When association volunteer leaders exclude the CEO from their board self-assessments tool, that’s a missed opportunity. Including one voice among many doesn’t skew results; it strengthens them.
Board self-assessments are among the most valuable tools associations can use to strengthen governance, improve effectiveness, and ensure the board is operating at its highest potential. Yet many organizations make a common and costly oversight: They exclude the CEO from contributing their insight to the process.
The reasoning is understandable on the surface. Many CEOs serve as ex-officio, non-voting members of the board. It can feel procedurally tidy to limit the assessment to those with voting authority.
But governance isn’t just about voting. It’s about advancing organizational performance, which relies on a healthy board-staff partnership, effective leadership utilization, and measuring whether the board is truly moving the association forward. On all those dimensions, the CEO has something essential to offer.
A Unique Vantage Point
The CEO occupies a singular position in any association: close enough to the board to understand its culture and dynamics yet operationally embedded enough to see how board decisions ripple through the organization. Board members see governance through their own participation. The CEO sees it through its consequences. That difference in perspective isn’t a liability; it’s an asset.
When board members struggle to put their finger on what isn’t working, the CEO can frequently name it. They’ve watched how board deliberations translate (or fail to translate) into staff direction. They’ve felt the friction when roles are unclear, when strategic priorities shift without warning, or when committee structures create confusion rather than clarity. Including the CEO in a board self-assessment surfaces insights that board members might sense but not be able to articulate — and when those insights appear in the results, board members often recognize the truth of them immediately.
“In our experience using ASAE’s BSA tool with over 50 associations, we have experienced only two occasions where the CEO was excluded. Frankly, in both cases this was a red flag which highlighted a toxic organizational culture,” said governance expert Mark Engle of AMC Consulting.
Partnership, Not Evaluation
There’s a cultural argument to be made as well. When the CEO participates in the board self-assessment, it signals something important: Governance is a shared endeavor. It reinforces the partnership between board leadership and the chief executive. It builds trust. The board isn’t simply being graded by staff; the CEO is investing in the board’s development alongside them.
This kind of trust is foundational. Boards that operate in a silo—evaluating themselves without input from the person who interacts with their work most directly—miss a critical feedback loop. Associations thrive when the board and CEO are genuinely aligned, and the self-assessment process is one of the most natural opportunities to nurture that alignment.
One Voice Among Many
For those concerned about the CEO’s input skewing results: the math simply doesn’t support that worry. As the average size of a high-performing board is 15 members, the CEO’s response represents one data point in a much larger dataset. It can inform the conversation without dominating it—and when CEO feedback diverges meaningfully from board members’ self-perception, that gap itself becomes a valuable discussion point.
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