Composition, succession and evaluation sit together as a standing board responsibility in the governance code, not as an occasional exercise.
Why it matters when the plan changes
A board is the one group in an organisation with nobody above it to assess it, which is why the practice is written into codes such as the UK Corporate Governance Code rather than left to good intention. It is also the group whose failures are least visible from inside, because the same information constraints that limit its oversight of management limit its view of itself. Agency theory holds that owners and boards know less about execution capacity than the management they oversee, so any independent signal about the board's own functioning has value, however noisy, precisely because the board cannot generate that signal unaided.
The tension is that a board evaluating itself is subject to exactly the dynamic it is meant to examine. Internal reviews tend to produce process observations and avoid questions about dynamics, chair effectiveness and individual contribution; external reviews reach further, cost more, and are commissioned least often.
In practice
A board completes an annual self-evaluation questionnaire. The findings concern meeting papers arriving late and agendas being crowded. Nothing addresses whether the board can hold the executive to account on execution, which is the question the code is pointing at and the one nobody in the room is well placed to raise.
Evidence
Governance codes place composition, succession and evaluation together as a continuing board responsibility.
Financial Reporting Council, UK Corporate Governance Code (2024)A board is a governing body supervising an organisation's activities, which is what an effectiveness review examines.
Board of directors, Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
A board effectiveness assessment describes how the board functions as a body; it cannot verify whether the organisation can execute the plan it approves. It is also conducted from inside the group it examines, so it can miss dynamics, dominance and unspoken deference that only an outside observer would notice, however well the questionnaire is designed.
Questions
A review examines composition and skills against what the company needs, the quality and timing of information, how the agenda is used, board and committee dynamics, the chair's effectiveness, individual contribution, and whether the board discharges the oversight duty the UK Corporate Governance Code (2024) sets out under composition, succession and evaluation.
Codes such as the UK Corporate Governance Code (2024) expect an external review at intervals and internal ones between them. External reviewers reach the uncomfortable questions about dynamics and individual contribution that a self-evaluation rarely does, which is both their value and why they are commissioned less often.
Questionnaires that ask about process rather than substance, and a scope that stops before chair effectiveness and individual contribution. A review that concludes with observations about paper deadlines and agenda length has examined the logistics of governance rather than the governance itself.
It asks whether the board functions; oversight of execution asks whether the organisation can deliver. A well-functioning board with no independent information about execution capacity is still constrained, which is why the two remain separate questions with separate answers and separate remedies.
The chair, or the senior independent director where the chair's own effectiveness is in scope. Commissioning by the executive would place the review inside the relationship it is meant to examine, which is the same structural problem the board exists to counter.