“It’s an incredibly lonely role. The loneliness of leadership is widely acknowledged in relation to the chief executive, but the isolation and challenges of voluntary leadership are less recognised.”
Rosalind Oakley, former CEO, Association of Chairs
Boards Wales takeaways:
- Chair Connect has launched as Wales’s first dedicated peer network for board Chairs across the public, third and cooperative sectors.
- The inaugural webinar brought together more than thirty chairs from organisations spanning housing, environmental conservation, sport, careers, democracy, agriculture and the third sector.
- Discussion ranged across preparations for the Senedd election, and the evolving demands of the Chair role.
Why Wales needs this now
There is a paradox at the heart of Chairing. The Chair is the most senior person in the room, and is simultaneously the person with the least obvious support structure around you. You cannot confide in your board (you chair it), but you also cannot fully unburden yourself to your chief executive (you manage that relationship). The truth is that other Chairs are often the only people who genuinely understand what the role feels like from the inside.
Of course, this isn’t just an issue for Wales, it’s a universal one. Tolstoy observed that all happy family is alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In the same way, each country has its idiosyncracies that lend particular challenges to the organisations within it.
Our public bodies and third sector organisations operate within a dense web of Welsh Government relationships, Audit Wales expectations, bilingual nuances, Well-being of Future Generations Act duties and funding cycles do not mirror much of what happens across a border in any direction. Generic UK guidance only gets a Welsh Chair so far.
That’s why I was so delighted to partner with GatenbySanderson to create a dedicated peer space, Chair Connect, for Chairs across Wales to come together, compare notes, and remind each other that the pressures they’re navigating are shared.
The inaugural session
The first Chair Connect webinar in March brought together Chairs from a wide range of organisations: housing associations, wildlife and environmental charities, sport partnerships, careers bodies, democratic and electoral institutions, cooperative food businesses, and local governance structures. We have deliberately created a structure that welcomes all Chairs from organisations operating at all scales.
We feel that cross-sector exchange is often more productive than sector-specific conferences where attendees generally know what most other delegates would feel about a topic. The Chair of a housing association and the Chair of a nature conservation charity face genuinely different operational contexts but share similar fundamental governance tensions, for example how to lead a board through uncertainty; how to hold an executive to account with both rigour and warmth; hand how to stay strategically focused when the environment is shifting rapidly beneath you.
What I observed within that virtual space was exactly that shared recognition, with mutual respect given to colleagues from the smallest NGO to large and highly regulated public bodies. Attendees came from organisations with very different missions, stakeholder bases and funding models, but the issues they face have significant commonalities.
Senedd 2026
The first substantive topic was on how colleagues are preparing for the Senedd election, and it led to a rich and wide-ranging discussion. Wales is heading into an election that will redefine democracy in Wales, via a significantly expanded 96-Member Senedd, and a new (and highly controversial) proportional voting system featuring party lists instead of the ability to vote for an individual. Gone are the direct constituency links to an individual.
The discussion in the room reflected a governance landscape grappling with that uncertainty. Colleagues described efforts to map manifesto commitments across parties, to identify common policy ground that might survive a coalition negotiation, and to build or deepen relationships across political traditions rather than placing all their ‘eggs’ in one ministerial basket.
There is a temporal space between manifesto publication and Ministerial portfolio that provides an opportunity for organisations to take stock and prepare for the next four years of political direction. Chairs clearly have a significant role to play in this space.
Participants also provided a note of realism. New ministers with new portfolios, inheriting complex policy dossiers from an outgoing administration; many old hands in the room understood that this would inevitably lead to delays in ‘business as usual’. Those Chairs planning strategy reviews or significant announcements would do well to build in considerably more time than they might have expected for previous annual iterations.
The Well-being of Future Generations Act compels Welsh Government to work in a genuinely long-term way. For some organisations that might mean continued political and budgetary support, but that is surely not going to be the case for all. At least Welsh Chairs have a shared statutory framework to point to, which colleagues in other parts of the UK do not. We would be well advised, as a collective, to work in a genuinely committed way, to uphold and deliver the promise of the WFGA, and to remind Welsh Government of their own obligations under it!
The changing role of Chair
The second theme, on the changing nature of the Chair role itself, confirmed the thesis that the demands of Chairing are intensifying. Regulatory frameworks are expanding. Scrutiny from funders, government sponsors and public interest bodies is more exacting. Digital, cyber risk and the epoch-defining arrival of AI has landed on the board agenda in a way that most governance frameworks have not yet caught up with.
And in some sectors, including housing, the structural landscape is shifting towards consolidation, merger and federated working in ways that put extraordinary demands on Chairs leading organisations through that kind of change.
There was a sense in the room that the role of Chair has genuinely evolved. It is no longer enough – if it ever was – to turn up to ten meetings a year with a well-prepared agenda and a working knowledge of Nolan. The modern Chair needs to be strategically alert, relationally skilled, digitally literate enough to ask the right questions, and personally resilient enough to hold a steady line when the organisation around them is under pressure. That is a significant ask of what remains, in most cases, a voluntary commitment.
Which is precisely why peer support matters. The loneliness at the top has real consequences for governance quality when Chairs are operating without adequate support, challenge or community around them.
What comes next
Chair Connect is a series. We are planning three further webinars for 2026. The next session focuses on board effectiveness, which is a topic that is one of the most genuinely difficult for Chairs to address, not because the evidence base is thin, but because applying it requires a degree of honest self-assessment that is easier said than done.
If you Chair a board in Wales and are not yet part of the network, I would encourage you to register at chairconnect.wales. We have nearly 50 members of the group, but have the ambition for involving many more. The more diverse the representation, by sector, geography, organisation size, the more valuable the peer exchange will be. Join us in the network….pull up a Chair!
This blog post is the personal opinion of David Clubb.
Photo by Joshua Mallett
