{"id":75140,"date":"2026-09-10T17:51:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T12:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mint-money.in\/index.php\/2026\/09\/10\/sujata-deshmukh-on-the-boardroom-question-nobody-is-asking-can-your-organisation-tell-you-the-truth\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T17:51:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T12:21:42","slug":"sujata-deshmukh-on-the-boardroom-question-nobody-is-asking-can-your-organisation-tell-you-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mint-money.in\/index.php\/2026\/09\/10\/sujata-deshmukh-on-the-boardroom-question-nobody-is-asking-can-your-organisation-tell-you-the-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Sujata Deshmukh on The Boardroom Question Nobody Is Asking: Can Your Organisation Tell You the Truth?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], September 10<\/strong>: A board can have the right people around the table, the right committees, the right dashboards and the right strategy. It can meet every requirement of good governance and still fail at the one thing that makes a board truly effective: getting to the truth.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every board pack I have seen in recent years has a slide on AI. A slide on geopolitics and risk. A slide on cost. A slide on talent, somewhere between the risk matrix and the five-year plan. All of these matter. But what is harder to see in a board pack is the quality of the conversation underneath the numbers: What are we not hearing? Where is the challenge being muted? What does management know that has not yet made its way to the board?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my experience of working with 500 organisations, these questions often matter more than they appear to. Because the effectiveness of a board ultimately depends not just on the quality of the questions it asks, but on whether the organisation is willing and able to bring the uncomfortable answers to the table.<\/p>\n

I remember standing outside a conference room once, after sitting in on a top team meeting. The strategy presentation had been sharp. The numbers were tight. The CEO was confident, and fielded every question with ease. People nodded. Nobody interrupted. Everyone looked attentive. The meeting even closed twenty minutes early, which the room seemed to take as a good sign.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, I asked one of the directors what he thought. There was a long pause. Then he said quietly, \u201cHonestly? I had two questions I didn\u2019t ask.\u201d When I asked why, he just shrugged. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel like the moment.\u201d It never does. That, to me, is precisely the point.<\/p>\n

We spend a great deal of time on board oversight of strategy, of capital allocation, of succession. We spend far less time on something quieter and, I would argue, more consequential: whether the truth is actually reaching the top table, and whether it feels safe to disagree once it does.<\/p>\n

Almost every serious stumble I have watched unfold from the sideline.. a product recall, a compliance failure, a strategy that quietly unravelled two years after it was celebrated had an earlier moment somewhere in it. A moment where someone knew, and said nothing. Or said it so softly that it never registered.<\/p>\n

As Indians we are unafraid of having a good argument. Turn on any news debate and you\u2019ll find opinions delivered at full volume, with total conviction, by people who have clearly never doubted themselves in their lives. We\u2019ve been arguing about scripture, philosophy and politics around dinner tables for centuries. Voice is not something we lack.<\/p>\n

But there is a real difference between speaking and speaking up. In many of the boardrooms and leadership teams I\u2019ve worked with, hierarchy still carries genuine weight. Questioning a chairman, a promoter CEO, or a founder who built the company out of nothing, is not the same as debating a colleague over dinner. There\u2019s respect in that, sometimes affection, and often, if I\u2019m honest, plain fear of consequence.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpower distance\u201d gets in the way. So people find other ways to register what they cannot say aloud: a slower pace of execution, a project that quietly loses steam, whispers in the corridor, a resignation that arrives \u201cout of nowhere.\u201d Boards tend to read these as operational issues. In my experience, they are usually something else entirely\u2026 unspoken disagreement that has simply run out of road.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve come to see this play out as two opposite polarities, and I\u2019ve sat inside both. At one extreme are the organizations I\u2019d call overtly harmony-seeking everyone agrees with everyone, rather too easily, and decisions move fast. Suspiciously fast, in fact. I once sat through a leadership meeting where a multi-crore decision was signed off in eleven minutes flat, with more time spent on where to order lunch from than on the decision itself. Nobody was lying. They just weren\u2019t disagreeing, which is its own quiet kind of dishonesty.<\/p>\n

At the other extreme sit the organizations that have made everything about rigour, where every proposal must be cross-questioned, re-questioned, and litigated across four more meetings before anyone commits to anything. I\u2019ve watched teams debate the order of speakers, or the wording on a slide, with the intensity most people reserve for a merger\u2026skeptical of almost everything that comes up. It looks like the healthier of the two cultures, because at least people are talking. But argument without end is not the same as honesty either. It\u2019s often just a more exhausting way of avoiding a decision, and, I suspect, avoiding the accountability that comes after one.<\/p>\n

Both extremes, oddly, produce the same silence I opened with. In the harmony-seeking room, nobody says the hard thing because it would break the mood. In the argue-till-eternity room, everybody says everything except the one thing that matters, because it\u2019s safer to relitigate the process than to own the call. Boards tend to reward whichever extreme feels more comfortable to them, the swift room looks decisive, the argumentative room looks thorough, without asking the one question that actually predicts trouble: when something genuinely goes wrong here, who is the first to know, and how long before it reaches the top?<\/p>\n

This, I believe, is the real risk boards need to sit with as they head into 2026. Not whether the strategy is right. Most strategies, in my experience, are directionally right, or right enough. The harder question is whether the organization is structurally capable of telling its leaders when something is going wrong, early enough for it to actually matter. A board can approve the finest five-year plan in the country, but if the CEO only ever hears agreement, and the CEO\u2019s direct reports only ever hear agreement from their own teams in turn, that plan is being built on information nobody has ever stress-tested with an honest word.<\/p>\n

We already have mechanisms designed to address this: vigil mechanisms, annual board evaluations that ask about the quality of debate, and sessions where independent directors meet without management. On paper, the architecture is there. But these mechanisms can become exercises in compliance rather than genuine tests of candour. A questionnaire completed once a year cannot tell you whether people feel free to challenge power. And a whistleblower channel designed to catch fraud is unlikely to capture the quieter moments when someone has a serious concern but decides not to raise it.<\/p>\n

The real signals are often much simpler. How often is the CEO genuinely surprised by something the organisation already knew? Do the same three voices dominate every board discussion? Do independent directors ask their difficult questions in the room, or save them for the corridor afterwards, as mine did that day?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the answer lies in more frameworks. Boards have quite enough of those already. I think the answer is simpler, and in its own way, harder: leaders and directors willing to build rooms where disagreement is not merely tolerated but actively invited, and who notice when a meeting has gone unusually smoothly, and treat that, correctly, as a signal to look closer rather than relax.<\/p>\n

The CEOs I admire most, across three decades of this work, are rarely the ones with the most persuasive strategy decks. They are the ones who, at the end of a meeting where everyone seemed to agree with them, feel a small flicker of unease, and go find someone afterwards to ask, \u201cDid that feel right to you?\u201d That single habit of staying gently suspicious of consensus, may do more for a company\u2019s future than any strategy offsite ever will.<\/p>\n

Boards will spend all of 2026 talking about AI, about capital, about the next wave of disruption.<\/p>\n

All of it matters, and none of it is wasted conversation. But I suspect the organizations that come through the year stronger will be the ones whose leaders kept asking a different, less comfortable question all year long not \u201cwhat is our strategy,\u201d but \u201cwho in this room isn\u2019t telling us something, and why.\u201d<\/p>\n

That, to me, is the agenda nobody is writing about. It might just be the only one that decides how all the others turn out.<\/p>\n

For those boards and institutions that are doing it right, may your tribe increase. For the rest, there is much work to be done. And it is one of the key drivers that take you from \u2018Successful Organization\u2019 to \u2018Institution.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sujata Deshmukh is the founder of<\/em> Tutul Consulting<\/a><\/em>, a boutique organizational development firm based in Mumbai. Over three decades of consulting, she has worked with 500 organizations across sectors, and her practice spans institution building, culture transformation, leadership development, and top-team effectiveness. She has coached and assessed leaders at the APAC and global level. In the past she has served as an Independent Director on the board of a public limited company, and been part of the National Executive Board of the National HRD Network. She is a Visiting Faculty at B-Schools and keenly involved in contributing to the social sector, particularly in the health care space.*<\/p>\n

Email: sujata@tutulconsulting.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Website: https:\/\/www.tutulconsulting.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

If you object to the content of this press release, please notify us at pr.error.rect<\/a>ification@gmail.com<\/a>. We will respond and rectify the situation within 24 hours.<\/em><\/p>\n

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