While all directors can contribute to the board’s success, the board chair has a unique set of responsibilities, both in the tone that they set, and their influence on how time and resources are deployed. The best board chairs are facilitators who get the best out of the collective expertise of the board – yet many chairs fail to play that role successfully. Year over year, we are constantly amazed at the sizable gap between observed chair behaviors on typical boards and those on Gold Medal Boards (boards whose directors rate their board effectiveness as a 9 or 10 on a 1-10 scale, and report the company as having outperformed relevant TSR benchmarks for two or more consecutive years), as shown below: