Why We Wrote The Culturally Conscious Board.

In 2024, I wrote a book in collaboration with my esteemed colleague, Jennifer Jukanovich. The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Table for Impact invites board members, board chairs, and executive directors to master the one competency that changes the world—speaking up. That’s right. It’s that simple.

In our board coaching work, we often overhear the distress of unseized opportunities that unfold simply because of the very human tendency to avoid discomfort. Making decisions alone can be difficult enough for any executive or team leader. Making decisions together can be even more daunting—especially when outsized egos, unshared values, or unsteady confidence enter the mix. In such cases, “Don’t rock the boat” becomes the unspoken rule.

We approach the boardroom table differently.

We acknowledge that a board’s culture may be one of its most underutilized, underrecognized, and hardest-working “employees” in the entire organization. It's there working late at night when no one else is around. It’s the first one at every meeting, setting the table and the stakes for how decisions will unfold. It will be there, biding its time if it has to, waiting out every member’s tenure. And long after everyone on the board today is gone, the board’s culture will still be calling the shots for future generations of leadership.

If that’s true, wouldn’t you want to get to know this employee?

Hopefully, you read that last paragraph through a positive lens—that if such a staffer exists, it’s advancing the best of what a board could hope for in its work. As Michael Gerber reminds us in The E-Myth, “Your organization is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting.”

Hopefully, your organization is getting positive results. Your culture may be one of your greatest assets. But if it isn’t, Gerber’s words may be hard to shake. Your culture could be a serious liability. Either way, it’s happening right now—whether you are aware of it or not. Or, in the language of the book: whether you are conscious of your culture or not.

We vote for boards becoming conscious of the culture they keep. Just like every other asset boards scrutinize on spreadsheets and performance dashboards, we believe the culture they cultivate must rise to that same level of importance and stewardship.

Because when a board has a deeper conversation, an organization will have a deeper impact.