At Board Meetings, the CEO Should Get Lost

Directors need to candidly discuss company leadership. They can't do that if the top manager is also the board chair.

EVERYONE KNOWS YOU would never hire a fox to guard a henhouse. The fox has an appetite for chicken and the instinct to hunt, which is a clear conflict of interest. Yet plenty of otherwise intelligent people seem to think it's just fine for the CEO of a company to have a seat on its board of directors. And often not just any seat, but the one at the head of the table. That's the equivalent of a dictatorship, and as crazy as, say, letting the chairman and CEO at Boeing decide the safety standards of the company's airplanes-oh, wait.

Have people learned nothing from Logan Roy's boardroom antics on Succession? From my perspective, the CEO shouldn't be on the board, period. But that's not the way your typical CEO sees it.

Every board's job is to protect investors by providing oversight and helping leadership grow the organization. One of the board's most important duties is to hire or fire the CEO.