When it comes to assembling a successful board, sometimes it seems like associations can’t win. They can do all manner of vetting and matrix-building and interviewing and onboarding; they can labor around staying focused and strategic; they can encourage preparation before meetings by making board books so simple they’re effectively a page of emojis. And still, there’ll be that one board member who wrecks things.

You’ve heard that story plenty of times. So have leadership experts Marianna Zangrillo and Thomas Kiel, who interviewed 120 board chairs about the challenges they’ve faced. As they write in Harvard Business Review, they’ve absorbed “many candid accounts about how a single director can make effective board work feel almost impossible.”

Zangrillo and Kiel’s research uncovered three main examples of problematic board members, who I suspect are familiar to most CEOs. There are “passive passengers,” chair-fillers who fade into the woodwork; “dominators” who treat every discussion as a zero-sum game and wrest control from colleagues, and “misguided experts,” who see every issue through the filter of their particular area of specialization. 

The hard part is that pre-board vetting doesn’t always surface these problems before they arise. That’s partly because none of the problematic types are problematic individually. That passive person can look like a team player. The dominator may seem “passionate about mission.” The misguided expert may represent that all-important subject-matter expertise that boards ought to have.

Add to that the fact that once a group of people gets together in a room, there’s no way of telling how people might behave, and which personalities might clash. A passive personality may not intend to “dull debate and diminish expectations,” but something about this year’s group may lead to that kind of waywardness—or, worse, toxicity.

Just as there are three main problematic board members, Zangrillo and Kiel recommend three areas of focus to address the problem: Boards, they write, need to pay attention to the quality of engagement, interaction, and impact. This is tricky, because those are all things that you can only measure qualitatively. You want board members who “lean into the conversation” but who don’t “derail” or “interrupt,” they write. They say good board members should “strengthen debate” and “sharpen judgment,” but the problematic board members are likely confident that they’re doing exactly that. 

That’s not to say that vetting and onboarding aren’t useful. But the article is a reminder that in an association, “board” is a verb—a constant effort to ensure that everyone is aligned on the mission and goals, even if they disagree on particulars. The HBR article points out that structure can go a long way to assist with that, and that leaders should police for “unclear committee roles, poorly sequenced agendas, or too little time allocated to strategy.” 

But because the challenges are behavioral, a board chair’s main skill is an ability to read the room, and address trouble spots quickly in fair, respectful ways. “The chair should work to maintain a disciplined equilibrium in a way that allows disagreement without division, participation without chaos, and expertise without overreach.” 

Easy, right?

No, it’s not, of course. But that means the chair, and perhaps the CEO, need to lead in a way that encourages everybody in the room to be not just a leader of an organization, but a standard-bearer for its culture. Every board chair will find their own way to that, but all of them will have to work under the assumption that the work on alignment doesn’t end when you’ve done the vetting and onboarding.