Your First Board Position

Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

Introduction

“Where will your  evolution as a leader take you?”

This is a series of coaching blogs for managers and senior executives. The content is developed from anonymised segments of emails originally sent to my clients summarising our coaching sessions. The aim of the emails is to encourage self reflection and to challenge them to develop and  progress.

Your First Board Position

What you read below started out as a email to a client. I used this format to ask a series of coaching questions and challenges to enable my client to formulate their plans and priorities as they transition to their first board level role. The questions I framed will apply equally to anyone working at senior level, either as a new hire, or, having been promoted internally.

As you begin the transition from your present position to that of a board director do take some time to stop and reflect.

Your First 100 Days

• What needs to happen between now and when you start for you to have an effective first 100 days in your new role?
  • What will you need to do by way of research and reading prior to joining your new company?
    • Where are the gaps in your knowledge?
    • Do you know what you don’t know?
    • What steps will you take to bridge those gaps?
    • What are the USPs of your new company?
    • What makes them successful in their chosen market sector?
    • What do you need to know about their wider market sector in order to understand their business model?
    • Who are your customer’s customers?
    • What value does your organisation need to deliver in order for your customers to service their customers?

Getting Along Purposefully Rather than Accidentally with the CEO and Board

• How will you go about making sure that your CEO, board and you have “agreed ways of working” that will ensure you will get along purposefully rather than accidentally?
  • Once you are in your new role how will you construct the agenda of your one-to-one meetings in order for them to be a truly developmental experience?
  • Who will you need to meet inside your new organisation?
  • What ground do you need to prepare with your fellow board members and investors?
  • Who are the key stakeholders and influencers?
    • How will you engage with them so that your workplace relationships produce a win/win for all concerned?
  • What will be different for you compared to the role you currently hold?
  • We discussed moving from an expectation that your present role is ‘reactive’ to one that is proactive.
    • The expectation is for you to be a proactive, forward-thinking board member.
    • What do you need to do in order to fulfil their expectations?
  • How aware are you of the responsibilities that fall to a director in order to discharge their social, moral, legal and corporate duties?
  • What can you do to challenge and develop their business model to take them to the next level?

Your First 100 Days

• What plans and objectives do you want to successfully complete by the end of your first 100 days in your new role?
  • Have you envisioned “what good looks like” at the end of that period.
  • What steps will you take between now and then in order to achieve that outcome?
• What will you have to “unlearn” in order to give yourself the intellectual bandwidth to be the best main board director you know how?
  • Remember what got you here won’t get you there!
• How will you adapt your management style, given your experience to date, in order to get the best out of your people and yourself?
• Even though your job title says “director”; your role will be far wider and will include the commercial, sales and marketing aspects of the business.
  • What preparations do you need to make so that you can make a meaningful contribution?
  • What will it take for you to become truly multifaceted, multi-disciplined director?
• How will you, when required, challenge your fellow board members in a positive and proactive manner?
• We discussed how you will develop other aspects of your “brand” and “style”.
  • What will your “brand” look like 12 months from now?
• We also discussed how you will prepare your handover to the person who is replacing you.
  • What needs to happen for the transition to be transparent and successful?

Why You?

Lastly during your preparatory meetings with your CEO find out why you were chosen as their ideal candidate to be their next board director? It is really important that you understand where success comes from so that it ceases to be an accident, the causes of which you are blissfully ignorant, and becomes something you can regularly repeat using your talents and resources.