Board Effectiveness Statistics (2025)
The 2025 Boardspan Benchmark draws on board performance assessments across nearly 60 governance dimensions spanning strategy, leadership, succession, oversight, and board composition.
The findings reflect aggregated results from Boardspan board performance assessments conducted across public, private, and nonprofit boards using a structured evaluation framework covering nearly 60 dimensions of governance effectiveness.
The 2025 benchmark findings show a consistent pattern across governance dimensions: board and committee leadership continues to strengthen, while succession planning below the CEO level and access to competitive intelligence remain among the least-developed areas of board oversight. Oversight of emerging topics such as artificial intelligence sits in the middle tier, reflecting a capability still taking shape.
Explore the full findings in the 2025 Board Performance Benchmark Report
Board and committee leadership ranks 3rd out of 9 governance categories in the 2025 Boardspan Benchmark.
Scores in this category have increased each year since 2023, making it one of the most consistently improving areas of board effectiveness.
Confidence in board chairs, lead independent directors, and committee chairs continues to strengthen across organizations.
Boards rated their AI oversight effectiveness 73 out of 100 in 2025.
This places AI governance in the mid-tier of board effectiveness capabilities, suggesting boards are still developing structured approaches to oversight of emerging technologies.
Board succession planning scores improved in 2025 compared with 2023 benchmark levels, reflecting a growing focus on refreshment and forward-looking composition planning.
Management succession planning ranks in the bottom 5% of nearly 60 governance topics measured in the 2025 Boardspan Benchmark.
Despite modest improvement year over year, most boards still report gaps in leadership continuity planning below the CEO level.
These results suggest that succession oversight beyond the CEO remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of board governance effectiveness.
The 2025 Boardspan Benchmark scores for topics such as access to market data and competitive standing register in the bottom 10% among the more than 60 topics covered by the Boardspan Board Performance Assessment. Interestingly, these scores have remained essentially flat since 2023, which hints that the issues are tricky to solve.
Board–CEO relationship scores rank in the top half of nearly 60 governance performance dimensions measured in 2025.
However, median scores for board–CEO dynamics have declined slightly since 2023, suggesting alignment between boards and CEOs is becoming more complex as expectations around strategy, risk, and performance oversight continue to expand.
Together, these statistics highlight where boards are strengthening their effectiveness—and where governance expectations are evolving faster than current oversight practices.
These findings sit within Boardspan’s broader body of work on board effectiveness, where we explore how boards measure, strengthen, and sustain governance performance over time. See the Board Effectiveness hub.
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