Do Boards Deserve Their Ratings? The Perception Gap Board Evaluations Keep Missing

Executive confidence in boards is at a record high, but the closer you look at who holds that confidence, the less reassuring the record becomes. 

The latest research on board effectiveness contains a finding that should give chairs pause. Executives who work closely with their boards rate them highly, but executives at a distance do not. The gap between the two groups is wide enough to raise an awkward question about which of them is right. The honest answer is that most boards cannot say, because the evaluation process they rely on gathers its evidence from the first group and rarely hears from the second. 

How Do Executives Rate Board Effectiveness in 2026?

The headline numbers look excellent. PwC’s Governance Insights Center, working with The Conference Board, surveyed 524 C-suite executives at US public companies between September and November 2025, and 41% now rate their boards as excellent or good, a record for the survey and a marked improvement on the 29% who said the same in 2021. 

The detail underneath is less comfortable. Confidence is concentrated among the executives who spend the most time with directors, and among those who rarely interact with the board, just 17% give it the same rating. The record high, in other words, belongs to the inner circle. 

A second study from 2026 shows how far the pattern extends. When Board Intelligence surveyed 405 directors, CEOs, and CFOs across four regions, it found that the seat determined the score even inside the boardroom. Among chief executives and finance chiefs, 27% said their board does much to enable innovation, but only 12% of the non-executive directors on those same boards agreed, and just 37% of directors overall saw their board as essential to value creation. Nobody in either study is looking at the same board and seeing the same thing, which is exactly what makes the ratings hard to trust. 

Why Executives Closest to the Board Rate It Highest

There is a charitable reading and a less charitable one. The charitable version holds that CEOs and CFOs see the full picture. They watch directors debate tradeoffs, ask hard questions, and improve management’s thinking, while executives further out see only the outputs, which tend to arrive as requests for more slides and decisions delivered without context. The less charitable version holds that closeness breeds loyalty, and that directors end up being graded by the people they share dinners with. 

The data cannot settle which version is true, and that is precisely the trouble. When an assessment produces one answer at the top of the house and another two levels down, the board does not learn how it is performing. It learns who it has been asking. 

The Risks of a Board Perception Gap

The most immediate risk is practical. The executives who rate their boards poorly are the same people who will be asked to carry out board decisions when the pressure is on, and their skepticism will shape how much energy and candor they bring to that work. 

The deeper risk is that the doubters may be right. In the same PwC survey, executives named overboarding (47%), slower responses to emerging risks (35%), and difficulty keeping pace with digital transformation (34%) as the leading constraints on board effectiveness. Directors share some of the unease, since only a third of those surveyed for NACD’s 2026 Governance Outlook expressed high confidence in their board’s collective skill set. And the consequences are already visible in decisions, with 86% of directors in the Board Intelligence study saying their board’s own processes had contributed to a delayed, rushed, or poor decision within the previous six months. 

None of these weaknesses appears in a self-assessment completed by the directors themselves, and only some of them surface in conversations with the two or three executives the board knows best. A board can carry them for years without anyone naming them in the boardroom, which brings us to the mechanism that is supposed to prevent exactly that. 

Do Standard Board Evaluations Miss the Gap?

The annual evaluation exists, in principle, to catch problems like these. In practice, the typical evaluation follows a comfortable script. A questionnaire circulates once a year, directors confirm that they are broadly satisfied with themselves, a summary is noted in the minutes, and the document is filed until the next cycle. The format survives because it satisfies a governance expectation without threatening anyone, which is also why it changes so little. 

Set against the perception gap, the design flaw is plain. An evaluation that gathers its evidence from the directors themselves, plus perhaps the CEO and CFO, is polling exactly the people the research identifies as the most generous raters. It does not miss the gap by accident. It is built on one side of it. 

The people watching from the executive floor have noticed. In the PwC and Conference Board survey, nine out of ten executives said the board assessment process could be improved, with the greatest opportunity in what happens after the questionnaire, since assessments carry the most weight when they inform succession planning and drive follow-through on board input. Executives want evaluation that reaches further and leads somewhere, which is a different request from wanting more of it. 

What Separates a Useful Board Evaluation from a Ritual

Boards that get real value from evaluation tend to do four things differently: 

• They gather evidence from a wider circle. Structured and confidential input comes from executives beyond the CEO and CFO, so that the 17% are heard alongside the 41%. 
• They look in both directions. Board effectiveness is a system with management inside it, so a review that examines only one side of the boardroom table will misdiagnose problems that live in the relationship. In the same PwC survey, nearly a third of executives said management itself could be more transparent about key risks and provide clearer follow-through on board input. 
• They give the findings teeth. Every finding gets an owner and a deadline, each director receives feedback on their own contribution rather than a share of a full-board average, and the results are allowed to change who sits on the board, who chairs its committees, and what reaches the agenda. 
• They treat evaluation as ongoing maintenance rather than a yearly event. Deloitte’s 2026 governance outlook points the same way, counting ongoing director education and regular reassessment of board composition among the practices that keep governance effective. 

The thread running through all four is consequence, and consequence is what to test for: could the evaluation, even in principle, change anything about how the board works? An assessment that can never lead to a change in board composition, a new committee chair, or a refreshed agenda is a survey rather than an evaluation, and directors can tell the difference. The difference feeds on itself, because people calibrate their candor to the stakes. Contributors who see findings produce visible change engage seriously with the next review. Contributors who watch their input disappear into a filed report learn to answer accordingly, which means a consequence-free evaluation does not merely fail to improve the board. Year by year, it loses the ability to see the board at all. 

But where should the consequences point? Directors have already marked the spots. In NACD’s 2026 outlook, directors ranked CEO succession planning as the board practice most in need of improvement, and more than 60% pointed to strategy execution as the area where board oversight most needs to get better. Answers like these are an admission that parts of the board’s own work are underperforming, and an evaluation is how any individual board finds out whether its own succession planning or strategy oversight belongs on that list. A review that tests the board against the practices directors already doubt turns its findings into a concrete agenda rather than a general resolution to do better. Boards have no shortage of improvement targets. What most lack is a process that turns targets into change. 

Where Does an Independent Board Evaluation Fit In?

Everything above is easier said than done internally, because the person running an internal evaluation reports, one way or another, to the people being evaluated. An independent reviewer changes that arithmetic. Directors speak more openly to an outsider who offers confidentiality and has no stake in the answers, and executives who would never criticize the board in an internal survey will describe its blind spots to a third party in detail. 

This is the work Stanton Chase’s board services practice was built for. Our evaluations gather confidential input from directors and the executives who work with them, so the review captures the full range of views rather than the friendliest ones. We examine whether the board’s composition, dynamics, and structure are working for the company instead of checking whether duties were technically performed, and we return individual, honest, and actionable feedback to every director rather than a satisfaction score for the group. Boards come out of the process knowing where they stand with the people they lead, what to change, and in what order. If your board’s last evaluation produced a filed report and an unchanged agenda, that is worth a conversation before the next cycle comes around. 

About the Authors

Çağrı Alkaya is the Managing Partner of Stanton Chase London and the Global Chair of the firm’s board, a role he took up in 2025 after serving as Global Vice Chair for Regions. He has worked in executive search and leadership advisory since 1999, with work spanning board services, CFO, and transformational C-suite appointments across industry and services, and particular attention to organizations facing transformation, growth, succession, or a greenfield build. He began his career in the business assurance division of Coopers & Lybrand, working in audit, due diligence, and risk management before moving into search, and in 2002 he co-founded a boutique leadership consulting firm that joined Stanton Chase in 2006. He also serves as a non-executive director of two professional services organizations. 

Mikael Stelander is the Managing Partner of Stanton Chase Helsinki, the office he founded in 2005, and the firm’s Global Functional Leader for Private Equity. He conducts C-suite searches for clients worldwide across the technology, industrial, and private equity markets, where his placements include chief executives of public companies and the founding CEO of a business that went on to become a unicorn. Alongside search, he advises boards and leads management and culture assessments, having earlier led the firm’s technology practice and served as its Vice President for EMEA. He holds a Master of Science in Economics from the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, and he works in English, Finnish, and Swedish.