Plain language, and short. Taking the assessment means accepting these.
Last updated 2026-09-30.
The Director Governance Style Assessment is a free, ten-question instrument that names the perspective a director brings to a board conversation. It was built by Paula Fontana and Marva Bailer, and debuted at PDA PRISM in Atlanta in October 2026. Using it means accepting what is set out here.
The result is a prompt for a conversation, not a professional opinion. Nothing here is legal, financial, investment, governance or employment advice, and nothing here creates a professional relationship of any kind. It is not a psychometric instrument, it has not been clinically validated, and it should not be used to select, assess, promote, evaluate or remove a director, an officer or an employee. Decisions of that sort deserve better evidence than ten forced choices.
The assessment is offered as it is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty that it will be available, accurate, uninterrupted or fit for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent the law allows, the authors are not liable for any loss arising from using it or relying on its result.
Responses are anonymous. Nothing collected identifies anyone, and answers are shared with the Research & Standards Council only in aggregate. An email address, if you choose to give one so a copy can be sent to you, is stored separately from responses with no column joining the two. The privacy notice on the assessment sets out exactly what is recorded.
The four styles, the questions, the accompanying text and the design are the authors’ work. You are welcome to take the assessment, keep your own result, share it, and point others at the site. Republishing the questions or the style descriptions, presenting them as your own, building a derivative instrument from them, or using them in a commercial product needs written permission first. The research cited on the research page belongs to its own authors and publishers, and is cited rather than reproduced.
There is a form on the result page for directors who want to run this with their whole board. Sending it starts a conversation and nothing more. It is not an engagement, and it commits neither side to anything.
Please do not attempt to submit responses automatically, distort the aggregate totals, scrape the site at volume, or interfere with its operation. The totals shown on screen are the point of the exercise, and they only mean anything if they come from real people.
These terms may change as the instrument develops. The version on this page is the one that applies, and the date at the top says when it last changed.