Elevating Board Leadership: The essential role of chair training

Chairing an enterprise board is a serious governance role. It is arguably the most powerful position in a corporation and, yet, one that comes with no codified authority and almost no formal training. While CEOs are coached through decades of executive grooming, MBAs and 360-degree feedback loops, board chairs are largely expected to improvise. Much like parenting, most chairs learn by watching others, for better or worse. This has led to a proliferation of ineffective or ceremonial chairpersons, coasting on seniority, status, or mere survival.

If you are seeking to chair a board with gravitas and purpose, rather than preside with ambiguity, there are indeed programmes designed to cultivate this rarefied skill. They are a few, scattered across continents, and often cloaked in the elite world of governance think tanks and global business schools.

Let’s start in Switzerland, where the IMD offers what may be one of the most rigourous and respected board leadership intensives: The Role of the Chair. This biannual, in-person programme runs for two days and is tailored to sitting or incoming board chairs who want to master the subtle arts of agenda-setting, CEO management, stakeholder balancing, and steering boardroom dynamics. It’s the sort of course where governance meets diplomacy; teaching how to lead and enable leadership among peers.

Crossing hemi-spheres, the Non-Profit Training’s Board Chair programme, based in Australia, offers a more concise approach. Designed especially for non-profit boards, its three-hour online sessions delve into the essentials of chair effectiveness, meeting culture and values-based governance. While these sessions are less corporate in nature, they address the soft-power skills vital to good chairing: listening, guiding and intervening with tact. For first-time chairs or those transitioning from executive to board roles, these digital intensives provide accessible orientation without high vcosts.

The Institute of Directors (IoD) runs a two-hour CPD-certified online course called Leading from the Chair. Open to current IoD members, this session focuses on the essentials: clarifying the chair’s function, orchestrating boardroom debate, and managing tensions between independence and cohesion. This is one of the more scalable training options for those needing foundational insight with limited time.

Heading westward, Canada’s Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) offers a more intensive route with its Chairing Boards programme. Delivered online across four modules of three hours each, this course is tailored for directors moving into chair roles in public companies, pension boards or large institutions. It’s not inexpensive, but what it lacks in brevity, it makes up in depth, covering everything from succession oversight and crisis handling to ethics, stakeholder dialogue, and tone from the top.

For those who want the Ivy League experience of board chair training, look no further than INSEAD’s Executive Education programme, Leading from the Chair. Held over three days in-person at the Fontainebleau campus in France, this €9,000 course is as luxe as it is comprehensive. It is immersive, case-driven, and heavily peer-interactive. As of now, the next session is already waitlisted. Participants range from Fortune 500 chairs to family-owned business stewards.

On the other end of the world, IoD New Zealand runs an in-person, Chairing the Board programme. This two-day course distills decades of governance wisdom into actionable frameworks, all shaped by New Zealand’s strong emphasis on stake-holder capitalism and indigenous governance principles. While rooted in local context, many of the lessons are universal: how to build consensus, calibrate authority and hold the CEO accountable without overreaching.

Together, these programmes signal a quiet evolution in preparing veterans to chair roles. The notion that chairing a board is a skill, not simply an honourific, is finally gaining traction. In an era where boards are under unprecedented pressure from activist shareholders, regulators, employees, and even algorithms, the old model of an aloof, ceremonial chair is increasingly untenable. Chairs must now be curators of culture, stewards of time, and guardians of risk. They must inspire debate without chaos, guide without micromanagement.

To be clear, attending a few days of training doesn’t a great chair make. But in a domain where no formal pathway exists, these offerings matter. They create a shared vocabulary. They prompt reflection. And they may just save a company from the quiet mediocrity of a disengaged boardroom.

So, yes, board chair training exists. And, for those with the humility to learn, and the courage to lead, it may be the most important investment in governance they’ll ever make.

Muneer is a Fortune-500 advisor, start-up investor and co-founder of the non-profit Medici Institute for Innovation. Ward is global board advisor, coach and publisher. X: @MuneerMuh