Why you should help your CEO and board build trust

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If we had to venture a guess, we’d say your CEO is under a lot of pressure right now.

Right now, CEOs are grappling with a volatile business environment, rapid technological change, heightened visibility, increased expectations from investors and other stakeholders, and other factors that have made their roles demanding. CEO turnover is increasing: In 2024, a record 43 CEOs exited within their first three years, the most since 2018, according to a CEO turnover study from Russell Reynolds Associates.

Compounding the problem is the fact that CEOs and boards often fail to trust one another. Only 37% of CEOs say the board has their back, according to a Spencer Stuart survey from April 2025.

But trust is all the more crucial in turbulent times, the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) wrote in its latest Blue Ribbon Commission Report. Based on the input of 25 directors and six CEOs, the report outlines ways CEOs and boards can strengthen their relationships with one another. The results are pertinent to other members of the C-suite as well, commission cochair Dona Young, former chair, president, and CEO of the Phoenix Companies, said during a press session at the NACD Summit.

In today’s business environment, trust between CEOs and their boards “leads you to a place where the CEO feels confident and comfortable in sharing information, even when the CEO doesn’t know the answers…without fear that the board is going to encroach on the CEO’s territory,” Young explained. That also “enables the board to walk the journey with the CEO, so that when those inevitable bumps in the night happen and you wake up and there’s some new headline that impacts your business model,” she said, the board is “ready to act in a timely, thoughtful, decisive way with the CEO.”

Steps to build board-CEO trust: Trust between the board and CEO may not always grow organically, but it can be intentionally nurtured, the report states. One way to start is by “reinforcing the structure of relationships and practices” between the CEO and board, and particularly between the CEO and the board chair or lead independent director, commission cochair Wayne Peacock, former CEO and president of USAA, said during the press session.

Boards and CEOs can explicitly spell out their roles, responsibilities, and expectations of one another, the report said. For instance, Young suggested, they can consider questions such as: “Where does the board expect to be consulted? Where does the board have decision-making rights?” As she noted, “You can’t play a game well unless you know the rules, right? And so it’s about outlining those rules and being very explicit about it, and not assuming that the CEO and board are aligned.”

CEOS should also spend time “formally and informally, with individual members of the board” and build a “strong personal relationship” with them, Peacock said. “And that doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s really a commitment from the CEO to lean in and make that happen,” he observed.

When boards come to know the CEO as a person, “one of the things that it does is it humanizes the relationship. It becomes something other than a boss relationship,” Young said.

What CFOs need to know: It’s not just CEOs that boards need to support. Lack of trust “reverberates through the entire organization,” Young said, adding that it’s important for boards to develop relationships with the C-suite beyond the CEO. Boards can also set expectations and create norms for conversations with C-suiters beyond the CEO, she said. Especially when those conversations take place without the CEO, “you need to have clear, established expectations about how those conversations take place.”

CFOs or other C-suiters at large companies could become liaisons to the committee chair, Peacock said, “which gives you a very formal way to build upon that [board] relationship.”

What’s more, often the company’s next CEO will be someone from the C-suite, Peacock said, making it all the more beneficial for boards to foster relationships beyond the CEO. Those connections can give the board “confidence in the team” and help them start to “understand the next level of talent at a deeper level,” he said, as part of a“continual succession planning” process for the CEO role.