drbrendanmoloney - Essential Steps for Success

No governance structure, committee charter, or set of bylaws can compensate for a poor working relationship between a board or council chair and the university's chief executive. That relationship is the operational core of institutional governance — the channel through which nearly every significant decision, disagreement, and piece of difficult news eventually passes. When it works, a board can move quickly and confidently even under pressure. When it doesn't, even a well-designed governance framework tends to produce delay, mistrust, and, eventually, public dysfunction. Building that relationship deliberately, rather than leaving it to personal chemistry, is one of the essential steps toward effective institutional governance.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Dr Brendan Moloney can guide you through it.

Start With an Explicit Conversation About Role Boundaries

Many chair–president relationships struggle not because of any single disagreement but because the two people were never explicit, early on, about where governance ends and management begins. The chair is accountable for the effectiveness of board process, for ensuring the board holds management to account, and for representing the board externally on governance matters. The president or vice-chancellor is accountable for running the institution. Ambiguity at the boundary — a chair who begins directing operational decisions, or a president who treats board oversight as an obstacle to route around — is corrosive precisely because it tends to develop gradually rather than as a single crossable line. New chair-president pairings benefit from an explicit, even slightly uncomfortable, early conversation about this boundary: what decisions belong solely to management, what decisions require board involvement, and — critically — how the chair will raise it if that line starts to blur. Revisiting this understanding periodically, not just at the start of a new appointment, keeps it from eroding quietly over time.

Establish a Predictable Communication Cadence

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Ad hoc communication between chair and president — reactive calls triggered only by problems — trains both parties to associate contact with crisis. A far healthier pattern is a standing, predictable cadence: a regular one-on-one meeting, weekly or fortnightly depending on institutional scale, that continues whether or not anything urgent is happening. This does two things. First, it gives the president a reliable channel to flag emerging issues while they are still small and manageable, rather than waiting until they are board-meeting-worthy. Second, it gives the chair enough continuous visibility into institutional operations to ask informed questions in full board sessions, without needing to manage day to day. Boards that rely solely on scheduled board and committee meetings for chair-president contact tend to be governing from a position of information lag, discovering issues only once they have already escalated.

Agree in Advance on How Disagreement Will Be Handled

Chairs and presidents will disagree — about the pace of a change, the framing of an issue to the full board, or a judgement call under pressure. What distinguishes healthy governance relationships is not the absence of disagreement but a pre-agreed way of working through it. This typically means committing to two principles well before any disagreement actually arises: first, that disagreements are worked through privately between chair and president wherever possible, rather than surfacing as visible tension in front of the full board or council; and second, that once a decision is reached through proper governance process, both chair and president represent it consistently, even if one of them argued against it beforehand. Boards that lack this discipline often see internal disagreement leak into public or semi-public settings — a divided board meeting, inconsistent messaging to staff — which damages institutional confidence far more than the underlying disagreement itself would have.

Protect the President From Board Micromanagement — and the Board From Being Under-Informed

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The chair sits at the fulcrum of a genuine tension in university governance: presidents need enough operating latitude to lead effectively, while boards need enough visibility to meet their fiduciary and oversight obligations. A chair who shields the president from all board scrutiny is not protecting good governance, they are undermining it. A chair who allows individual board members to intervene directly in operational matters is not supporting oversight, they are enabling dysfunction. The essential skill here is triage: routing genuine governance-level concerns to the full board or the relevant committee, while redirecting operational questions back to management channels, consistently and without exception. Chairs who do this well often find that it actually strengthens the president's authority internally, because staff learn that operational decisions run through one clear channel rather than being second-guessed by individual trustees.

Give the Relationship a Formal Feedback Mechanism

Even strong chair-president relationships benefit from a structured way to surface friction before it hardens into resentment. Many boards handle this reasonably well for the president — an annual performance review against agreed objectives — but far fewer apply the same discipline in reverse: a structured, honest channel for the president to reflect on how the chair and board are functioning as governance partners. A brief, confidential annual conversation, sometimes facilitated by a governance committee or an external advisor, in which both sides can name what is working and what isn't, prevents minor frustrations from accumulating unaddressed for years. This is particularly important because the power asymmetry in the relationship — the board formally oversees and can remove the president, not the reverse — can otherwise make presidents reluctant to raise legitimate concerns about chair conduct or board behaviour.

Plan Deliberately for Transitions on Either Side

Because the chair-president relationship carries so much institutional weight, a change on either side is a genuine governance risk moment, not merely an administrative transition. When a new chair takes office, the outgoing chair and the president should ensure the incoming chair understands not just the formal governance structure but the working patterns, unresolved issues, and relationship history that shape how the board actually operates. When a new president is appointed, the chair carries particular responsibility for establishing the relationship deliberately from day one, rather than assuming it will develop naturally — setting the communication cadence, clarifying role boundaries, and being explicit about how disagreement will be handled, all before either party is under real pressure. Institutions that treat these transitions as significant governance events, worthy of deliberate onboarding rather than informal handover, tend to preserve institutional stability through leadership change far better than those that don't. This relationship-first view of institutional governance is the perspective offered on this site by Dr Brendan Moloney, reflecting the reality that structures and charters matter far less than the working relationship of the people who operate within them.