What can you do when your charity board has turned toxic?

At the Festival of Trusteeship 2025 one of our best attended sessions was ‘How Not to Be a Prat on a Board’. During that session, our brilliant panellists: Hannah Kubie, Partner, Charity & Social Enterprise team, Stone King LLP, Ruth Davison, Trustee of the UK’s National Emergencies Trust and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Frederick Hillinger, Trustee of Reach Out for Mental Health, Rashmi Rungta, Trustee of the Association of Chairs, Trustee of Myaware, Co-Chair of Citizens Climate Action Committee for Westminster City Council and Non Executive Director at the University of Hull shared some excellent examples and reflections.

However, an important point was raised by one of the Festival panellists: prattish behaviour often comes from well-intentioned people behaving in an uninformed way. We all have an inner prat, but what happens on a board when the behaviour goes beyond this? Who takes control when board behaviour turns truly toxic? Ahead of this year’s panel discussion on this very topic we explore the subject.

What counts as toxic

Broadly, toxic behaviour is when difficult relationships become damaging. All boards experience difficult conversations from time to time – disagreement and diverse opinion is essential to robust scrutiny and good governance. Toxic behaviour on the other hand is egregious, disruptive (quietly or loudly) and if unchecked can be an existential threat to a charity. The problem with toxic behaviour is that everyone knows what it might mean to them but defining it is very difficult. It can also be insidious and hard to spot.

Official guidance:

Let’s start with what the regulator says and the law. Under the Charity Commission guidance trustees have a responsibility to ensure that they’re taking reasonable steps to protect people who come into contact with your charity from harm. This includes those who benefit from your charity’s work, others who come into contact with your charity through its work and staff and volunteers – including other trustees.

“Harm” might include negligence and safeguarding lapses, but in terms of toxic behaviour on a board it broadly falls into one of the three categories:

1. Bullying
2. Harassment
3. Discrimination.

There’s no legal definition of bullying in the workplace, but employees are protected from harassment and discrimination by law. Trustees, as volunteers, are not similarly protected but that shouldn’t stop you making every effort to accord trustees with the level of respect, care and basic human decency that everyone deserves.

Red flags and warning signs:

So, what might toxic behaviour look like on a board?

1. Bullying and harassment might look like a trustee or a group of trustees using their privilege or power to force a decision upon others, it might present as repeatedly challenging or undermining decisions that have been democratically agreed. It might be repeatedly taking decisions without involving the CEO.
2. Discrimination might be undermining and excluding people with protected characteristics, either in practice or in discourse and speech.
3. A feeling; toxic behaviour can take many other guises and forms – scratch any group of trustees and myriad awful examples will appear. Yes, they can be hard to spot but trust your gut: if the vibes feel off, the chances are there’s something not right.

When it’s tricky:

Problems arise when toxic behaviour is already embedded in board culture. What happens if the trustee in question is the person who charms everyone at your events, or has a brilliant network, or has brought in a lot of funding? What happens if you just suspect bad behaviour, but you’ve not seen it in practice?  It can feel like you’re wading into a minefield so it’s no surprise that serious problems are sometimes allowed to fester.

Possible solutions to toxic behaviour in boards:

1. Mitigate bad behaviour by setting early warning processes in place:
   • A post-board meeting how-did-it-go anonymous survey shared immediately after the meeting can capture valuable sentiments.
   • Regular annual trustee appraisals is another place where views might be shared more candidly.
   • Most importantly, you should a have code of conduct for trustees which is regularly reviewed.

However, bravery on boards (check out our Festival session on this topic on Thursday 12^th November 16:30 to 17:30) is essential. The most useful thing a trustee can do is ask awkward questions.

Louis Brandeis, a nineteenth century anti-corruption lawyer and US Supreme Court judge coined the expression ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ and it’s been a cornerstone of good governance ever since.

2. If you see anyone displaying toxic behaviours at board meetings, espousing discriminatory views, dismissing other people’s lived experience, belittling other trustees or staff members or expressing harmful speech against people you need to address it.

• • Firstly, check in with the person affected and get a sense of how they’re feeling.
  • Next, discuss your impressions with the chair. If you are the chair you need to move to the stage below.
  • Good governance relies on clear policies and procedures, particularly in an area that relates to care of people. Check your policies and procedures around safeguarding and workplace bullying (do this today – don’t wait for a crisis!). They should have a clear delineation of who to report problems to, how these are defined and how to escalate if unresolved.

What you are looking for is how best to approach the situation; not a policy to hide behind and do nothing. That would be institutional cowardice.

However, it may be that you don’t have a framework to guide you, or the situation may involve two opposing accounts pitted against each other, with no clear way of arbitrating where the truth lies.

In this case, an external governance review is your friend.

Committing to this can feel a lot for a smaller or cash-strapped charity to take on particularly if there’s no line in the budget that covers it. However, a good consultant will tailor a review to the needs of your organisation, and this is money well spent. A review can expose systemic issues that may be enabling individuals’ bad behaviour. Additionally, recommendations made by a third party, even quite drastic ones like replacing a trustee or chair, may be palatable when filtered through external expertise.

Apply your common sense. If you have trustees, chair or staff who are very forthright and didactic that’s one thing but if you can see that staff are unhappy, or you’ve found out via feedback surveys that there is low morale then you must take action.

Don’t assume that everything’s ok. Don’t assume that people harmed will suck it up or get over it or that the problems will go away by themselves. In the case of toxic behaviour, if you see it and don’t challenge it, then you may be part of the problem.

-ENDS-

This blog is part of our Festival of Trusteeship collection. Find out more about the Festival, the biggest online event for UK trustees, aspiring trustees and charity leaders here.

This blog was written by Fiona McAuslan, an Eastside People communications and governance associate consultant working with the not-for-profit, public and private sectors, and mission-driven organisations, and a serving trustee and NED.