Your successful professional life has given you unique skills, experience and exposure to business challenges and effective paths to achieve corporate goals. You have a demonstrated record of accomplishing results in challenging environmental, safety, economic, political and geographic situations while protecting critical assets and assessing future risks.
But, unfortunately, so does everyone else who seeks a board seat!
So, let’s talk about how you can distinguish yourself and highlight the special value you would bring to a new board situation.
What Do Boards Want?
For the moment, let’s forget about your experience and skills and focus on what all boards want, which is:
- Experience understanding and balancing the interests of the company, stakeholders and shareholder’s while focusing on sustainable and profitable growth.
- A strategist who understands where an organization is now and where it can go and how it might consider getting there.
- Experience making decisions that impact the critical mission of the entire enterprise.
- Experience designing and implementing transformative strategies.
- Understanding and appreciation of using advanced technologies and fact-based data throughout the enterprise, to contribute to efficiencies and competitive advantage and to drive revenue growth and profit.
- The ability to evaluate opportunities developed internally or presented to the company.
- The financial acumen and experience to review budgets, investments and other financial documents.
- A track record of leadership in complex, and unstable economic, political and business cycles.
- An understanding of the organization’s tolerance for risk.
- Governance experience or exposure.
- Cultural sensitivity.
- Awareness and exposure to regulatory restrictions that may apply.
- A personal collaborative style while being constructive and fact-driven.
- High integrity.
Now back to you. Look at these features that boards seek and think about how they relate to your career. Think about the value you’ve added to an organization that might include strategic, financial, cultural, security, risk awareness, leadership, competitiveness, governance or diversity.
Developing Your Board Résumé
The purpose of a board résumé is to get an interview by wanting the reader to want to know more. Once there, you can elaborate.
Remember: Boards are only interested in their needs, not in who you are or what you’ve done. The word “I” should not appear in your résumé. Tell just enough to make the reader interested to learn more about what you’ve accomplished.
While boards may need a specific expertise, they want the new director to have the experience and capability to contribute constructively to all their deliberations, which could include matters of compensation, human capital, succession, financial review, nomination, governance and more. You probably won’t have exposure to all of these categories, so paint a broad picture of your activities making strategic decisions and managing organizational resources.
Showcasing Your Unique Value
Your board résumé should include five distinct sections:
- Summary
- Professional experiences
- Board roles
- Education and certifications
- Personal
And it should feature the following characteristics:
- It must be easily understood and read, and should be no more than two pages.
- In general, a one-inch margin on both sides works well.
- It should feature information about accomplishments and results, not responsibilities.
- The writing should feature action verbs, such as “delivered,” “developed,” “transformed,” “achieved,” “scaled,” “led,” “launched” and “succeeded.”
- The résumé should include keywords that can be searched, like “digital transformation,” “Big Data analysis,” “governance,” “security,” “AI,” “ESG,” “sustainability,” “regulatory,” “risk” and cybersecurity.
- The document can be constructed to showcase your experiences by formatting it around either your titles, organizations, tenure or career projection.
Summary. This is a brief overview of your expertise and experiences. The summary is important and will determine if the reader wants to know more about your unique value for a board seat.
Some examples of opening summaries include:
“Accomplished financial expert with a history of designing and implementing transformative strategies and regulatory compliance solutions for major global financial institutions, while protecting critical assets and evaluating risks. Effective oversight of financial functions in times of constant uncertainty.”
“Board member and chief executive officer with expertise in operations and strategy in a variety of public and private manufacturing organizations. Demonstrated record of success steering companies through high-profile business cycles in domestic and global markets. Achieved operating and product efficiencies that have led to profit growth and competitive advantage.”
“Information security and IT transformation executive leading the integration of digital and data-driven analysis into all corporate functions. Working with the board, established a roadmap demonstrating how using advanced technology leads to profit growth and a competitive advantage. Achieved turnarounds in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, retailing and professional services.”
Once you’ve told about your special expertise, you need to support the summary by showing where or how it happened.
Professional experiences. This is your career projection with titles, dates and years. Tips include:
- Keep it chronological, starting with the most recent.
- If you’ve received a series of promotions, show that by including the titles and dates. If you were recruited to the job, use that word to indicate that you were encouraged to bring a certain expertise to a needed function.
- Start with either the company name or your title, but keep it consistent.
- End with something impressive or something that could be encouraging of more conversation, such as articles you’ve written or details on education, active personal interests and awards.
Some abbreviated samples include:
Exterio Industries, Summa, OK 2014-present
A private global mid-cap manufacturer of industrial parts
President, 2018-present
Work closely with the CEO and board to identify and execute advanced technologies
Achieved significant digital transformation and cybersecurity expertise throughout the organization, leading to efficiencies that saved the company more than $200K over 4 years
Senior Vice President, 2014-2017
Recruited by former CEO to expand manufacturing, operations and sales globally
Established offices in Germany, Austria and Thailand
Achieved a 20% increase in gross international revenue in the first 3 years
________________________________________________________
Chief Human Relations Officer
Inxlot Company, Washington, DC 2019-present
- Direct the global talent management function for this $3B public aerospace and defense services company
- Spearheaded the programs and processes that drove the development and retention of the global leaderships populations by 25%
- Led the succession planning pipeline achieving identification of over 200 high-potential executives
________________________________________________________
Vice President, Organizational Development
Boeingal Flight Corporation,Chicago, IL 2013-2018
- Led the integration of a newly acquired company with the professional development policies and procedures of the Boeingal Corporation, realizing an annual savings of 12%
- Created and facilitated new leadership development programs for all management levels with a budget of over $4M.
______________________________________________________
KPMW LLP, Arlington, VA 2009-present
Managing Director
Lead the board consulting services practice for this large tax and advisory services company working with major clients to mitigate risk, drive sustainable change and achieve corporate goals. Have originated and maintained long-term client relationships in a wide variety of industries, including technology, financial services, health care, and banking, resulting in significant corporate profits.
________________________________________________________
Board roles. Here is where you would specify board and/or advisory seats. Make sure to list the names of organizations, your title, tenure and some brief facts about the organization.
Education and certifications. Include the names of degrees, academic institutions and dates of graduation. You can add professional qualifications or certifications as well.
Personal. This section offers an opportunity to trumpet any presentations, articles or books authored or active pursuits.
Discretionary Considerations
As you review the layout of your document, squint your eyes and see if the document directs your eyes to the highlights you want noticed. Maybe it’s the titles you’ve held, the organizations you’ve worked for, the tenure you’ve achieved or board roles you’ve held. With that in mind, consider the following:
- What personal contact information should be included? You want to make it easy for someone to reach you. It’s best to include your name, phone, email and city or state. There is no need for a street address.
- Should you include a picture? People look at pictures and make two fast judgments: 1) Is this person attractive and 2) how old are they? If those are important attributes you want included for whatever reason, it’s OK to add a photo. There may be times, for example, that you want it known that you are a diversity candidate.
- What font size is best? Depending on how the document lays out, use font size 11 or 12. Remember, board members often have “aging eyes.” Make it easy for them. Consider Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman or Helvetica fonts.
- What about using colors, underlines, bolds or frames? Remember, the goal here is to keep it simple and easily read. You may choose color or underlines but make sure they emphasize what’s important.
- Should I do a bio instead of a chronological résumé? Bios are helpful if you are a keynote speaker or workshop presenter. For these purposes, you should include a picture as well. Bios should be one page and told in story format. They can be constructed around your expertise without using a chronological format. A résumé format is preferred for a board seat as an easier way for a nominating committee to see and understand what you would offer them.
Judith Alper Smith spent 20 years in the board practice at Heidrick & Struggles before establishing board recruitment services at the National Association of Corporate Directors and is a senior consultant for Vell Executive Search Ltd.