By Lindsay Frost | April 20, 2026
Boards are causing more stress for CEOs than ever before, new research from Boston Consulting Group shows, and that’s leading to tension, burnout and departures. Directors simply have less patience than they used to amid a wave of business disruptions and are demanding more from chief execs.
The new study is in line with a growing body of research suggesting the relationship between boards and CEOs is fracturing.
“The role of CEO has gotten to be more complex, more uncertain and more multifaceted,” said Christine Barton, a member of the corporate development practice at BCG. “And, the roles that employees, consumers and society are looking for CEOs to play has expanded. So, it’s a lot of pressure.”
Boards need to balance holding CEOs accountable for business goals with keeping a pulse on their well-being, sources told Agenda.
Directors also need to reposition themselves as strategic partners to tackle challenges, said Peter Gleason, CEO of the National Association of Corporate Directors. “That’s a big piece of the support system that boards can offer,” Gleason said.
Stressed to the Max
CEOs ranked boards at the top of the list of seven stakeholder groups for causing the most stress last quarter, according to a survey of 500 CEOs at companies with at least $100 million in market cap from BCG.
Meeting the expectations of the board was anticipated to be the third-most-stressful part of being a CEO, after meeting growth targets and managing costs, over the next six months, according to the survey.
“As the CEO, you’ve got 10, 12 bosses,” Gleason said. “That’s where the stress points come in. You get feedback from all of them on a regular basis, and they all have different interests that they’re focused in on.”
This stress is driven by boards continuing to raise the bar in terms of performance expectations. Roughly one-third of the CEOs surveyed by BCG said they have more to prove to their boards now than they did just six months ago.
“There is just a lot less patience for when CEOs need to be performing, and not just focused on their future strategy and making investments and building toward performance, but actually an expectation around the immediacy of performance,” Barton said. “The more that there is a perception of misalignment between the board and the CEO or the board and management, the level of stress goes up.”
Meanwhile, a challenging business environment driven by geopolitical issues, technological disruption and shareholder activism has led to increased board scrutiny, sources said.
Meanwhile, because CEOs don’t often set boundaries in work and in life, it creates a “chronic ‘stuck gear’- type issue,” wrote Dr. Kevin Fleming, founder of Grey Matters
International, a boutique neuroscience-based consulting firm for CEOs and board members. He wrote that CEOs are often in “an invisible state of profound distress.”
This is also due to “exponential increase of knowledge and information ‘on demand’ with the advent of AI and consequent feelings of being obsolete, ever growing technology addiction, self-medicating habits on the rise … as well as successful marriages dropping,” Fleming wrote.
Match Accountability with Support
The pressure cooker environment for CEOs is leading to record executive turnover. Meanwhile, only half of nearly 800 CEOs surveyed by Spencer Stuart last year said the board has their back in challenging situations.
But there are things boards can do to smooth working relationships with CEOs while maintaining high expectations, sources said. This includes boards’ getting up to speed on the issues du jour, setting better agendas and practicing long-term decision-making, Barton said.
“The CEO is going to need those insights from the board and the different skills that the board brings to the table, because there are just too many issues on their plates,” Gleason said.
Board members can also offer insights from other boards they serve on, including how those companies got through challenges or strategies on products and services, Gleason said. That “lowers the pressure cooker kind of atmosphere,” he added.
“It’s not an ‘us versus them,’ it’s a ‘we’ approach,” Gleason said. “That idea really is a tremendous benefit to the company.”
This support includes checking in on mental health.
Just 15% of the CEOs surveyed by Spencer Stuart said they can always be vulnerable with the board when facing a hard strategic decision, while more than 40% said rarely or never. Some 29% said the board provides opportunities to discuss sensitive topics including personal well-being.
“I would encourage CEOs and directors to think about the recovery side, not just the performance side, because over long periods of time, that level of acute stress really does lead to systemic burnout,” Barton said.
