Myth: Once you’re on one corporate board, the next ones come easy.
Did your corporate board seat or seats find you, and can you make it happen on demand?
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
—Marshall Goldsmith
This may be you.
You were found for your first board seat. The next one hasn’t followed.
You earned a board seat or seats in the years boards were actively searching for the depth you bring. You assumed it was the first of several. A few years on, the next one hasn’t come.
The calls that found you for that first board, or boards, have gone quiet. The portfolio career you pictured, three or four seats, now feels uncertain, because the social moment that had boards searching for leaders like you has waned.
Have you taken the time to reflect on what you did to become known and chosen for that board role, or roles? Are boards still sourcing and recruiting the way they did then? Do you have an executable plan to make it happen again?
None of that is a verdict on your readiness. It’s the absence of a method. Methods can be built.
What changed, and what didn’t.
Boards still need you. They’ve just stopped including observable descriptors in their search requirements.
Start with what didn’t change: boards still need what you bring. The case for cognitive range in the boardroom, the different way you read risk, weigh a decision, and see around corners, is stronger now than it was, not weaker, because the complexity boards face has only grown. You are still needed.
What changed is how boards source it. For a few years, boards searched outwardly, and that search found you. That outward search has waned. The need didn’t disappear with it. It went quiet. Boards still want the value; some have simply stopped including adjectives in their description of what they are seeking, or gone back to recruiting generalists.
That one shift changes how the next seat happens. The first could find you while the searching was loud. The next, you make happen, by being known, on purpose, for the business reasons a board needs you in the room.
And the bar moved. Your first seat was won on the depth of your expertise, the thing only you bring. The next is won on that depth made usable across the whole boardroom agenda: deep enough to lead in your domain, broad enough to ask the sharp question in every other. That is the move from an I-shaped contributor to a T-shaped director, and it can be learned.
The work: becoming known and chosen, on purpose.
The fix isn’t more readiness. It’s a method: The T-Shaped Director.
You don’t need to prove your readiness again. You need a repeatable way to be known and chosen for it. That is the work we do together.
The method is The T-Shaped Director. It starts with the depth you already own, the expertise that made you an independent director, and builds governance breadth on top of it: deep enough to lead in your domain, broad enough to ask the sharp questions across the whole boardroom agenda. Boards don’t need another specialist who speaks only in their lane. They need someone who brings rare depth and can range. That person is hard to overlook.
Together we do three things:
1. Sharpen your value. We sharpen your differentiated value until you can say it in a sentence a board can use.
2. Build your breadth. We build the governance fluency that turns a functional expert into someone who can go a mile deep in their area or areas of expertise, and an inch deep and a mile wide in the others.
3. Make you known. We make you known, on purpose, to the rooms and the people who decide, so the next seat is earned by design, not waited for.
This is not a readiness course, and it is not a promise of a seat. It is a researched, repeatable method for doing the right things, at the right times, to be chosen for the right reasons. This time, you pursue it by design, through a proactive plan that is yours to run.
Why work with me.
I’ve been on both sides of the table, and I studied this transition for years.
I am a non-executive director, and I have been on the other side of the table where the choosing happens. I have served on the nominating and governance committees that select directors, and I have advised boards on how they search. I know how the decision actually gets made.
I am also the researcher who studied this phenomenon. I have formally and informally interviewed hundreds of independent directors about their boardroom journey, and what separated the ones who built a genuine portfolio of board work from the ones who stalled. That research became my book, my frameworks, and this method.
So I am not handing you generic advice about getting on boards. I am handing you the themes my research surfaced from the people who have already done what you are trying to do, and meeting you where you are to help you put together a plan you can execute.
The next move is yours.
Close, selective work. The way in is an application.
You were chosen once and can be chosen again. This time, with a plan you run and the discipline to run it, and that is the work we do together.
I take on a small number of leaders at a time, because this is close, tailored work, not a program. The way in is an application. It is short and substantive, and it lets me understand where you are before we speak, so our first conversation is already about your path.
If you are ready to stop waiting for the next seat to find you, and to pursue it by design, apply now. I read each one personally, and if it is a fit, I will reach out.