Every board swears it doesn't have one. Every board does. Not the mean-girl kind you see on your favorite TV show, where the queen-bee moms deliberately ice out the new mom at pickup. Real cliques are quieter than that. That quiet is exactly what makes them dangerous. It's a handful of people who have quietly aligned and started steering outcomes before the rest of the board gets a say. Nobody voted them into that role. They just took it. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
This shows up in every kind of organization, whether it's a PTA, an HOA, a nonprofit board or a board of trustees. On some boards it's harmless noise. On others it quietly reroutes the real power. And on a public board, it can even cross a legal line, which we'll get to. Here's how to see your clique for what it is and pry it open.
Forget the drama. A board clique rarely knows it's a clique. It's just the people who have been around longest, or who think alike, quietly finding each other. The signs are subtle. Decisions feel settled before the meeting even starts. The same handful of votes always move together. There's a shorthand and a history the rest of the room doesn't share. Proposals from outside the group quietly stall while the group's own ideas sail through. No conspiracy required. Just an alignment that formed in the background and started calling the shots.
The real problem is bigger than hurt feelings. A clique is a board within a board. It's a small group holding power that nobody handed them. Your members elected or appointed a whole board to make decisions together, in the open. A clique quietly relocates that power to a back channel, a group text, a pre-meeting phone call, a conversation in the parking lot, where a few people settle the outcome before the real meeting even happens. By the time the board formally votes, the decision is already made. Everyone else is just ratifying it. That's not leadership. That's a shadow government. It runs on authority it was never actually given.
Not every clique sits at the top. They don't all want the same thing. There's the power bloc, the votes that always move together and quietly run the place. There's the complainers, the alignment that exists mostly to stir the pot and torpedo whatever leadership proposes. There's the old guard and, just as often, a younger crowd, two generations that caucus separately and cancel each other out. What they share is the thing that makes them a clique and not just a friendship: a secret alignment that shows up in the outcomes. If a bloc decides together in private and votes together in public, you have a clique, whatever their cause.
To be clear, friendship isn't the problem. People who serve together will like each other, carpool, grab a drink after the meeting. That's healthy. A clique is something else. It's when that closeness turns into a voting bloc, when the friendship starts deciding board business off to the side and showing up to the meeting with its mind already made up. You can be close with your fellow members and still walk in genuinely undecided, ready to actually deliberate. The line isn't who you're friends with. It's whether the real decision happens at the table or before you ever get there.
On a private board, a PTA or most nonprofits, a clique is a governance and trust problem. On a public board, it can be an actual legal one. School boards, public college and university trustees and other government bodies are bound by open meeting laws. California has the Brown Act, Texas has the Open Meetings Act, Florida has its Government in the Sunshine Law and nearly every other state has its own version. Those laws exist for exactly this reason. A majority of the board is not allowed to reach a decision privately, whether in a single back room or through a chain of texts, calls and intermediaries. When a clique that adds up to a majority settles things before the public meeting, that is what the law calls a serial meeting or a walking quorum. It's a violation. The fix and the law point the same direction. Deliberate in the open, where you're supposed to.
The uncomfortable truth is that the inside of a clique never feels like a clique. It just feels like the people who get it. That is exactly why cliques survive. Nobody in one believes they're in one. So if you've served a while and you always seem to know how a vote will go before it happens, look harder. That's not a sign you understand the board. It might be a sign you're the reason the rest of them can't.
Start with what you can't do. You can't stand up and announce that three people are a clique and order them to stop. They'll deny it and dig in. Now you have an organized bloc instead of a loose one. You fix this a different way. Only one of the three is the chair's job.
If you see it, name the process, not the people. Don't accuse anyone of anything. Just ask for the behavior you want. "Can we decide this here, together, instead of settling it ahead of time?" Nobody can take offense at that. It quietly drags the decision back where it belongs.
If you find yourself in one, that's the real lever, because you're the only person you can actually change. And it is okay to admit you might be the problem. That's not a character flaw. It's self-awareness. On a board it might be the bravest move there is. Stop discussing pending decisions in the group chat. Walk in undecided. Bring your influence back to the table. And if the clique is really a friendship underneath, keep the friendship and move it off the board. Grab the coffee, talk about the things you actually have in common, just stop letting it settle board business in the parking lot.
If you run the board, you can't decree a clique away, but you can build a room where one has nowhere to operate. Make decisions in the meeting, on the record. Rotate who works with whom so the same pair isn't always fused at the hip. Make transparency the default setting. Change the plumbing and the back channel dries up on its own.
And what does none of that require? Not one accusation. You don't dissolve a clique by calling it out. You dissolve it by pulling every real decision into the sunlight, one meeting at a time.
What is a board clique? It's a small alignment of members who settle board business among themselves, outside the full board, then arrive at meetings with the outcome already decided. It's not the same as having friends on the board. The problem is a bloc quietly holding power it was never given.
Is it illegal for board members to decide things privately? On a public board, it can be. Open meeting laws like California's Brown Act prohibit a majority from deliberating or deciding outside a noticed public meeting, including by text, email or a chain of side conversations. Private nonprofit and PTA boards aren't bound by those laws, but the same principle holds. Decide at the table, not before it.
How do you break up a clique on a board? Not by accusing anyone, that only hardens it. Ask for decisions to happen in the actual meeting instead of beforehand. If you're in the clique, take your own influence back to the table and move the friendship off the board. If you run the board, make on-the-record, in-the-meeting decisions the norm so the back channel has nowhere to go.
