Online Reporter
Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
Once upon a time, the boardroom was a crucible. It was marked by mahogany tables scarred by coffee rings and conviction, where data was dissected under fluorescent truth and sacred cows were slaughtered before lunch.
It was the one room where rank yielded to reason, where a chief financial officer’s spreadsheet could silence a founder’s ego, and where “I disagree” was not treason but duty.
That room is now a cathedral. The mahogany remains, but the air is thick with incense. Debate has been replaced by “I concur”.
From crucible to clan
Robust discussion, once the oxygen of governance, has become remote, if not extinct.
Many modern boardrooms have devolved into clans. Totems are hoisted above logic; lineage outranks evidence.
The question is no longer “Is this right?” but “Whose idea is it?”
Critical interrogation is mistaken for insubordination and silence is canonised as loyalty.
The alignment chorus
A new psalm echoes through glass towers: the alignment chorus. Too many directors and executives now enter not through competence, but through sponsorship.
The unspoken covenant is clear: “I brought you in; you keep the harmony.” So they hum. They harmonise. They drown out dissonance with deference.
The result is a boardroom of echoes, where the loudest sound is the absence of a second opinion.
The cost of contradiction
Diversity of opinion, tough questions and robust engagement are the pulse of a functional board.
Yet today, that pulse is faint, because contradiction comes with a price. A contrary view in a management meeting is read as dissent, an attack, a career-limiting move.
But contradiction is not sabotage. It is cartography. It shows us there is another side to the mountain. Without it, we govern by monologue and mistake unanimity for unity.
The big man syndrome
We must exorcise our organisations of the big man syndrome. It is a governance pathology with clear symptoms.
Left untreated, the syndrome turns institutions into personality cults. When the big man coughs, the balance sheet catches pneumonia.
The forgotten beatitude: Blessed are the respectful dissenters
Speaking one’s mind, respectfully, should never be career-limiting. Yet I write this with a heavy heart: The quality of many board members, executives and managers has quietly atrophied.
You cannot occupy a board seat just to make up the numbers. You are there to make it count: to test assumptions, to defend the minority report, to ask the question that makes the room uncomfortable for five minutes and the company safe for five years.
The reform pulpit
CEOs and boards of directors must deliberately architect a culture of robust dialogue.
Organisational narratives will not improve with a single perspective. They improve in the collision of perspectives, in the friction that produces light.
This is a call for mentorship, not mastery. It should never be assumed that once you become a CEO, you have arrived.
The corner office is not a summit; it is a new base camp. Everyone, especially the titled, has scope to become a better version of themselves.
The challenge for HR practitioners
Human resource (HR) practitioners must step into the pulpit. You are not just custodians of payroll and policy.
You are curators of culture. Drive the boardroom reform agenda. Audit the quality of debate. Coach directors on constructive challenge. Protect the dissenter. Measure boards not by how peacefully they meet, but by how rigorously they think.
The boardroom must cease being a cathedral of compliance and return to being a workshop of wisdom.
The future will not be worshipped into existence. It will be argued into it, voted on, stress-tested and built by people brave enough to say “I see it differently” before the benediction. Because when the minutes of a meeting read like a hymn sheet, it is not governance. It is a funeral for accountability. And we are all pallbearers.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
