strategy! The boards that navigate complexity, drive transformation and prevent crises are rarely the ones with the most credentials. They are the ones with people who can lead in the boardroom, who can influence without authority, see around corners, and hold the organisation to account while stewarding its mission with courage and care. Yet often Board recruitment practices, still privilege credentials over governance leadership.
Beyond the skills matrix: the boardroom behaviors that raise performance
Most board recruitment today follows a predictable choreography. Identify a gap in the matrix. Draft a job description that mirrors it. Hunt for candidates who “tick” that box. We convince ourselves this is scientific: define the needed skill, assess qualifications, appoint accordingly. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it is useful to know what technical knowledge you need at the table. Skills matrices capture technical expertise, sector exposure and functional strengths. They signal diligence and reassure stakeholders.
But sometimes they miss the point when it matters most. The false precision of “We need climate expertise” too often becomes a proxy for “We need someone who can navigate the existential strategic, financial and reputational questions climate poses for our mission.” Climate risk is not a climate problem; it is a strategy, funding, operations and trust problem. “We need fundraising experience” becomes “We need someone whose address book opens doors,” when what’s often required is a director who can level with the board about trade-offs in a world where bilateral aid contracts are shrinking, pooled funds are consolidating, and philanthropic capital is seeking different kinds of returns.
Boards in our sector face fewer technical puzzles and more adaptive challenges. Localisation and shifting power, restricted funding amid geopolitical volatility, AI’s disruption of service delivery and programme integrity, the decolonisation of aid and the expectations of the communities we serve, these are not problems you solve with credentials alone. They are navigated by leadership in the boardroom: courage to face uncomfortable truths, an ability to synthesise across domains, deep organisational intuition, future orientation, and a governance presence that elevates the whole board’s performance.
What we consistently underrate
When I look back at the most effective board appointments I’ve been part of, they share five leadership capabilities that rarely dominate recruitment briefs but overwhelmingly determine impact.
The first is strategic courage that transcends a preference for easy consensus. We say we want collaborative directors, but too often we recruit for comfort. The leaders who make a difference are those who can voice dissent when it is uncomfortable, test assumptions rigorously and keep relationships whole.
Second, the ability to make sense across domains is more valuable than singular depth. Specialist expertise matters, particularly in audit, risk, and safeguarding. But boards are collective bodies; their power lies in integration. The best board leaders can connect dots between programme performance and donor appetite, between AI policy and frontline safeguarding, between climate adaptation and treasury strategy for example. One of the most valuable board members I’ve seen was a former ambassador who had never worked in development operations but had spent a career reconciling competing interests at negotiation tables. He could translate complex geopolitical shifts into implications for partnerships, brand, staff security and funding flows faster than any subject specialist, and helped the board govern the whole, not the parts.
Third, organisational intuition beats sector pedigree. Sometimes we over-index on “comes from our world” and underweight the skill of understanding how organisations move. A board member who can read the informal networks, spot where resistance lives, and support management in sequencing change without breaking trust is worth their weight in gold. Ask them how they influenced without authority. Probe how they navigated politics in previous roles. If the answers stay at the level of strategy and never descend to people, pay attention.
Fourth, future orientation trumps pattern-matching. Boards often reach for what worked before, especially under pressure. But the next decade will not reward precedent. The boards that stumbled through COVID, or were blindsided by shifting donor conditionalities, were not blind; they were tethered. The leaders you want on your board habitually scan beyond their field, think in scenarios, and are comfortable making decisions when data lags.
Finally, governance presence beats executive gravitas. Sometimes we are seduced by accomplished executives with commanding presences. Some are excellent board members; many are not. Governance leadership is horizontal, not vertical. It is the discipline to ask questions rather than give orders, to challenge without grandstanding, to influence peers rather than direct reports. When references describe a candidate’s boardroom manner as “curious, firm and generous,” I listen. When they say “decisive, takes charge,” I probe for how that shows up in a non-executive context. A board seat is not a command post.
Why processes sometimes screen out exactly who we need
If you recognise the capabilities above, you may also recognise how easily our processes filter them out. Job descriptions routinely privilege tenure, sector stamps and formal credentials. People who have crossed boundaries, between sectors, functions, geographies, often don’t “fit” the neat list of requirements, despite being exactly the kind of sense-makers you need.
We also fall prey to executive bias. We assume the best board members are sitting or former CEOs and C-suite executives. Some are. But the muscles that make a superb chief executive can be counterproductive at the table: speed to solution, comfort with authority, impatience with ambiguity. Many brilliant executives are mediocre board members; many brilliant board members were never CEOs.
Then there is the safe-choice syndrome. Under reputational pressure, especially in our sector, boards recruit people who look like success. This is human. It is also how you recreate groupthink and miss perspectives rooted in lived experience. Unconventional paths, cross-sector partnership leads, individuals who have orchestrated enterprise change, regional leaders who have navigated fragile contexts, often bring the diversity of thought we claim to prize, but they can frighten some selection panels conditioned by precedent and politics.
Finally, organisations often interview for harmony, not impact. We ask if we “like” the candidate. We discuss “fit”. Simulating real work is often ignored in the process: can this person help us wrestle a contested strategic choice to the ground? Can they dissent without derailing trust? Can they distil complexity for a room under pressure? We often neglect to ask those who have sat alongside them as peers, “What happened when they were in the minority? Did they stay engaged, or withdraw?”
In short, we say we want board leaders, then we design a process that selects board members.
Recruiting for leadership capability, not comfort
This is where Committee Chairs earn their keep. The change begins before you draft the brief. When I work with boards at SRI Executive, we start with the adaptive challenges in front of you, not the skills you lack. Are you grappling with a pivot to locally led programming? Are you preparing for a shift away from reliance on a single donor? Are you rethinking how AI affects programme integrity and mission delivery? The answer reorients the brief from “digital expertise” to “a director who can help us work through what AI will do to our funding model, our values, and our approach to risk.”
The sourcing strategy follows the same logic. If you only fish in the “board-ready” pond, you’ll catch what everyone else does. The leaders you need may be hiding in plain sight: the programme lead who brokered a cross-border partnership against the odds; the diplomat who has steered multi-country agreements with asymmetric power; the transformation lead who re-architected a federation without rupturing relationships; the fundraiser who pivoted a revenue model when a government contract disappeared.
Assessment must then mirror the work.
We also test chemistry, not in the superficial sense of “getting along”, but in the deeper sense of elevating the board’s collective capability. We have them meet multiple members of the board, not just the Chair. Afterward, we ask a simple question: will this person make us better, or simply make us bigger?
Our 99% fill rate is a point of pride; more important to us is the pattern we see in balanced longlists, more inclusive appointments, and directors who stay and are entrusted with greater responsibility.
What this requires of Board Chairs & Nomination/Selection Committees
I say this with respect and empathy: your recruitment philosophy matters more than your process. If you believe your problem is “We need X expertise”, you will recruit a credential. If you believe your problem is “We need to get better at Y adaptive challenge”, you will recruit a leader. The difference is not semantics; it is the difference between a board that manages and a board that governs.
You also must model what you seek. If you want directors who challenge constructively, you must welcome challenge. If you want future orientation, you must resist governing by precedent. If you want diversity of perspective, you must be willing to hold the discomfort it brings. Recruitment is downstream of board culture. The best process in the world cannot compensate for a room that tacitly rewards conformity and punishes dissent.
This takes courage. The safe choice is the credential everyone recognises. The right choice may be the candidate who makes some of your colleagues uneasy, precisely because they will stretch the board. I have seen chairs take that bet, choosing the community leader over the corporate name, the cross-sector integrator over the sector celebrity, and watched their boards become braver, more agile, more trusted by the people they serve.
The development sector is living through a once-in-a-generation period of transition. Funding is more precarious, stakeholder expectations more demanding, and the speed of change relentless. This is not a time for boards to seek comfort. It is a time to seek capability.
Closing the Leadership Gap in Board Recruitment
Organisations have professionalised governance, charters, committees, evaluation cycles, and that is progress. But many have not professionalised for leadership in governance. Often the result is technically competent boards that sometimes lack strategic courage and adaptive nous. You cannot train that into a room in a two-hour session. You select and nurture for it.
As a partner to impact-focused organisations across seventy countries for nearly three decades, I’ve learned that the boards that thrive are not those with the most impressive CVs on their website. They are the ones whose members exhibit the posture, presence and principles to navigate what’s coming, who can hold mission and market realities together, who can interrogate power and still move forward, who can lead as peers. That begins with how you recruit and how you set expectations from day one.
If you are a Chair or a member of a Nomination/Selection Committee, pull out your last board recruitment brief. How much of it describes credentials, and how much describes leadership capabilities in the specific governance context you face? Where you put the weight is where you will land. And if that realisation stings a little, you may be closer than you think to the board you need next.
At SRI Executive, we will continue to back rigorous, values-led board appointments with evidence, inclusivity and a guarantee that reflects our confidence. But even more than that, we will continue to challenge the premise of the brief, because we are here to strengthen governance that powers mission. In a world that needs resilient, impactful organisations, recruiting for leadership in the boardroom is not a luxury. It is an obligation.
