The head of people at a privately owned specialist contractor told me about a question she asked her chief executive not long after she joined. Should there be some non-executive support around this business? Who is really giving you an external view of the world?

It is the right question, and hardly anyone asks it out loud. She could, because she had come into construction from another sector and had not yet learned which subjects are left alone.

Her point was not that the business had nobody. There was a chair and a non-executive already. Her point was sharper than that. One came from a finance background and the other was known personally to the owner, and between them they bolstered the business rather than challenged it. The support was real. The challenge was not.

I see that arrangement constantly in growing construction businesses, and I do not think most owners realise they have built it. You take on a chair because an investor expects one, or because it feels like the grown-up thing to do. You appoint someone you already know and like, because the alternative is inviting a stranger into your numbers. Then the board meets and everyone is agreeable, and you come away reassured rather than tested.

Reassurance is a poor return on a non-executive day rate.

The businesses that get this right buy something different. They buy the person who has already seen what happens when a contractor doubles turnover in three years without changing how it prices risk, and who will say so in front of the whole board. Not someone who arrives with the answers, which is a consultant. Someone who keeps asking why you are doing it that way until you either justify it or quietly stop.

That person is usually uncomfortable to have in the room. That is the job. If your chair has never made you defend a decision you had already made, you have hired a supporter and called it governance.

There is a second thing worth noting, and it applies well beyond the boardroom. The question came from someone who had never worked in construction. Everyone else in that business had grown up in the industry and had absorbed, without noticing, that certain things are simply how it is done. She had not, so she asked. Hire enough people from inside your own sector and you will get a leadership team that agrees with itself for years at a stretch.

So two questions, and they are not rhetorical.

Who, in your business, is paid to tell you that you are wrong? If the honest answer is a friend of the founder who meets you four times a year, you do not have challenge. You have company.

And when did someone last ask you why you do something a particular way, and you could not give an answer better than "we have always done it like that"? If you cannot remember, the problem is not that nobody is thinking. It is that everyone in the room learned the same habits in the same industry, and nobody in the room is paid to notice.