Charmain Bogue on Advising Boards and Telling Them What They Already Know

The value of an outside advisor isn't new information. It's permission to act on old information.

Most of the time, when I walk into a boardroom as an advisor, the people sitting around the table already know what's wrong. They know their strategic plan is stale. They know their leadership pipeline has gaps. They know they have a culture problem that no amount of pizza parties is going to fix.

They don't need me to tell them. They need me to say it out loud so they can finally do something about it.

That's a strange arrangement if you haven't experienced it, the idea that smart, capable people would pay someone to confirm what they already suspect. But it makes sense when you understand how organizations work. Internal voices carry baggage. When the VP of operations says the strategic plan needs an overhaul, people hear a power grab. When an outside advisor says it, people hear an objective assessment. Same observation, different reception.

Charmain Bogue as an advisor and coach has learned to be comfortable in that role, the person who names the thing everyone's been tiptoeing around. It took time. Early in my career, I thought my job was to bring answers. I'd show up with data and recommendations and detailed implementation plans. And they'd sit in a binder on someone's shelf.

What I learned, through years in public sector leadership and later in advisory roles, is that information isn't the bottleneck. Courage is. Organizations don't stall because they don't know what to do. They stall because doing the right thing is expensive, uncomfortable, or politically inconvenient.

My job as an advisor is to make inaction more uncomfortable than action.

Here's what that looks like in practice. I'll sit with a board and ask simple questions. Not complex strategic frameworks. Just: What did you say you were going to do last year? Did you do it? If not, why not? Those questions are devastating in a room full of people who've been busy congratulating themselves on their intentions.

I also push back on the planning addiction. Some boards will spend eighteen months developing a five-year strategic plan, and by the time it's done, the assumptions it's based on are already outdated. I've watched organizations go through three planning cycles without ever fully executing one. The planning becomes the work. The actual change never happens.

The boards I enjoy working with most are the ones that are honest about their limitations. They know they don't have all the expertise they need. They know their membership doesn't reflect the communities they serve. They're willing to ask hard questions about governance, about succession, about whether the founding executive director who built the organization twenty years ago is still the right person to lead it.

Those conversations are painful. I've been in rooms where a board had to confront the fact that their most beloved leader was also their biggest obstacle. That takes a particular kind of honesty, and it takes an outside voice to create the conditions for it.

From my time working with startups through different acceleator programs, I've seen the other end of the spectrum too. Startup advisory boards that are all optimism and no oversight. Everyone's excited about the vision, nobody's asking about the burn rate. That's a different problem but it requires the same thing: someone willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

What I bring to these situations isn't magic. It's pattern recognition from years of working across sectors, and a willingness to sit in the tension that follows an honest observation. The moment after you tell a board something they didn't want to hear is the moment that matters. If they lean in, you can do real work. If they get defensive, you know you're dealing with an organization that wants comfort, not change.

My role is not to be liked. It's to be useful. Those are different things, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes advisors make.

The best outcomes I've seen come from boards that treat their advisors like mirrors, not decorations. Use me to see what you can't see from the inside. And then do something about it.