My mentor’s mentor: How to ensure you are choosing board advisors you can trust
The goal of a board is to mentor a company, guide its decisions, and provide advice on best practices. However, most companies don’t consider the benefits that come from mentorship: Greater awareness of new ways of thinking, a challenge to our limiting assumptions, and the sharing of valuable life lessons we have yet to gain. What better way to tap into the skills and expertise board members bring than to connect them with people in the same company looking for mentorship?
THE BEST MENTORS
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Startups And Boards: How To Accelerate Your Growth
Going into a startup, founders have a lot to worry about. Startups have an incredibly high failure rate—a whopping 90%—because of the unique and vast range of challenges their founders face. Founders may not have many solutions to get through those obstacles and often end up learning the harder (and more painful) way to do things, especially when they are going at it for the first time.
It can be challenging for startups to prioritize which fire to address first, the next best steps to take or how to make decisions based on experience without that experience to work with. This challenge is the reason establishing a board should be at the top of that priority list. When startups prioritize founding a board with both inside and outside members, they increase their chances of success.
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Finding the Right Board Members for Your Company is Crucial to Success. Here’s How to Do it.
Finding the right board members for your company is an important task. Here’s what to consider.
Once upon a time, a new startup rushed through the process of bringing board members into their company. Its leaders were young and inexperienced. They went through the process without third-party guidance or a deep dive interview with candidates. They met smooth-talking members looking to be partners and were sold on something grand, but what the candidates delivered was the total opposite.
The partners’ experience was less than they let on. Their mission, vision and values were out of alignment with those of the existing members. Things quickly started to fall apart and the startup founders suffered through years of pain before the company eventually dissolved.
I’ve heard this story many times in my job guiding board formation. So many leaders lament that fewer mistakes would have been made if they had just had connections to more of the right people who matched up with their company’s core values, ambitions and guidance to vet those candidates.
“But none of that happened,” they tell me. “We signed papers and got screwed.”
Not many founders consider their board’s composition, but taking the time and care to cultivate a board of inside and outside perspectives across diverse experiences can be a company’s number one predictor of success. Building a board is a big deal for your company’s success and must be done correctly. Here’s how to do it right.
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Cultivating executive talent in yourself and your team
I believe executive talent is the most important aspect to look for when hiring or promoting leaders. A company’s leadership affects an entire organization and can either motivate teammates and provide them with purpose and direction or cause them to leave. Having a leadership team full of people with executive talent can help bring your company to new heights, but only if you nurture that talent in both yourself and in others.
Not everyone may know executive talent when they see it, but there are some common traits that anyone can easily identify. I believe good executives have no ego. They understand the value of constant learning and always seek out new ways for continuous improvement. Someone with too big of an ego may be unable to realize what it takes to be a great mentor or be mentored. If they think they know everything, they leave no room for others to teach them. And if they view teaching as a waste of time, they’re unlikely to offer their guidance to others. A culture of teaching and mentoring within a company can create an environment that nourishes executive skills and leadership, which is the key to exploiting that talent on a team.
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How Outside Board Members Can Shift Your Company
CEOs and founders need to be very good at what they do to succeed, but no one alone can be an expert in every subject, nor in every area of a company. With the combined insights of a carefully curated board, however, maybe we can. A board offers additional perspectives and the wisdom of having gone through diverse experiences of success and failure. When done right, a board drives a company’s growth and innovation with tried and tested strategies, and it guides better, more holistic decision making.
While some of a company’s leadership might be well-suited to sit on its board, looking within to fill all board positions will severely limit its potential. Outside board members can help the company’s leadership see objectives and obstacles from different angles and paint a more complete picture.
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The Time for Outside Board Members is Now
Outside board members are the x-factor that will propel your company out of times of crisis.
Outside board members have always been a necessity, but today they are more important than ever. When a company can turn to a board with a broad diversity of insights and with members from outside the company, they receive guidance that can be the advantage they need to survive tough times. Nowadays, it seems like times are only getting tougher.
As problems increasingly have global repercussions, every decision we make could make or break a business. Outside board insights have always been a necessary consideration for staying agile and strengthening decision-making power, but now, those insights are becoming indispensable. To be more in an uncertain future, bring on outside board members for a broader selection of expertise to fill a company’s gaps and the best chance of coming through anything on top.
Related: Why E-Commerce Businesses Need to Rethink Their Channel Strategy
Look outside your company for the best fit
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Your personal brand for your board opportunity
When companies look for board members, they look for leaders with the right experience, education, and qualifications. And since board diversity drives stronger company performance, board member hopefuls should take care to highlight any applicable areas of diversity—like gender, ethnicity, experience levels, or economic background, for example. But otherwise, how do people get noticed and recruited by boards?
CULTIVATE A BRAND
Cultivating a personal brand establishes you as an expert in your field and should start long before even seeking board membership.
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How Your Board Should Guide Your Hiring Practices
“The Great Resignation” does not seem to be letting up any time soon, so take advice from your board in order to revamp your hiring practices to retain and recruit strong employees.
Just as the remote work trend brought on by the pandemic never seemed to go away, “The Great Resignation” is starting to seem like a permanent shift in today’s business landscape. People left in masses and moved on to better pay, more perks and greater flexibility — and are unlikely to give this trend up any time soon.
For a company to keep up with the changing face of business, its leaders need to be frequently evaluating their company hiring practices to recruit, attract and retain the right employees for the job. This can take a lot of time strategizing that CEOs may not always have to spare while running a business. For support in uncovering otherwise overlooked areas to maximize advantages in hiring, leaders should turn to their boards to guide them.
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How To Build A Board Of Advisors For Company Success
As an entrepreneur, it’s hard to see past your own issues or your own company, let alone think outside of your own creative box. People often turn to counselors or advisors for an outside perspective, support and advice when they need to get out of their own heads. For a company, a board of advisors can provide those insights and outlets. If you prioritize building a board based on the qualities you need to achieve new heights, your company has a better chance of performing well at those levels.
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The Great Resignation: What board members need to know
In early 2021, experts predicted the “Great Resignation” was coming. After hitting record highs of 4.4 million resignations in September 2021, the wave of people leaving their jobs has since shown little sign of slowing down. That rate maintained near stability through January 2022, when another 4.3 million people quit.
