Does your board practice emotional intelligence in meetings?
Boardroom evaluations are a vital part of good governance and are a legal requirement for many organisations (e.g. UK listed businesses). Yet how many evaluations measure emotional intelligence around the boardtable?
A boardroom evaluation helps identify whether a board is performing effectively, making sound decisions and fulfilling the boards strategic, financial and legal responsibilities. But the effectiveness of board evaluations has often been questioned, particularly in recent years following a number of high profile scandals (e.g. Carillion, Post Office) where one of the ‘big 4’ had given both these organisations a clean bill of health following their board evaluations (IOD, 2024).
In our opinion, and based on our team’s extensive exposure to a diverse range of boards across 30+ industries there is one crucial factor that many board evaluations overlook: emotional intelligence, measured by their emotional quotient (EQ).
You can have a boardroom full of brilliant minds, but if emotional intelligence is lacking, performance, relationships, and ultimately, organisational outcomes can suffer. One of the most critical elements of emotional intelligence is self-awareness and its absence often shows up in subtle but extremely dangerous and powerful ways in the boardroom. How self-aware are your board?
Our latest insights explore the role of emotional intelligence in board effectiveness, with a particular focus on self-awareness and why it should be a central item in your next boardroom evaluation. No matter what size your business, having a boardroom evaluation can be critical in protecting your organisation and your board.
Why Boardroom Evaluations Are Imperative
Boardroom (or board effectiveness) evaluations are structured reviews of how well a board functions. Whilst some organisations (e.g. listed PLCs) are legally required to conduct independent evaluations we recommend every board has an independent review to help protect organisations and society as a whole.
How else do you know how your directors are performing?
Evaluations assess governance, decision-making, skills, relationships, all critical elements linked to the board’s effectiveness and impact on organisational culture.
Evaluations can be conducted internally (by the Chair or Company Secretary), or externally (by an independent governance expert), or by an independent third party such as a non-executive director.
The challenge with the Chair, or even Company Secretary conducting the reviews it is is a bit like marking your own homework – it is difficult to see things when you are part of them. Because perceptions, power dynamics and expertise are critical when deciding on how, who, when, why, where and what feeds into a board evaluation. Typically evaluations explore:
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- Board composition, diversity, and skills
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- Clarity of roles and responsibilities
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- Meeting dynamics and decision-making processes
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- Oversight of risk, compliance, and strategy
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- Relationships between board members and executives
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- The culture and tone set by the board, and chair
Which, in reality, many boards would struggle to do without external expertise and an independent eye.
One of the most critical elements of any evaluation is often missing. Because Psychologists are often not part of the assessment. Psychologists are experts in human emotions, motivations and behaviours, so the value they can add is phenomenal. As experts in behavioural insight (the human dynamics that truly shape how a board really operates) their input can, and has, significantly impacted board performance across a wide range of our clients because of their impact on decision making, focus and the ability to work collectively.
Emotional Intelligence – Is This The Hidden Driver of Board Success?
All humans are influenced by their emotions. An emotion is a strong feeling, often instinctive or intuitive, derived from a person’s circumstances.
Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s ability to recognise, understand and manage their own emotions, and is linked to their ability to empathise with and influence others. It is not about shutting down or closing emotions, but recognising they exist.
In the boardroom, emotional intelligence (which is measured by the emotional quotient) enables:
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- Directors to remain calm under pressure
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- Professional constructive challenge
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- Stronger relationships across the board and the executive team
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- Improved decision-making as individuals and a collective
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- Better conflict resolution
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- Inclusive, psychologically safe dynamics
Boardrooms are not just places of strategy, where leadership theory prevails. They are spaces where high-stakes conversations, conflicting priorities and large personalities often converge. Which is why technical skill alone isn’t enough. This is only one half of the coin.
When our consultants are working with emotionally intelligence boards, the Directors tend to:
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- Ask better questions
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- Listen more deeply
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- Challenge without creating defensiveness
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- Adapt their approach to meet the needs of different stakeholders
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- Prioritise legal and governance requirements protecting self, employees and organisation
In a boardroom where there is a lack of emotional intelligence, even the best-intentioned boards can become risk-averse, disengaged or divided.
So how can this be avoided?
Self-Awareness: Is The Cornerstone of Boardroom Effectiveness
In our opinion, based on over 30 years of experience across numerous industries, the most important (and often most overlooked and underestimated) component of boardroom effectiveness is self-awareness.
Think about the Post Office scandal. There were over 900 sub-post masters wrongfully convicted of theft under the stewardship of over 50 directors. The one thing that was missing was self-awareness. If the directors had been self-aware, or even open to listening the scandal could have been avoided. The investigation and enquiry is uncovering how Directors refused to publish information they didn’t like, or agree with – the very opposite of being self-aware.
Self-awareness is the ability to:
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- Understand your own thoughts, emotions and behaviours
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- Recognise how your actions affect others
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- Acknowledge blind spots, biases and limitations
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- Accept feedback and adapt constructively
Directors who are not prepared to feel uncomfortable, or listen and seek to understand, with a curious mindset, help create and fuel scandals such as the Post Office or Carillion.
In the boardroom, self-awareness supports:
✅ Better Relationships
Because self-aware directors are more likely to recognise when they’re dominating, interrupting or shutting down conversation and they are able to course-correct in the moment.
✅ Constructive Challenge
Directors need to challenge, but self-awareness helps them do so thoughtfully, ensuring professional approach without ego, reactivity or point-scoring. Helping promote psychological safety.
✅ Better Decisions Under Pressure
When emotions run high, self-aware leaders can pause, reflect and most importantly choose a response suited to the situation, rather than reacting on impulse or defaulting to groupthink.
✅ Growth and Improvement
A board is only as strong as its willingness to learn. Self-aware directors invite feedback, acknowledge when they’re wrong, and model the continuous improvement they expect from others creating and leading a culture of growth across their organisation.
Self-awareness missing?
In reality, there are two types of people those who think they are self-aware (95%) and those that really are self-aware (10-15%). Tasha Eurich explains more, because for many of us we don’t do introspection well, especially when we ask “why we do things“.
When self-awareness is missing, then the loudest voices dominate while the others stay silent, creating a culture which doesn’t foster growth.
Egos get in the way of objectivity, with individuals needing to be heard for their own reasons, as opposed for that of the organisation or business.
Over time, if not checked, then meetings become performative, not productive, and there is an increasing risk of the board potentially missing its role in understanding organisational issues.
On the surface a board may look (much like the Post Office board) as if they are high performing and meeting their requirements. Because many of these issues often sit below the surface, they can be difficult to spot in tradition evaluations.
Because unless psychological safety, emotional intelligence and the quality and productivity of relationships is evaluated then board evaluations fall short. Much like the board evaluations produced by one of the big 4 for Carillion and the Post Office, giving them a clean bill of health shortly before the scandals broke.
How Do We Embed Emotional Intelligence into Board Evaluations?
Any Director can assess their own emotional intelligence (EI), but real transformation happens when EI is assessed and developed collectively across the board.
In a rapidly changing world, boards that embed emotional intelligence into their evaluation processes are better equipped to lead with empathy, adaptability, and strategic clarity.
If you’re ready to future-proof your board, it’s time to put emotional intelligence in the spotlight.
If you’d like support, reach out to Sarah Clarke for a free 30-minute Emotional Intelligence consultation. In the meantime, here are four practical ways to bring EQ into your board evaluations:
1) Undertake Behavioural Feedback
Traditional board evaluations often focus on technical competencies or industry-specific insights. But to truly understand a board’s effectiveness, you need behavioural feedback on how directors interact, communicate and challenge one another.
To do this gather insights from across the organisation to capture how board members are perceived, especially in relation to trust, collaboration, empathy and self-regulation.
Employees at various levels often see what goes unseen in formal evaluations such as relationship tensions, unspoken power dynamics, or emotionally unintelligent behaviours.
Prioritise behavioural data to get a true picture.
2) Facilitate Board Reflection
One of the most effective ways to build emotional intelligence is through guided reflection. Creating space for directors to explore how they behaved in key moments, what they said, how they said it, and why they said it, can unlock deeper self-awareness and team growth.
Psychologically safe, professionally facilitated workshops enable directors to reflect without judgement.
This encourages openness, surfaces hidden motivations, and builds stronger alignment. Reflection transforms individual insight into collective improvement.
3) Observe Board Dynamics
Boards are more than the sum of their members. Because boards are shaped by unspoken norms, power plays, and interpersonal dynamics.
Inviting an independent observer, such as a Business Psychologist, to study how your board operates in real time can be hugely revealing.
Because it is not always about what is said, but how it’s said and who is (or isn’t) heard.
Observing tone, body language, timing, and patterns of contribution provides invaluable data which can help improve boardroom dynamics.
The goal isn’t to judge, but to understand and enhance the relational health and effectiveness of the boardroom. This is what a Business Psychologist is an expert in.
4) Assess Culture Fit & Influence
Boardroom culture is more than policy, because it is the lived experience of “how we do things around here”. Each director contributes to, and is shaped by, and also helps shape their organisational culture.
Understanding how individual behaviours align with or influence the board’s shared norms is essential.
By assessing both fit (how well a director embodies the board’s desired values and behaviours) and influence (how their presence shapes the wider organisational culture), boards can ensure alignment, inclusivity, and long-term effectiveness. Afterall, a successful organisation is sustainable.
Emotional intelligence isn’t a “soft” skill but, when understood and embraced, it is a strategic asset.
By embedding EQ into your board evaluations, you will unlock stronger collaboration, better decision-making and a healthier sustainable organisational culture.
Book your free 30-minute consultation with Sarah Clarke to explore what this could look like for your board.
It’s time to treat emotional intelligence as a core boardroom competency, not a soft skill. The future of governance demands it.
