Three steps to finding a voice in the boardroom

Viewed in Heidrick & Struggles

The typical corporate chief executive can be forgiven for believing that his or her prior professional, academic, and personal traits and successes are sufficient for a fairly seamless transition into the role of a corporate director.

However, that assumption, Chicago-based executive recruitment and management consulting giant Heidrick & Struggles cautions in this report, would be a grave mistake.

Board Member is a (real) job

Three factors, the firm contends, can actually leave an executive surprised at how inaccurate they were in assuming the transition to being a corporate director would come with ease: “how the board operates, what topics the board spends the most time on, and what doesn’t get discussed.”

Learning by doing

But there is good news: The executive who recognizes these challenges at the very beginning of his or her role as a corporate director will grasp the need to prepare sufficiently. That preparation, in turn, should prove sufficient to make what could be a rocky transition to corporate director a vastly easier one. Heidrick & Struggles boils down this suggested preparation to three steps:

Step #1 “Find a mentor on the unwritten rules

Every board functions with its own unstated rules and culture in which certain topics are unpredictably sensitive and best avoided and with varying levels of long-established protocols associated with challenging status quo or alternative board views.

Board chairpersons can be helpful in assigning mentors to new board members, but that practice does not yet seem common. If no formal mentorship process exists as part of on-boarding a new director,  new board members should seek out such a transitional mentor.

Unwritten rules are, by nature, obviously unwritten–and rarely are they pro-actively explained. But understanding them beforehand can spare the new director avoidable turbulence and conflict as they join a new boardroom.

Step #2 “Build social capital”

As is the case with a mentor who is capable of preparing directors to understand a board’s culture and its so-called “unspoken rules,” building social capital also is essential.

New directors should make an effort to build one-on-one relationships with each board colleague. Establishing these relationships allows a new director to better understand a board’s potential red lines and to develop some basic human relationship that likely can soften rough elbows when disagreements or internal board tensions arise, as they often and almost always do.

Step #3 “Understand the power of being new

As a new director but likely only for a brief time an opportunity exists for a new director to ask penetrating and important questions in pursuit of understanding the thinking behind a board’s strategies or operational decisions.

Questions phrased with the preface, “As a new member, it would be helpful for me to understand” a certain issue are questions that are entirely reasonable for a new director but ultimately, over time, become less applicable.

A new director faces great challenges as a new director but has at least this one favorable opportunity associated with being new–to probe into vital areas under the auspices of trying to understand a new company and its associated challenges. Seize that opportunity, Heidrick & Struggles urges new board directors.

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