Fire Your Committees

Two voices show up on the drive home, and neither one was invited. The first recites everything you got wrong — call it the shitty committee. The second recites everything you got right, polishes it, and files the bad day under other people’s failings — call it the bravado committee. One is cruel, one is kind, and you almost certainly trust one of them more than the other. That is the mistake. They have the same defect: neither is working from evidence. Both are reciting a verdict that was reached before the day started, and both are extremely confident about it. That is what a committee does — and neither of these was ever appointed to anything.

The mechanism is small and it works the night you first use it: name which committee is talking. Out loud if you have to. The shitty committee is reciting; the bravado committee is reciting. Naming the committee breaks the trance, because a recital exposed as a recital loses its authority — and then you make the ruling that matters: neither committee gets a vote. Not silenced, exactly. Just never seated. One guard, because this is the mechanism’s own failure mode. After a few months, that is the shitty committee becomes a way to dismiss an accurate signal — sometimes you had a bad day because you were bad that day, and if you are new in the seat, a good deal of that recital is information you do not have yet. So when the recital contains an actual fact, the fact does not go back to the committee. It goes to the board.

What replaces them is the reflective board: the trusted few who were actually in the room — or know you well enough to ask what the room was like. People who will tell you the truth with your interests at heart, which is a rarer combination than either half alone. The test of a real board seat: one name, one question that costs you something to hear answered honestly. If nobody on your board has ever told you something you did not want to hear, you have not built a board. You have built an audience — and the committees stay in charge.

Here is the instrument, and it has a name worth carrying — the board audit. It tells you whether you have a board or an audience. Write down the three or four people you would call after a genuinely bad day. Now, beside each name, write the last thing that person told you that you did not want to hear. Not a disagreement about strategy — something about you. If you can fill in three of them, or all four, you have a board — and you should protect it. If most of that column is blank, that is the finding. Those people may be close, loyal and good company. They are not doing the job, and it is usually not their fault — nobody ever made it safe or expected. The blank column is exactly why the committees keep the chair: nothing from outside ever arrives to overrule them. And that is rarely about the people you chose. Hold that.

One honest difficulty about the board, and it is structural rather than personal. Inside a company, almost everyone close enough to see you has a stake in your continuation: your directs’ candour is bounded by the appraisal you write, and your peers are competing for the same next job. So if you run the audit and the column comes back blank, the finding is probably not that you chose badly. It is that you chose from inside the building. The seat that works is usually someone with no economic tie to you — a peer at another company, your predecessor, someone senior in a different function. And the way to make a seat safe is not to ask for more honesty. It is to act visibly on one piece you did not enjoy hearing, and say out loud where it came from.