Sadly, way too often. In our comprehensive report titled Benchmarking board performance: 500 board reviews later, we included a detailed article on this matter. That article reported that around 25% of the more than 500 boards we had reviewed had some form of dysfunction.
We say that this is the elephant in the room that boards, directors and company secretarial associations do not want to talk about. We also pointed out that many of that 25% do not know they are dysfunctional. And many do not have the capacity or the will to fix the problem.
We defined dysfunction as an impairment that has or is likely to adversely impact the board’s performance, effectiveness, and decision-making significantly.
Some of the many causes and fixes were included in that article.