Debra has been recognized as a an executive resume and board search expert by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Inc, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and many others in addition to serving as an international speaker and guest for top-rated podcasts. In 2021, she was recognized by Forbes as a NEXT 1000 Entrepreneur.
There's growing recognition that boards want a good mix of age experience and backgrounds so as to foster a better debate and decision making and less groupthink. That means that boards are growing in diversity and diversity not just in race and ethnicity, but also in gender in that can also include LGBTQ plus status, and then age. There's more opportunities for younger board members, especially first time board members to find opportunities as well.
Career duration: At least 15 years of experience for board seats, especially these paid board seats. However, we're looking at more of like 20-25 years for paid roles. And if you're earlier in your career, or you've really had an early launch into executive roles, but you're not quite at that 20 there are still things you can do to start setting yourself up for a strong board career, but you may be a little bit early to get paid roles.
Deep industry knowledge: Are you an industry expert in whatever industry or do you have deep functional expertise, like as a CFO? You're going to have to have one or the other or both. It really helps to have unique experience such as international or global experience leading teams or an executive during an m&a or divestiture or an IPO or going from public back to private. That shows that you understand something super complex that a company may be going through, and that may make you an attractive candidate for their board, if they have something similar coming up.
A wide industry network: If you've built an amazing career or you've been at the same company for a long time, and you've got an executive title on the C-Suite this helps.. But maybe if you don't have an industry network, outside of that company, that can be really hard. I always say, start networking as early as possible, as widely as possible in your industry, so that when you start your board search, people will know you. From the best data that we can find only about 15% of paid board seats are filled by board recruiters. That means that the other 85% are done through networking. So while working with board level recruiters is a good channel as part of your search, you are going to want to be able to have a network that you can activate to go secure other opportunities.
The most common mistake is trying to be all things to all people rather than focusing on the specific areas of expertise and value adds. I see this all the time with my executive candidates. The natural thing that everyone want to do is to add all of their experience so as to not to limit your opportunities. But by doing that people don't understand really where you belong or where you can add the most value, and they don't understand what box you fit in, and then you miss out on opportunities anyway. So the very first thing we're going to do is get clear on what your ideal board opportunity looks like. And once you get clear on that, then picking the skills and writing your resume and writing your bio and doing your networking all becomes easier. Because if you're really clear on where you're headed, then that will be your roadmap for every other piece of this process.
