Early in a presidency, and especially when conditions are stable, the confidence a board expresses toward a president can feel relational. Alignment feels durable. Board affirmation is often experienced as personal regard rather than institutional support. Those perceptions may be accurate. Even so, they reflect only part of the institutional reality.
Why Board Support is Institutional, Not Personal
Boards support presidents because, at a given moment, they believe the president is the right leader to meet the institution’s needs, keep the institution financially viable, and advance its strategic direction. Under nonprofit corporation law, board members exercise strategic and fiduciary responsibility. Their duties of care, loyalty, and obedience are owed to the organization itself, not to individual leaders or personal interests. As such, board support is inherently conditional—tied to the institution’s evolving needs, perception of fiscal sustainability, risk tolerance, and assessment of what the presidency must deliver in a given moment.
How Stability Masks the Reality of Support
When enrollment is steady, finances are manageable, and external scrutiny is low, the distinction between institutional loyalty and personal support often blurs. Conversations feel expansive. Trust feels mutual. Presidential support feels assured.
Under these conditions, presidents reasonably infer that transparency and performance will sustain board confidence. The relationship feels reciprocal and enduring. This interpretation is neither naĂŻve nor misguided. It is simply contingent on conditions holding.
The Shift: Conditions Change and Governance Becomes Stressed
When conditions worsen—financial strain, enrollment decline, political pressure, or reputational risk—the board’s fiduciary focus sharpens. Risk tolerance diminishes, prior assumptions are revisited, and institutional exposure is reassessed.
In these moments, the presidency is evaluated less as a relationship and more as a governance mechanism for navigating uncertainty. Support can shift quickly, even when presidential competence, effort, and integrity remain intact. This shift is rarely framed explicitly. It is often experienced as sudden.
What changes most immediately is not intent, but posture. The board’s focus turns from long-term horizons to near-term risk management, from partnership to protection. Governance becomes more directive, and expectations for decisiveness increase—even as the conditions required to support that decisiveness erode.
Why Transparency Does Not Guarantee Alignment
Presidents repeatedly hear—at professional conferences, in articles about board culture, and across leadership circles—that being highly transparent with the board builds trust. Those same sources suggest, again and again, that such trust engenders and sustains board support. Over time, these messages are frequently internalized as a governance truth.
Transparency does matter. But it does not, by itself, guarantee continued board support.
Being transparent about risk neither ensures that presidents and boards will interpret that risk in the same way nor agree on how or when it should be addressed. Naming exposure does not produce consensus about response. Candor can, in fact, accelerate reassessment.
Candor and consensus do not always coincide, and the distance between them can place presidents under strain.
Transparency Can Build Trust and Accelerate Risk Assessment
Presidents are expected to be transparent with their boards, especially under stress, and the timing, framing, and level of detail in that transparency matter greatly. Presidents who surface risk early and describe conditions plainly often do so out of institutional responsibility, believing that clarity fosters trust and shared problem-solving. Paradoxically, this level of transparency can place presidents in a more vulnerable position than peers whose reporting preserves a sense of manageability through more cautious or optimistic framing.
This is not because boards punish honesty. It is because the explicit articulation of risk potential alters governance behavior.
How Risk Exposure Triggers Fit Drift
Once risk is fully exposed, boards cannot disregard what they have been told; many feel compelled to act decisively to protect the institution. The board’s fiduciary responsibility moves to the foreground. Their risk tolerance becomes more circumscribed. And they begin to view the presidency less through the lens of relationship and more through the demands of institutional protection.
This dynamic is one of the primary ways fit drift begins to take hold: expectations morph in response to newly visible risk, while corresponding adjustments in support, readiness, and decision-making clarity lag behind.
Transparency is necessary for informed governance, but it is not singularly sufficient to sustain alignment and support as conditions change.
The Speed of the Governance Pivot
What is often most unsettling to presidents is not that boards act in institutional interest but the speed with which their posture changes.
Support that once felt relational becomes procedural. Informal check-ins give way to executive sessions, outside counsel, and tightly managed communication channels. Conversations that were exploratory become prescriptive. Presidents who interpret early warmth as durable backing are especially vulnerable here. The shift feels personal because it is abrupt. The driver, however, is structural.
The Discernment Question Every President Must Ask
When board support cools, presidents often ask a transactional and personalized question first:
How do I win them back?
A more systematic and probing question is harder yet more illuminating:
Have the board’s expectations of what the institution now needs from this role, and what the board is prepared to provide the sitting president, shifted in ways that narrow my ability to lead effectively?
This two-part question shifts the frame from self-preservation to role viability. It moves the focus away from persuasion and toward structural assessment. Rather than asking how to restore confidence in an individual leader, it asks whether the board can make available what the role requires at this moment for effective leadership.
The answer is not always comfortable. Sometimes the gap can be closed through recalibration, clarification of authority, or renewed alignment around priorities. At other times, the board’s expectations have shifted in ways that fundamentally redefine the role itself. In those moments, discernment—not endurance—becomes the more responsible act.
A Governance Reality About Board Support
Board support is institutional. It is contingent. And it can morph quickly under stress.
Presidents who fare best are those who recognize this early, separate self-worth from governance responsibilities, and respond with deliberation rather than defensiveness. Sometimes that response is recalibration. Sometimes it is negotiation. Sometimes it is preparation for transition.
What matters is not longevity in office but positional agency throughout one’s presidency.
Next: Essay Four turns to perception—why it shapes presidential vulnerability whether leaders attend to it or not, and how unmanaged perception often accelerates governance strain.
FAQ
How transparent should a president be with their board?
Transparency is a core element of healthy governance, even though it does not guarantee presidential preservation. Presidents should aim to be as transparent as possible in ways that are timely, accurate, purposeful, and oriented toward solutions. Transparency is most effective when disclosures about risk are paired with clear context and clarity about what the board is being asked to understand, decide, or support; absent that clarity, transparency can invite more directive governance and narrow presidential room to act.
What should boards and presidents be explicit about when institutional conditions change?
Boards and presidents should be explicit about what has changed and why, which risks now need to be top of mind, who is responsible for addressing those risks and communicating risk-management strategies, and the timelines for implementing risk-reduction decisions. Naming changing conditions and risks early helps prevent confusion, misaligned expectations, and unfair judgments about leadership performance.
Which assumptions need to be revisited when risk tolerance tightens?
When risk tolerance diminishes, boards and presidents should revisit assumptions about how quickly decisions can be made, how much discretion the president has, what resources are truly available, and how stable board backing will be. Making these assumptions explicit helps prevent misalignment and reduces the likelihood that governance strain is misread as a leadership failure.
When does transparency strengthen governance—and when does it decrease a president’s room to act?
Transparency strengthens governance when disclosures are tied to clear roles, decision authority, and shared expectations about response. It decreases a president’s delegated authority and agency, however, if risk is surfaced without proposed risk management strategies and parallel clarity about who will act, how quickly, and with what institutional support.
How should a presidency be evaluated when transparency destabilizes, rather than bolsters, the role?
A presidency should be evaluated by whether the leader acted with integrity, surfaced material risk responsibly, and exercised sound judgment in service of the institution—even when those choices narrowed personal authority or shortened tenure. In today’s environment, agency is as much or more a marker of presidential success as longevity. Successful presidents retain as much agency as conditions appropriately allow; they continue to act with purpose until the end. Staying in a role stripped of meaningful authority is not a marker of effective leadership
