Lead & Follow Podcast — Season 5, Episode 1
Guest: Otto Henfling · March 8, 2026 · 33 min
Otto Henfling spent 15 years as a CEO and years more as a board chair, and here he maps the CEO–board relationship as a lead-and-follow partnership. The conversation covers why directors drift into the weeds, what a tight CEO–chair relationship changes about which proposals reach the boardroom, and Otto’s argument that the mission outlasts everyone and leads them all.
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Questions Covered in This Episode
What’s the difference between the board’s job and the CEO’s job in a nonprofit?
Otto Henfling calls them two sides of the same coin. The board is there to look after mission, mitigate risk and make sure the organisation still exists in the future; the CEO and their team run the place day to day, meet the strategic objectives and serve whatever client group sits in their purview. Same aim, he says, just approached from different perspectives.
Why do CEOs and boards end up in conflict?
A lot of it comes down to time. Directors step into the business for maybe one to three hours a month and then step out, while management is living it 24-7, so expectations get mismatched. Otto also sees boards forget their governance role and “get into the weeds”, and CEOs go passive-aggressive — the board asks for X, Y and Z and gets A, B and C “pretending it’s X, Y and Z”. Once it becomes a tussle, he notes, the board usually wins, because they appoint and can terminate the CEO.
How should a CEO build a good working relationship with the board chair?
Otto can’t stress this one enough: make it super tight, and have the hard conversations privately first. From his own time as a chair, he’d tell a CEO straight out that the board won’t go for something, or that they need to rework it and bring it back. The board stops wasting time on proposals that aren’t ready, the CEO gets a better hit rate, and the board starts seeing a more polished, better-argued product. He describes it as two cogs meshing and humming.
Can an organisation’s mission be the leader instead of a person?
That’s the idea Sharna and Otto circle around — the mission as the primary leader, with the CEO, chair and board all following it first and each other second. Otto points out it isn’t a strange concept: people still go back to the Bible or the Koran, and universities established hundreds of years ago are still fundamentally about educating and research. He’d like it built into regular reporting, and floats a “mission audit” — checking whether you’re operating outside your mission — which Sharna throws out to listeners as something to pilot.
Why is it hard for a CEO to have normal relationships with staff?
In his PhD interviews, the CEOs who stood out said things like “I’m a worker like everybody else”, and several told Otto the title itself got in the way of relating to junior staff. One woman, months into her first CEO role, found it a real blockage. He compares it to Undercover Boss, where the boss has to disguise himself to be treated like a normal person, and says what helps is rolling up your sleeves, joining the professional development course as just another participant, and being willing to be vulnerable.
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Read the full transcript
Welcome to lead and follow a podcast that explores how great collaboration actually happens. I’m your host, Sharna Fabiano, author of the book, lead and follow the dance of inspired teamwork. And I’m pleased to bring you the latest research insights and learning methods to help you work together better with the people around you. I help founders, solopreneurs and new leaders become great at collaborating because I’ve seen how much more becomes possible when people integrate their ideas, perspectives, and strengths in a practical way.
To learn more about coaching with me and for a one-time discount on your first session, go to Sharna Fabiano. com slash coaching and enter the promo code podcast. The link is in the show notes. And now here’s the episode.
Today I’m speaking with Otto Henfling. Otto is a consultant and governance advisor in Australia with more than 20 years experience in the for-purpose sector, including 15 years as a CEO. He also has over 20 years of board experience, including a substantial period as a chair. He works extensively with boards and CEOs on governance, role clarity, risk, and strategic alignment.
Otto is currently completing a PhD exploring trust and followership in human services organizations, examining how leaders and followers sustain common purpose in complex environments. He brings a distinctive lead follow lens to the board CEO relationship, helping boards govern well and CEOs both lead decisively and follow faithfully in service of mission. Otto, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much.
I’m so curious to learn about this board CEO relationship through the leadership followership lens. To start us off, would you just give us a really brief outline of the functions of the CEO and board as you see them in for-purpose organizations? Yeah, for sure. That CEO board relationship and especially the CEO chair relationship is really about a little bit like leader followers, two sides of the same coin.
So the board is really there to make sure that the mission and the risk mitigation is being managed and being looked after and that the future of the organization is sustained. The CEO and the CEO’s team are there to run the organization, to make sure that it’s meeting the board’s objectives, that it’s meeting the strategic objectives, that it’s fulfilling mission, and that it’s supporting or servicing whatever client group it has within its purview. They’ve got the same aim to further the company, but they do it from different perspectives. Thank you.
Yeah, that makes sense. What are some of the common challenges that you see as a consultant working with these kinds of pairings? The challenge is usually around the reality that directors and boards and chairs step into a business for one, two, maybe three hours, maybe once a month, thereabouts. And then they step out and do something else.
Management, on the other hand, is there all the time. They’re working, living at 24-7. And so sometimes there’s a mismatch in expectations. Sometimes there’s a mismatch or lack of understanding of the role that each has in the organization and a lack of respect for that as well.
Yeah, I can imagine just the time difference that you mentioned that CEOs are there kind of 24-7, and then the board sort of comes in once in a while. That can create some blind spots maybe on both sides. 100%. Yeah, the reality is the board relies on what management tells them and a little bit of what they might pick up or might hear or complaints or information that comes to them.
But primarily about what’s going on in the business, they rely on what management tells them. So yeah, those blind spots can be accidental. They can be on purpose as well by management. Yeah, management may choose not to pass some stuff on or tell boards.
That happens occasionally, infrequently, but it does happen occasionally. But it’s also about boards understanding that they’ve got a specific role around governance. Often people on the boards are there because of their sector knowledge or their specific knowledge. They might be accountants or lawyers.
They might work in a similar organization somewhere else. And sometimes, yeah, humans being humans, sometimes they forget to not get into the weeds and they want to get into the weeds where management really ought to be doing its thing. And so that can get a little bit difficult as well. Yeah, sounds like they both need to sort of keep perspective on their position, you know, like what they have to contribute.
Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. Yeah, absolutely. I want to go into the lead follow lens here. I don’t often hear that applied to this level of organization.
And I would really love to hear how you see that play out, like who leads, who follows, you know, when do they switch? And like, maybe this is too many questions. How does that help you address, you know, miscommunications or blind spots as they come up? Some individuals think because they’re the CEO or because they’re the chair, they’re top of the tree, you know, they’ve got all power or whatever.
The reality is you’ve got the, you know, the CEO has to report to the board, whether they like it or not, and has to take their lead to some extent from the board. Now, they don’t always want to do that or like to do that, but that’s the reality. Equally, the board has to take their lead from their members or the shareholders. And they don’t always like that part either, that there’s members above them, that there’s a mission that sits above them, the organization’s mission or purpose or whatever, whatever they want to call it.
Everybody has to operate to that mission or purpose or operate within that mission or purpose. In a really good situation relationship, the CEO and the board will listen to each other and they will lead and follow at kind of at the same time. And what I mean by that is, you know, the CEO will respond to what the board wants, the board will listen to it and take advice, but also guidance from the CEO and adjust its thinking on what is best for the long-term future or medium-term future of the organization. And together, those two work together to move the organization forward.
It’s a little bit like the two sides of the same coin. We hear that time and time again in fellowship and that sense that they’ve both got a role to play. You can’t do one without the other. Now, sometimes one of those two will try, but in essence, you need the CEO and their team to do the day-to-day and make sure everything’s happening.
You need the chair and their team to make sure that governance is being looked after and the strategic intent’s being followed and risk is being managed and all of that. Once the two of them understand that, you get this really powerful dynamic playing out. I love that you’re emphasizing the followership aspect of both of those roles. Each responds to the other and therefore each leads the other.
But I wonder if you have an example for us that kind of might make this like a bit more easy to visualize, like of how both a board and a CEO might follow the mission in their respective ways? If you think about it holistically as an organization, we tend to think of organizations that are reasonably short-lived. But if you think about some of the organizations that have been around for hundreds of years, or even tens of years, that have seen a number of chairs and a number of CEOs and whatever, and they’re into the umpteenth iteration of what a chair and a CEO, or who’s a chair and a CEO might be, the one constant is the mission. That might have been set 20 or 50 or 100 years ago.
Time and time again, people forget what their mission is or the mission of the organization is. That’s where things become unstuck. But they should really be looking at what’s the mission that’s what we’re moving towards. We’re moving towards that mission, we’re moving towards that mission, and we’re going to hand this over to the next generation so they can move towards the same mission.
In that sense, the board does that from a long, medium to long-term position around strategy and mitigating risk, making sure that the company doesn’t fall over because risk hasn’t been properly managed. Management is doing it in terms of some of the grassroots things around financial stability, growth, staying current, advocacy maybe. It might be about expanding geographic reach, might be about moving into new client spaces, whatever. But ultimately, it’s about mission, and it’s about making sure that what they’re doing still fits the overall mission of the organization.
I love the idea that the mission is the leader, the primary leader, and that the CEO and the chair and the board are followers of that mission, that leader first, and then perhaps leading and following each other secondarily. When I talk to people about the mission might well be the leader, the ultimate leader, in a corporate sense, people find that hard to sometimes wrap their heads around. But it’s not an unusual concept because when you start looking at religions, whether it’s any of the Judeo-Christian or the Muslim or some of the Eastern religions and whatever, it’s a common thing for them to go back to somebody who is around 2,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago or whatever and say, well, that’s what it’s all about. We’re still reading the Bible, we’re still reading the Koran, and using that as a way to lead our lives at a personal level.
So that notion of going back a long time to look for the mission that you’re following at one level is not unusual. The work Chris Mono is doing in terms of natural followership is in that realm as well. So it’s about trying to understand that and then applying that to a corporate space where some of the big banks around the world, especially the English ones, the universities, the Harvards and the Stanfords in the US, the Oxfords and the Yales, Sydney University here in Australia, University of Melbourne, they were established hundreds of years ago. Their mission hasn’t substantially changed.
It’s still about educating, it’s still about research. Fundamentally, they haven’t changed. The universities haven’t all of a sudden become mining companies or whatever. And so it exists even in corporate space, but it’s just about trying to bring it into more current thinking.
Yeah, absolutely. And I may be saying the obvious, but it strikes me as here by embracing the followership in that, right, that we’re all following that mission or that spiritual teaching or that educational prerogative, where there’s power in that and there’s meaning in that. In a way, that is where the meaning comes from, that it inspires us to lead, right? That we’re first following this higher principle and then that’s where our leadership comes from.
I kind of love that because I’m into followership, but it’s an interesting theoretical framework to put on it. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. I agree. And it’s something that I’m playing around with in my head at the moment is that notion of how do we explain that?
How do we describe it? And then how do we use it in practical terms? At one level, it’s fairly obvious. We talk in governance circles and we’re talking at CEO and board levels around the mission of the organisation system.
We’ve got to fit our mission, but it kind of gets done in a sort of an afterthought or gets used as a tool to maybe say to a CEO, no, no, don’t go there, that’s not part of the mission, rather than saying, well, what is our mission and are we working toward, are we following that mission? Could be part of regular reporting against how are we contributing to the mission? How are we following the mission? I’ve never heard of anyone doing a mission audit of are we operating outside our mission?
Some of the regulatory bodies, at least in Australia, will do that, especially for charities. They will periodically, and we’ve got an election coming up in Victoria, and I saw the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission that regulates charities in Australia put out something, which they put out every election about make sure that if you’re a charity, you don’t go outside your scope in terms of commenting on the election. But that’s about as far as it gets. I love the idea of a mission audit.
I think we should put that out there as a suggestion for any listeners who might want to pilot that idea for us. Listeners, if you do try a mission audit in your organisation, please do let us know. Otto, I want to ask you about some of the CEOs you’ve worked with or researched. I know you mentioned earlier sometimes there’s a disconnect, you know, maybe the CEO can kind of get into leader mode and forget that they need to follow too.
You know, what’s your experience coaching CEOs to embrace their followership side? Do you have any stories about that? By the time I get involved, CEOs have usually so far down the path of I’m the boss and nobody else that it becomes hard. So what I see is CEOs that are so stuck in their way of doing things and disrespecting, you know, there’s probably a nice word for it, but in reality what they’re doing is disrespecting the role of the board and the board potentially being a little bit passive aggressive.
And what I mean by that is you know, the board’s asking for X, Y and Z and they’re not delivering or they’re delivering A, B and C and pretending it’s X, Y and Z. It goes both ways though. Boards sometimes can be a little bit unrealistic with CEOs as well and expect them to get into spaces that the CEO’s not and the company’s not meant to get into. But my experience has been that once it gets to that sort of space where the CEO just thinks fair written, it becomes very hard and then becomes a tussle between the governing body and the CEO and usually the governing body wins that tussle because they’re the ones that appoint the CEO and can terminate the CEO’s employment.
So if you were going to give some pointers, right, to CEOs out there, you know, of organizations to prevent their own termination, what would you say? I would say don’t fight with the board. My point would be listen to what the board has to say. Now you can disagree as a CEO, you can disagree and you often do with the board, but you’ve got to understand what the board’s saying, why it’s saying it and what they’re on about.
And if you don’t understand, ask them. That relationship between the CEO and the chair, I don’t think people always understand just how important that relationship is. That ought to be a really tight relationship and I’ve seen it where the relationship becomes strained, so you withdraw. It’s not good for anybody.
It’s not good for the company. It’s not good for the CEO. It’s not good for the board. The CEO and the chair need to have those discussions so that the CEO knows that anything that they’re putting to the board, the chair is at least across and has voiced their opinions.
Now it might not go the way the CEO wants it to go, but they at least know the chair is across it and across their arguments, even if the chair disagrees with it, but they’ve had that private discussion. I can’t stress enough that need to have that really tight relationship between a chair and a board and a CEO. It just makes life so much easier for a CEO. Yeah, I wonder if this might be a hard question, but how have you seen those conversations change decisions?
Say the CEO takes your advice and I’m going to hear them out. I’m going to listen to the chair and the board and just even if I don’t initially agree, I’m going to hear their perspective and share mine. Just having that open communication, the willingness to understand one another, what changes as a result of that? At times I’ve been chair of a board and I’ve had those discussions.
I try to always have a really good relationship with the CEO. The CEO and I would have a discussion about something and part of it is me being able to say to the CEO, look, the board’s not going to go for this or you’ve got some and some of the board will support you, some won’t. You’ve got to make these changes. You’ve got to look at these areas of your proposal or pull it, do some more work and then bring it back.
The advantage of that for the board is that they’re not wasting their time on issues that aren’t ready to come to the board. The advantage for the CEO is that they’ve got a better hit rate with the board. They’ve got a better success rate in getting their stuff through because they’ve been listening and compromising a little bit. Well, compromising is the wrong word, but adjusting a little bit.
The other advantage for the CEO is when the board finally sees what they see, it positively changes the way the board will view the CEO in the long run so that they’re seeing more polished product, they’re seeing better thought out arguments and whatever. So, it raises the impression that the board has of the CEO. Well, that’s a really strong argument for a conversation. I mean, it’s transformative, really.
Depending on which definition of leadership you talk about, people like Joseph Rostam, back in the 90s, he spoke about leadership is that ability to get to an agreed position with somebody else, to adjust your own thinking, to give the other person things that they can latch onto to adjust their thinking. It’s not about the totality of somebody’s thinking, it’s about the particular issue you’re talking about. It’s that ability to reach a compromise or he doesn’t even call it a compromise, it’s an agreed position where you’ve both maybe given a little bit, you’ve both adjusted your thinking a little bit. That, when the CEO then takes that to the board, is just super powerful in terms of the relationship and so forth.
Yeah, and that’s what I see. Tell me if you disagree with this or agree with us. That’s what I see as followership, actually, is the willingness to let someone influence you, that’s followership, right? Versus influencing someone else and allowing yourself to be moved by the other person, to be influenced by the other person, that’s followership.
And that’s, for me, this ingredient that is often overlooked, right? That we’re hesitant to do because we’re attached to being the leader or influencing other people, but letting ourselves be moved, that’s followership and that is what makes the transformation for me. Okay, I want to ask about maybe the successful CEOs. So, ones who are good at this, right?
Good at kind of finding the shared agreement, who can lead and follow. How did they describe their role to you or what did you learn from them? So, during my PhD, I interviewed a few CEOs and then their subordinates. There was a cohort of leaders that stood out for me and they were the ones that basically said, you know, different words used, but the sentiment was the same, which was, I’m a worker like everybody else.
There’s nothing special about me. Some of them spoke about, you know, the title of CEO was getting in the way of them being able to do their work. And what they meant by that wasn’t that they couldn’t exercise the authority that comes with the position and the responsibility and the delegated authority and all of that, but what they meant was they couldn’t, that title was stopping them having a relationship with staff at more junior levels because people were concerned. They were talking to the CEO and what would that mean?
And I’m going to embarrass myself or whatever, whatever, whatever. And they found that very hard. One of them in particular had only been in the role for a few months. It was her first CEO role.
She found that interesting, a little bit frustrating, understood it, but finding it a real bit of a blockage in being able to relate to other people. We see it in, oddly enough, what’s that show, Undercover Boss? We see that kind of played out there where conceptually the notion that the boss has to go into disguise to be treated like a normal person and otherwise they don’t get treated as a normal person. We see that played out in those sort of shows and, again, loads of movies coming out of your part of the world that do that sort of stuff and play on that theme.
It is that notion that some people, they know they’re the CEO. They know that comes with a bunch of responsibilities and authorities and whatever, but they still want to be able to relate to people at lower levels within their organizational structures. Yeah, I think that’s super interesting, both because it exposes the fact that these hierarchical trees of titles compromises relationships. It makes it very obvious, your research, and we instinctively feel that, and that’s also in Chris Mona’s work.
But that these CEOs, the successful ones, are actually saying that’s sort of a concern for them because it’s getting in the way. It’s actually like an impediment. I take that as a really important note. If I were a CEO, I would think, okay, I need to be aware that this hierarchy of titles is actually going to get in the way of me relating to people, which is going to get in the way of me being effective.
I need to work a little bit extra to make sure I can relate well. I need to almost work against the title to make sure I have those quality relationships, I have the quality communication. I don’t think there’s any good solution for this because we’re still going to have trees of hierarchies in our organizations, but it’s a really important note, I think, for all of us. Yes, absolutely.
It’s also the part that makes it harder for people that have been promoted into CEO or senior executive roles from within the organization because they go from being one of the team to now being the boss or being the whatever. A lot of people have issues with that change in relationship. Now, it’s potentially easier if you’re coming in from outside because you’re relatively an unknown entity. If you can break down the barriers a lot quicker and easier in that situation by changing up what you do and how you do things compared to either your predecessor or norms or usual customs or whatever.
There’s all sorts of ways people try to do that. Some of them work, some of them don’t, but it’s also dependent on the people on the other side. CEO can do whatever he or she wants, whatever they want to try to break that down, but the people on the other side need to be prepared to reciprocate. They’ve got agency.
They don’t have to play along just because the CEO wants them to. Yeah. What are some of the ways you’ve seen it work well for CEOs to ensure they’re still having good relationships and work against that hierarchical bias a little bit? One of the ways is for the CEO to roll up their sleeves and get in there and do something or if they’re promoting some sort of professional development course, that they go along.
They’re just one of the participants like everybody else. We did that in my last role as CEO. We did that a few times and I always made sure that I would go along and just be one of the participants and join one of the groups and do all that and be vulnerable. Ultimately, the biggest risk for a CEO is being vulnerable and having that work against them, having somebody use that vulnerability to in some way damage them or their reputation.
That preparedness to be vulnerable and now we’re getting into that whole trust space. The notion of trust being around competency, integrity and benevolence, part of that, the whole premise of trust is based on vulnerability and the preparedness to be vulnerable. A lot of CEOs don’t want to be vulnerable. Most people don’t want to be vulnerable unless they absolutely trust the person that they’re being vulnerable to.
That’s a common human characteristic, not to be vulnerable to those that you don’t know because you don’t know if they’re going to stab you in the back. Yeah, of course. When you’re in a position of that kind of responsibility, I imagine it feels even like bigger stakes. Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah. Otto, this is fascinating. Is there anything else about governance and followership that you’d like to share from your research or from your experience consulting? If there are a couple of messages for people to take away, it’d be if you’re the CEO, don’t forget that you’re reporting to and following what the board’s on about and what the mission of the organization’s on about.
Secondly, the other takeaway would be make sure that relationship with the chair is super, super tight. Not because you’re always going to get your own way, but because you then have a working relationship and basically two cogs doing their own thing but meshing together super beautifully and just humming in a way that a lot of organizations don’t. Gosh, so there’s one thing I’ve learned from my dance experience. It’s trust the relationships.
That’s easy to say. It sounds cliche, but in real time, you’re on the dance floor with your partner and you’re having to make these decisions. We say that the leaders who can follow their partner as well as lead them are really the greatest leaders. It’s that.
You feel vulnerable because there’s an element of you have to not know exactly what’s coming and you have to trust the interaction between you that somehow you will move forward literally on the dance floor. It feels similar to me to what you’re describing here in that tight CEO chair relationship that if you commit to that and trust it, it will serve. Yeah. Like any relationship, there’s going to be disagreements and there’s going to be occasional flare-ups, but look at it over a longer term and commit to a long-term relationship.
Yeah. Thank you. Otto, you are also, amongst all of your other roles, co-chair of 2026’s first-ever Global Followership Conference in the Asia-Pacific region in Australia. Could you give us a little insight into your vision for this conference, your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams?
Yeah, for sure. It’s not just the first one in the Asia-Pacific, it’s the first one in the Southern Hemisphere. So, yeah, we’re kind of chuffed about that. We’ve got around 16 people presenting or 16 presentations at least, a number of keynotes.
We’ve got a keynote from New Zealand, the Race Commissioner, Dr Melissa Darby, who’s a Maori woman, presenting. We’ve got First Nations Australian, First Nations academic in Rejordan presenting. Just the notion of having a conference on followership in Australia is awesome for us. We’re just hoping that this helps promote followership within Australia and within the Asia-Pacific, within New Zealand and the islands of the Asia-Pacific area and into Indonesia and New Guinea and further into mainland Asia, and see if we can’t make this a reasonably regular feature on the GFC calendar.
Wonderful. Well, I’m excited about it. We’re recording this interview on March 5th in North America, March 6th in Australia. It’s not too late if you’re listening to it in the next 30 days.
Check out globalfollowership. com for all the details on this and our other conferences. Otto, thank you so very much for your time and sharing your expertise and your insights. We will link to Otto’s work in the show notes as well as to the conference, and I very much look forward to our next conversation.
Absolutely. So do I. Thanks for your time, Sian. It’s been absolutely wonderful.
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