How to Get on a Corporate Board (with your brand)

These days, it Seems LIKE everyone wants to get on a board.

And for good reason!

Boards offer a great opportunity for mid- and late-career executives to expand their experience, earnings and impact — but it's not always easy to figure out how to get started.

So with that in mind, here is a 10-minute ‘quick bite’ video to help get you started. Full transcript after the jump.

3 tips from Cat to position yourself to join a corporate board:

Full Transcript:

Hi I'm Cat Coffrin with Captivating Consulting and this is a 10 minute quick-bite on how you can use your personal brand to get a spot on a corporate board.

This is a topic that seems to be coming up everywhere lately, especially among executive women - which is awesome - and what I've realized is there's actually just not a lot of resources on how to get started and what it's going to take to present yourself in the right way. So I wanted to tackle that, and offer just three ways to think about this to get you started on the process.

First and foremost I will say there's two key aspects when you think about what it's going to take to get onto a board: There's the entire area around how do you find opportunities through your network and leverage the people that you know and essentially find the right contacts and connections. That's not what i'm going to talk about. 

The second piece is going to be all about how you present yourself to make a compelling case for why you are the right person for an open seat that you're going after. 

So, there's three things that you can think about when you have an opportunity for a board seat, you want to make a very concise and compelling case by answering three key questions”

The first one is going to be: "Who are you?" Not easy; very important. The second question is: "Why this board?" And then the third question is: "What is your value?" and that's ultimately what it's going to come down to. What is the right way to convey and explain why you specifically are the right person for this seat.

So let's dig into the first question:

"Who are you?" is not an easy question to answer. It's something that a lot of us grapple with, and what you really want to do is find a way to quickly and effectively communicate where you came from and what brought you to where you are at this moment in time ,and ultimately where you're going. 

Because we don't feel like we have a real authentic accurate sense of what's driving a person and what they're all about. It's a lot harder to get on board with having them in a leadership position.

This deserves a lot more time than we have time for today, but one of the shortcut ways to get the process started on defining who you are is to go back in time and ask yourself this question: What were you like as a kid? What did you want to be when you grew up? Where do you come from what was the context for when all of this was happening?

If you can, start by going back there and then ask yourself "Why?"

I talk to a lot of people who wanted to become a veterinarian. I'm not quite sure why I talk to a lot of former aspiring vets - what was it about helping animals or helping them get healthy that appealed to you at that time? 

Spend a little time with that question, and then from there you want to start to move through all of the the proof points and the steps along the way from that early aspiration through to where you are today and how you got there. Because if you start to plot these things out, you're going to be able to find what we in branding like to think of as that "red thread." 

Where are the patterns, where are the consistencies, where can we find where you've landed and connect it back to where you started and understand a little bit more about how you got there and what that trajectory was.

It's not an easy process but it's absolutely worthwhile. I'll give you an example:

I was recently working with a woman who works in executive recruitment and talent strategy with venture capital firms and the companies that they work with, and what we found as we started to look back into her path is that when she was a kid she wanted to be a marine biologist. 

And, of course that's nothing like where she's landed, but when I asked her why, she had this amazing statement about how she had always liked the idea of looking below the surface to see the stories and the beauty there that people might not always pause to see or appreciate. And as we looked at every step along the way, and what drove her in her life, and the things that attracted her or appealed to her and really benefited from her unique strengths and skillsets, what we actually found is that that frame of mind is very consistent with how she approaches what she does today.

Of course, we're being a little bit reductionist, but this becomes a device through which you can give a memorable introduction and help people get just a little flavor of who she is and leave them wanting to understand a little bit more. It sets her apart simply by talking about something from her past and who she's always been. 

Your job - once you start to plot out all the steps along theway that you've taken - is going to be to distill to simplify and make it shorter and briefer. And the more work that you do to do that, the easier it's going to be for other people to get the answer to that question "Who are you?"

The second question is "Why this board?" 

Don't overlook this one. You have applied for jobs before, I'm sure that you've been here, you probably know this, but you have to remember that when it comes to board seats this is a bit of a matching process.

It's a little bit like dating in some ways, it's not at all like hiring somebody for a full-time position because when you put somebody on your board they actually become a part of your brand, they become a proof point, they become part of your leadership and the way that you explain to your shareholders and your stakeholders how you are being responsible and conducting business and also how you are innovating and thinking about the future. 

So if you keep that in mind, it's up to you to make that process a little easier by doing the thinking for them. So start to look for those areas of overlap for things that you share what are you passionate about

when it comes to business, and does this company have a great story to tell there or could they use a better story? And, can you help them get there? Is sustainability an area of interest for you, seeing more diversity and inclusion in the workplace? 

Where can you start to help this company see that by adding you to their board, not only are they going to get the benefit of everything you know and all of your experience and skillsets, but they're also going to get the benefit of shared values and shared interests and you're going to add to the story that they are telling.

The last question is: "What value do you offer?"

This one's the most important, especially for board seats. And if you are somebody who's a little non-traditional or doesn't look like the past board members for this company, it's going to be a little bit harder for you so you have to double down on making it very clear and compelling why they need you in that seat. 

You're basically defining your value proposition but here's the problem: Most people take this topic and make it so boring. You have to take any jargon, any language that you tend to use talk about what you know, what you do, and bring out the human aspect of it and make it much more accessible.

Because we forget that joining a board is actually about joining an interdisciplinary group of leaders who probably don't share the same area of expertise and knowledge that you do, so you can't talk to them as if they are in the same function as you. 

You need to talk to them about your value in a way that they can hopefully understand and help them make the connection to how it's going to help support the business and what they are trying to achieve. So first and foremost, check your language, unpack your jargon. If you're somebody who likes to talk about moving a business from vision to implementation for example, what I want to know from you is what do you mean by "moving?" 

What does it take to actually drive a business forward? That's not easy and you probably learned quite a bit about what that actually requires.

What do you mean by "vision"? When you talk about vision don't just use the word, use the meaning.

And what do you mean by implementation? What does it mean to actually meaningfully implement something new or different within your realm of expertise as you start to unpack these things?

There's a leadership philosophy there, and that is what is yours, that's informed by everything you are, everything you've done, everything that you know, and your value is going to be there.

Then the last shortcut here, which is my favorite, is to think in two steps:

What's your superpower? What is that thing that people uniquely seek you out for and know that you can do for them unlike anybody else? Usually this is an intangible quality that people don't always know how to express verbally but the more that you ask people when people at work are looking for me or needing me what is that thing that they're looking to me for?

But then don't stop there. Take a look backward, look for the patterns, look for the evidence:

When I am called in to do my thing what changes for the people that I've done it for, what becomes better for them, what do I leave in my wake? What is my impact? When you can start to look backward and see that pattern then you're going to be really onto something.

So here's an example. I do brand strategy, but there's millions of other people who could say that they're brand strategists or they can bring marketing perspective to a board. So I had to spend some time to think about what uniquely happens when O come in and do my thing.

I sent a survey out to everyone I've worked with in the last couple of years and it didn't even matter what type of work I had done with them - whether it was strategy consulting or branding or personal branding or coaching, what I found was that for every single person I'd worked with there was one thing that kind of came up across the board.

What they all said was that "As an output of the work that we did with you, we find that we feel more connected to the meaning and the purpose in our work." And that was such an incredible new nuance and a much more rich insight to bring to my knowledge of what I'm capable of, and the distinct value that I can bring by practicing my skillset for any organization.

So that's just the beginning, there's so much more we can unpack here but please reach out with questions and let me know what tips you would add, because I think we need to add to the body of resources on this topic that are available.

Thanks so much for listening.