Moving Beyond the Board Skills Matrix

I have sat through many conversations about Board succession, and most eventually arrive at the same tool.

The skills matrix.

Someone is retiring, so we look at what skills might be leaving with them. We map the capabilities around the table, identify the gaps, and build a profile for the next director.

There is nothing wrong with that approach. It is a useful discipline and certainly better than recruiting someone because they are well known or familiar to people already at the table. But in my work with Boards, and serving as a Director on a few, I have increasingly wondered whether we put too much faith in what the matrix can tell us.

A skills matrix for an AEC firm Board can tell you that you have someone who understands finance, someone with deep industry experience, someone who knows major project delivery, and someone who has been through an ownership transition.

What it cannot tell you is whether those four people basically see the world the same way - and that matters a great deal.

Some of the most effective people I have worked with on Boards were not valuable because they filled an obvious box. They were valuable because they saw something the rest of us did not. They asked the question that changed the conversation. They were willing to sit with an issue longer when everyone else was ready to move on. Sometimes they were a little irritating, and in hindsight, that was often the point and the value.

Chip and Dan Heath wrote about the "Curse of Knowledge" in Made to Stick. Once we know something deeply, it becomes difficult to imagine what it is like not to know it. Boards can develop their own version of that problem.

Put enough capable people around a table who have travelled similar career paths, worked in the same industry, and developed similar instincts about what good looks like, and you can end up with a Board that is extremely experienced and surprisingly narrow at the same time. Nobody can see what nobody can see.

That does not mean we should throw out the skills matrix. It still has an important place and serves a critical diligence function. I would suggest Boards put another layer over it to make succession more robust.

Before deciding what credential the next director needs, spend time thinking about how the current Board actually thinks. Where do we agree too quickly? What assumptions have become so accepted that nobody challenges them? What kinds of questions rarely get asked? And what perspective is simply missing from the room?

Then recruit for that too, because good Board succession is not just about replacing skills that are leaving. It is also a chance to change the conversation that remains.

Sometimes the best person to add is not the one who fits most comfortably into the matrix. It is the person who causes everyone else to think a little harder.

How is your Board testing for diversity of thought, not just diversity of skills?