Tuesday July 07th, 2026
It is one of the first questions boards ask when commissioning an evaluation: should we run an anonymous survey, or sit down for confidential interviews? The honest answer is that the question is slightly wrong. Surveys and interviews are not competitors; they are instruments that measure different things. The real question is what your board needs to learn this year — and that determines the method, not the other way around.
Having conducted evaluations across both formats — and frequently combining them — here is how we think about the choice at Hawkamah.
What surveys do well
A well-constructed anonymous survey is the workhorse of board evaluation, and for good reason.
Structure and comparability. A proven question set puts every director in front of the same questions, scored on the same scale. That makes results comparable — across directors, across committees, and critically, across years. A survey repeated annually turns a snapshot into a trend line: is our strategy oversight improving or slipping? Did last year's actions move the numbers?
Full and equal participation. Every director answers every question. The quiet director's view carries the same weight as the talkative one's — something that is never quite true in a boardroom, or even in an interview programme squeezed by diaries.
Efficiency and discipline. A survey on a purpose-built platform takes each director under an hour and produces a complete, quantified dataset. For a board maintaining an annual evaluation rhythm, that discipline at reasonable cost is exactly what is needed.
Honest signals — within limits. Anonymity genuinely helps. Directors will score a three where they might say "fine" in person. But the protection has limits on smaller boards: directors know that distinctive views may be recognisable, and written comments tend to go diplomatic precisely where the issues are most sensitive.
What interviews do well
Confidential one-to-one interviews measure what surveys structurally cannot.
The "why" behind the score. A survey can tell you that half the board rates the quality of debate poorly. It cannot tell you that this is because one director dominates, or because the chair closes discussions early, or because papers arrive too late for anyone to challenge them. Interviews convert symptoms into causes.
The things nobody writes down. In our experience, the most consequential findings of an evaluation almost never appear in survey comments. They emerge twenty minutes into a confidential conversation with an independent evaluator: concerns about a colleague, doubts about succession, friction between chair and CEO. Directors speak what they will not type. Directors are often willing to share their perspectives verbally that they may be reluctant to document in writing, providing valuable and unfiltered insights.
Nuance and follow-up. An experienced interviewer probes, tests, and cross-references. When three directors describe the same meeting very differently, that divergence is itself a finding — one a survey would flatten into an average.
The trade-offs are real, though: interviews take more of everyone's time, depend heavily on the skill and independence of the interviewer, and produce qualitative findings that are harder to trend year over year.
The false choice
Here is what the "versus" framing misses: the two methods are at their most powerful together, because each covers the other's blind spot.
The survey provides the map — quantified, complete, comparable — and tells you where to dig. The interviews do the digging. In practice, we often design interview guides around the survey results: the questions with the widest dispersion, the scores that dropped since last year, the gaps between how the chair sees the board and how everyone else does. A survey alone risks measuring perceptions without explaining them. Interviews alone risk vivid anecdotes without knowing how widely they are shared. Together, each finding is both quantified and understood.
So which should your board choose?
A practical rule of thumb:
Survey only suits a board in good health, with stable membership and no known tensions, maintaining an annual evaluation discipline and tracking progress against prior years.
Survey plus interviews is warranted when something needs explaining: scores have dipped, the board has new leadership or new members, the company faces an inflection point, or the last evaluation raised issues that were never fully understood. It is also the natural choice for a board's first genuinely independent evaluation.
Survey, interviews, and meeting observation — the deepest option — belongs where behaviour is the question: when a board wants to see itself as others see it, not just as it reports itself.
The real objective
Ultimately, boards should remember that the objective is not to produce a report. It is to improve performance. Whether that insight comes from a survey, an interview, or a combination of both is secondary.
A useful question for every board is therefore not: “Which methodology should we use?”
Instead, ask: “Which methodology will provide the insights we need to become a better board?”