Being an effective board chair is harder than ever. Today chairs have to manage a growing and increasingly diverse group of stakeholders whose demands often conflict, while the environment their firms operate in has become more and more chaotic. With new risks emerging from climate change, technologies like artificial intelligence, and political instability, the number and complexity of problems their companies face have risen dramatically. Meanwhile, the directors that chairs must work with have become more diverse too. All these developments have made the chair’s job not only more difficult but also more time-consuming than it was just a decade ago.

An ongoing research project that the Leadership Institute at London Business School began in 2021 confirms that the demands of the role have changed substantially. Interviews with more than 100 FTSE-listed directors, including 30-plus chairs, revealed that classic strengths, such as deep executive experience and a track record of setting and executing strategy, have become less critical to chairs’ success than the ability to synthesize massive amounts of information, identify patterns in complex data, listen to and reconcile competing perspectives, and manage apparent contradictions. Read this great HBR article to find out more