The situation
In this case, the board itself wasn’t the issue, at least not in any obvious way.
There was a Non-Executive Director who had been involved for a long time, someone who was well regarded, trusted, and closely connected to the founder, with a history that went back to an earlier phase of the business.
Nothing had broken down. The board meetings ran as they always had, discussions were steady, and there was a general sense that things worked.
But as the business had grown and moved into a different stage, there was a feeling, not always stated directly, that the board wasn’t stretching the business in quite the same way.
It wasn’t a question of performance in a formal sense, more that what had once been valuable no longer quite matched what was needed.
What wasn’t obvious
What sat behind it wasn’t about whether the NED was good or not, which is often how it’s first framed.
It was more a question of how their role had developed over time, and how their relationship with the founder had evolved, to the point where independence had softened into alignment.
That tends to happen gradually. Trust builds, familiarity increases, and the dynamic becomes easier, but in doing so it can lose some of the tension that creates real challenge.
The difficulty is that none of that feels like a problem in isolation, so it rarely gets addressed directly, even when the overall effect is that the board is no longer pushing the business in the way it once did.
What we focused on
Rather than approaching it as a question of replacing an individual, we spent time understanding how the board actually operated, how discussions played out, and where challenge was coming from, if at all.
That meant speaking to different stakeholders to get a clearer sense of how the NED was contributing today, how the founder viewed that contribution, and how the needs of the business had changed since the original appointment.
From there, the conversation moved towards what the board needed to look like going forward, not in abstract terms, but in relation to the next phase of the business.
That created a more grounded way of looking at the situation, where the focus was less on the individual and more on the role the board needed to play.
The outcome
The change itself was handled carefully, and it didn’t happen overnight.
There was a clearer understanding of what was needed from the board, which allowed for a more considered transition, rather than a sudden change that risked unsettling the dynamic.
The impact showed up over time. Discussions became more rounded, there was a greater sense of independence in how viewpoints were formed, and the board began to introduce perspectives that hadn’t been present before.
The existing NED’s contribution was recognised for what it had been, but the board moved to a place that better reflected what the business now required.
The TWYD view
What often gets missed in situations like this is that tenure and contribution are treated as if they move in the same direction, when in reality they tend to diverge over time.
The longer someone stays, the more trust they build, but that same trust can reduce the distance that allows them to challenge effectively.
In this case, progress came from recognising that what had made the NED valuable originally was tied to a different stage of the business, and that holding onto that too tightly was limiting what the board could become.
It’s rarely about whether someone has been good or not. It’s whether the role they’re playing still fits what’s needed now.