The case for sitting on a smaller board before a larger one

I get asked, often, how to land a first board seat. The question is usually framed as a question about the seat. It is a more useful question if it is framed as a question about the apprenticeship. The answer is the same in both cases. Sit on a smaller board first.

I have already made this point in a piece on the leadership pipeline, but it is worth saying at more length. The smaller board, by which I mean the regulated subsidiary, the private company, the operating charity, the family-office investment committee, is the apprenticeship most professional women have not yet been told to seek. The conventional advice is to wait for the first FTSE 350 invitation. The conventional advice is wrong. It misunderstands what the smaller board actually offers.

The smaller board is harder, in some ways, than the larger one. The papers are shorter. The agenda is faster. The decisions are more concrete. The recommendation is rarely 'note and approve.' It is more often 'decide and assign.' A non-executive on a smaller board makes the same kind of decisions a non-executive on a larger board makes, but more often and on tighter timelines, and with the named owner of the consequence sitting at the same table.

This is the apprenticeship. A non-executive who has spent three years on a regulated subsidiary board has run, with the management team, through dozens of real decisions about real risks. The non-executive on a public board who arrives without that experience is going to make their first material recommendation as a non-executive in a room of fifteen people, two of whom are senior partners at firms that have been advising the company for twenty years. That is a harder room to be wrong in than a regulated subsidiary.

There is also a question of what the smaller board reveals about the non-executive's own working preferences. Some directors discover, on a smaller board, that they prefer the audit-committee work to the strategy work. Some discover the opposite. Some discover that they are better at the regulator-facing conversations than they expected, or worse at the people decisions than they assumed. These discoveries are easier to make when the consequences are smaller. They are still important to make, because they shape what kind of larger board a candidate should later look for.

The objection I sometimes hear is that the smaller board does not pay. This is partly true and partly a misframe. The smaller board does not always pay in fees. It pays in proximity to decisions, in time with management teams that are still being built, in exposure to regulators at a level where the candidate is the senior person in the room. The fees come later. The skill is built on the smaller board. The skill is what the larger board is actually paying for.

My practical advice to women who ask me about a first board seat is to look for two roles. The first is a regulated subsidiary inside a group whose parent board they would eventually like to join. The second is a private company in a sector adjacent to the candidate's executive experience. Three to five years on those two boards, taken seriously, produces a candidate who is going to be useful from the first meeting of the larger board. The candidate who skips the apprenticeship is going to be polite for the first year, and the year of politeness is a year the board could have spent benefiting from a director who already knew how to make a recommendation.

None of this is a fast route. It is the route I would choose again, in the order I chose it. The seat is the destination. The work is the journey, and the journey is most useful when it begins on a board where the journey is the point.