Restoring Trust to Your Board of Directors – Trust or Consequences

Every useful board eventually encounters considerable internal strife.

Qualified board
members are typically people who are intelligent, informed, and principled. It is little wonder,
then, that a room full of such people can generate quite a bit of tension, and in the face of
misunderstanding, distrust is easily bred. “How can she think like that?”; “He’s just advocating
for what will advance his career!”

Once board members have lost mutual trust, effective
decision-making becomes unlikely, and the fissure will creep through the whole organization
either by politicizing it into actively warring camps, or by paralyzing it as management seeks to
avoid being perceived as taking sides.

William A. Andrews, Stetson University

Campus Box 8398, Deland, FL 32724

386 822 7437 [email protected]

Full Story: http://www.sbaer.uca.edu/research/usasbe/2007/data/papers/cases/002.pdf