Join The Club: How To Land Your First Board Role

Many senior leaders will potentially be interested in holding non-executive director roles on the boards of companies and other organizations. Yet, the board can often seem an exclusive club that is impossible to break into, no matter how skilled and experienced you may be. So, what’s the secret to getting your first board seat and making a success of it? Here, five directors share their top tips:

1. Use your connections

Connections are fundamental to getting board seats, whatever level you’re at, according to Callum Laing, an experienced director, founder of the Veblen Director Programme and author of Boardroom Blueprint: Boost Your Career With a Board Seat in 60 Days. But he advises would-be board directors to be realistic when seeking out their first role.

“Your first board seat isn’t going to be Microsoft or Tesla,” Laing explains. “It should be a new start-up, or a local business. You need to make time to connect with founders. From there, you should deliberately be reaching out and building relationships with other board members and investors.”

There are estimated to be more than 330 million companies in the world. A tiny fraction of those companies has an active board. Laing’s advice is to not even apply for positions with existing boards, but instead offer to create a board for companies that haven’t got one yet. “The odds are much better and you can get that much-needed experience!” he says.

2. Know what you know

As a leader, you can bring valuable knowledge to any board that you sit on, but you will also have a lot to learn. So, when looking for board roles, it’s important to understand what knowledge you can bring and how that knowledge can impact the company’s stakeholders, including its shareholders. Be aware that domain expertise – such as a knowledge of a particular sector – is less helpful than holistic expertise – such as knowledge about how to successfully scale a business.

“Each business is different, yet every business has the same underlying basics,” says Ralph White, who became an apprentice board member on a European publicly listed company before joining the board of a sports and entertainment company based in the U.S.

“Knowing how to fundamentally influence core key performance indicators is a universally transferable skill,” notes White. “For example, a strategy of increasing prices by approximately 5% overall can result in a roughly 20% increase in profit, given the same expenses. This has the dual effect of increasing business valuation, and thus shareholder value, with little impact on customer experience.”

3. Raise your profile

People need to know how you could add value to a board. If people are unaware of you, doors will remain shut.

Healthcare executive Arvashni Seeripat overcame this issue by using her natural affinity with people to build a profile that made her attractive to boards that might potentially want to work with her. “You must build a profile for others to get to know you,” she says. “Yet that can be daunting.”

Seeripat admitted that she struggled with “putting myself out there”. So, she turned to podcasts to engage with people in an authentic way. “My strength lies in honest, robust dialog, while communicating the success stories of others,” she explains. “Very soon, I had people reaching out to me from sectors that I had no connections with. My advice? Highlight and showcase your strengths. You never know who might be watching.”

4. Work your way up

“People get hung up on trying to find the perfect board seat when your first step should be to gain your initial board seat and then work your way up to bigger things once you have gained some experience,” says Jeremy Harbour, director of business scaling platform Unity Group and founder of M&A network The Harbour Club.

Harbour believes that if you have curiosity and a genuine desire to help the company you join, that will make you a better board director than someone with experience who thinks they know it all.

5. Bring real value

It’s not enough to just become a board member. You also need to bring real value to the table. This is something Victoria Sylvester knows all about. She built up her own educational company, Acacia Training, and took it public. Additionally, she has served on both large and small boards, always focusing on how she can contribute as much as possible, in ways that benefit all stakeholders.

“To truly impact and add value to a board, mere attendance at meetings and reviewing papers isn’t enough,” Sylvester explains. “‘Passenger’ board members, who only seek resume enhancement, may seem harmless, but they can impede progress.”

She adds: “Continual learning and self-development are essential for board members to remain relevant in an evolving world and bring fresh ideas to the table.”