The question I most often get asked is ‘How do I secure my first Board position?’. Most women I meet assume that there is a secret magic formula to getting on a Board that they don’t know about. Is it having connections in all the right places? Is it completing one of those expensive training programmes for aspiring Non-Executives? What about having the right LinkedIn profile?
All of these are worthy of consideration and I’ll return to them in future blog posts. However, the single most important thing you can do to get your first Board position is to get Board experience. ‘But how?’ I hear you ask. Quite often when I give this answer, I’m met with comments like ‘but I don’t want to volunteer on a charity board’, ‘but I don’t want to work in the public sector’ or ‘I don’t know how to get Board experience, they’re all looking for someone who has the experience already’.
I’ve hired Non-Executives myself in some of my roles as Chair of Nominations Committees or recruitment panels. And I can tell you first-hand, we’ve never hired anyone for a Board role who has no experience as a Trustee or Non-Executive Director no matter how qualified they are. The gap in skillset, attitude and experience between Non-Execs and Executives is wide and the best way to understand and ameliorate these differences is to sit on the other side of the Board room table. Governance looks quite different from the perspective of a Trustee or Non-Exec who has ultimate responsibility and will be held to account by regulators or Companies House.
So how do you go about getting this experience? My preferred method is by becoming a volunteer Board member for a charity. Charity Board members are usually referred to as Trustees and most of these roles are unpaid. I favour these over public sector paid roles for several reasons:
- These are easier to get. There are thousands of charities in the UK ranging from tiny to huge.
- There is a great choice of roles – smaller charities are often almost permanently recruiting for Trustees
- You’re doing some good in the world!
- Taking a Trustee roles means you aren’t then pigeonholed to public or private sector future roles
- The organisations are generally very grateful to have you which makes for a pleasant working environment
- You can flex your commitment up or down – there will usually be a minimum time requirement you need to meet but it’s up to you how much you give over and above that. I recommend as much as you can so as to widen your experience.
- You can gain experience in a wide variety of Board areas – you might join the Board as Treasurer but that doesn’t mean you can’t help in other areas.
How do you find and prepare for one of these roles? This is something we can work through together. The most important thing is to work out what kind of role would suit you best. And this has two parts. Considering what your skillset is best suited to and thinking about what kind of paid Board roles you’ll be looking for in the future.
There’s a lot to it and we cover it in depth in the Gravitas Process and on the Bootcamp.