Are You Corporate Board Ready?

Anita Brick:

Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to Career Cast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career today. We're delighted. Well, I would say more than delighted to be speaking with Sandy Li. She is an amazing human being. So Sandy began her career as an investment banker for Morgan Stanley, and after nearly a decade in executive search, she launched her own executive coaching and recruiting practice in 2014. She recruits and coaches board and C-suite level talent across financial services, global corporations, consulting nonprofits, venture capital and social impact investing. Sandy graduated Summa Conde with an MBA from the Wharton School. She has coached faculty at Columbia University's Business School and Stanford University and has been a guest presenter at, let's see if I can do this in one breath for Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Brown, Columbia, MIT, NYU, UCLA, USC alumni and students. Oh my gosh, Sandy, you are a rockstar and the subject today of boards for many executives in business. It is the holy grail and it seems out of reach for many, so I'm very excited we're going to be chatting about this today.

Sandy Li:

Thank you very much Anita, and I'm delighted to join you here on Career Cast to share more about taking a holistic approach to serving the broader board ecosystem and getting individuals and organizations together to bridge the gap in talent.

Anita Brick:

I love it. So let's start off with a question from a booth student. How has your view of what board readiness means in a world that's changing so much, especially given governance, regulation and stakeholder expectations

Sandy Li:

And the evolution of what is being demanded from board members is escalating? Maybe 10, 15 years ago, a lot of board members were thinking, well, I've been a successful C-level executive. I want to bring that strategic know-how and expertise into helping other companies and things will sort of take care of itself. Now, the amount of scrutiny with AI, with competing political environments, market volatilities, their sustainability governance and the regulatory elements of the environment make it a lot harder to be a successful board member and therefore the selection of those board ready candidates, I'd say has gone up exponentially.

Anita Brick:

It's true. I was having a conversation this morning with someone who is at that level and she was saying the fiduciary responsibilities have escalated a lot. Here's what I hear a lot, and this comes from an alum. What is an example of a candidate whose board value wasn't immediately obvious and how did you help them uncover and articulate something unique that boards ultimately found irresistible?

Sandy Li:

Oh, I love that. And similarly, I was doing a board resume workshop for an MBA alumni program similar to career cast, and some of the questions was just around that. It's like, Hey, I've got great expertise. And this person had put herself forward for a number of board seats and just kept not getting a look. She was a head of HR and some of the feedback she was getting was, look, you're just not a CEO. We're looking for someone with different expertise. Rather than just saying, no, I started working with her one-on-one and the first piece was not, Hey, what's wrong with you? Why are you not fitting this profile that the search providers are looking for? It was more the other way of what kind of positioning can you uniquely offer and then being able to strategically find the companies that need that particular area of expertise.

So we started, given that she's coming from an HR background, look at the small public companies, that high turnover is an issue, but she was really trying to get her foot in the door for her first public corporate paid board seat. When we started to look at those companies with high turnover being hitting the headlines, it became a compelling argument to approaches companies from a human capital versus financial capital solution and being able to bring her expertise and background around people and culture driving returns, improving companies really from that human capital perspective. Not only were we able to help her land her first public corporate board seat within three months of working together, then she landed her second seat six months after that. I love examples where people are coming to me saying, I've got great things to offer and I just don't really know how to package it.

Anita Brick:

I love that a lot because you did something quite brilliant. You looked at what was perceived as a negative, you're not a CEO and I hear that a lot. People are like, I am not a CEO, I haven't even been a COO and I'm not getting traction. And you looked for where was her specific expertise, experience, knowledge, wisdom, and who was struggling and needed that as a filler. How do you do that when you sit down with someone? Some people are just told they're too specialized. How do you move that as a liability of being too specialized? Maybe there's another example that you can share with us, but you did it pretty brilliantly with the person who was head of HR and then once you got the first, I'm sure it was easier to get the second.

Sandy Li:

Absolutely. And look, I think some of that ability comes from my diversity in personal experience. I think I take that unique blend of industry diversity and recruiting expertise to first of all see individuals as a holistic 360 version of talent. Some approach is, Hey, am I right for a board? Yes or no? That's not how I start my process. If anything, my initial coaching usually starts with a two hour get to know you. I had a CFO tell me it felt like you did an audit of my professional and personal life. So Anita, just like you were saying, it's like first of all, looking through your profile, the strengths and weaknesses, how the different elements of your narrative fit together, but then being able to assess and give that 360 recruiters perspective and also organization, company placing board perspective of how you shape up relative to the market and the pros and cons of that, the strengths and weaknesses of that, and starting to be able to position you in a way that is customized, it's concise, and also it's comprehensive so that boards don't have to take a guess to what you have to offer.

And that's really hard for most people to define by themselves because they're looking at their perspective from their own seat.

Anita Brick:

That's absolutely true. However, if we wanted to give them a starting point, kind of a DIY audit for a potential board seat, what are three questions you would ask initially?

Sandy Li:

So one, I'd tell them, look at your career as a pie with four quadrants. One being pure credibility. What name brands have you been with the amount of tenure, what level of seniority are you a household name in something? Then a second quadrant would be your hard skills, whether it is the particular industry technical or functional knowledge. Are you somebody who comes to top of mind when people are seeking that particular slice of technical expertise? Then there's a third quadrant, which is again that leadership soft skills and where your network expands beyond just your immediate day-to-day working. How broadly are you known across multiple facets? And then the last one is specifically your value add for the particular audience fit of whatever board or whatever area you're looking to apply for. So if you look at those four quadrants, how many of them do you have? And then the second question is like, how many of those four do you have? And then the third question being, if you had to rank yourself on a scale of one to 10 relative to all the professionals you have ever met and all the other professionals in your space, what would you score yourself on those four areas? That is also what you're being compared against when any board or recruiter is evaluating you relative to other people's qualifications.

Anita Brick:

Okay. Many people believe that the secret sauce is really a few things. One of the things that can get in the way is doubt. Someone asks the question, alright, I have these limiting beliefs. No one in my family has ever been on a board. I'm not your typical historical board member. How do you unpack limiting beliefs and doubt and it's not good enough? Or even doing the audit and saying, well, compared to Sandy, not you as you but or Joe or Amit or whomever, I don't think I'm quite as good. What are some things that you've seen, concrete actions that you've seen someone do to unpack the limiting beliefs and dissipate them?

Sandy Li:

I love that, and that is one of the reasons why sometimes we are lacking diversity on boards. People are like, well, I don't fit that profile. I'm not what they're looking for and therefore I don't even feel comfortable applying. When I work with particularly a lot of diversity and affinity groups and organizations, we are here to really support and combat some of that conscious and unconscious bias to be able to help get those people on boards. One of the things that I would emphasize and I've encountered with candidates, I'll give an example. One person came to me and said, look, I just don't even feel comfortable being interviewed, much less getting an offer and speaking to the point that you're mentioning Anita, some of it is that initial confidence and that spills into executive presence. That spills into gravitas and some of the nuances of if you don't feel like you are board ready yourself, even if you try to put yourself out there, some of those poker tells are going to get in the way

Anita Brick:

And

Sandy Li:

Disqualify you before you even get started. And so how I work is first of all, we start to unpack where those limiting beliefs come from. Are they habits? Are they ingrained in you from your history? Are they things that have developed because of the way your career trajectory has happened? Sometimes there's a miniature step in advance of applying to boards, which is let's fix the root of some of those issues first, if you feel like it's a technical skill or something that you're lacking, let's pave a path where you can build up and bolster that expertise. If it's purely a communication representing your message, then we work on fixing that narrative. If it is truly an executive presence piece, well then there's a whole host of visual and tone and how do you carry yourself and body and all the way down from top to bottom, how you do your hair all the way down to how you do your nails, right? There's so much that you can do. Picking the pocket of why the answer is no, and then being able to translate that into what is the path to yes.

Anita Brick:

How do you, no, KNOW if the no is no flat out, no, not now or no, not the way you communicated,

Sandy Li:

I usually start where are you in the process? I map with what your motivations are. Some people want to be on a public board because they want to get paid. Sometimes they want to be on a public board because they want to pad their resume or to have more notoriety. And in many of those cases, that's nice. I mean that's in it for you, but none of the words are inspirational of why you deserve to be on a board. So as far as the board level of readiness, I would start with what are your genuine motivations? Because sometimes the answer, after we do a lot of the assessment, the answer is that you shouldn't be on the board. And I'll give some examples of alternative paths that went the other way. I had a senior executive at PIMCO who was already a chairman of several boards, mostly nonprofit, and was approaching kind of an emptiness situation and thinking, great, now is my time to really push corporate board seats.

This is my second career legacy, let's go. And then as we did a full assessment of, again, what's your time commitment? What are the strategic challenges you want to deal with? What are the intellectual questions that you think you want to spend your time solving? And then marry that with what your personal intentions are and how you spend your weekends and evenings. And we ended up coming up with a completely different plan that did not involve boards, and it was more about focusing on his family, his teenage son, about to be graduating and that personal growth. And then a second example that comes to mind is a partner at a wealth management company, a very successful fa, and she was determined that boards was her next focus, and then when we started to drill down onto the parts of what she liked about her current job, what she didn't like about her current job, and we came to a whole really just bevy of thoughts about dealing with boards and the egos involved, the slow listen of the decision making, the regulatory aspects of the things that you would have to deal with day to day, understanding her real motivations.

It was like, no, this is not the right move for you. Instead, we made a play for her to leave her firm, start her own platform, and she started a new multi-billion dollar RIA that she's the CEO of, and she cherry picked the partners that she used to work with to build this new initiative, and that was a very different direction than what she initially hired me and brought me on to do, which was to help her get on boards.

Anita Brick:

Wow, that's good. I think it is. Some people have, they're really fixated on it. It is the holy grail for them, and I wonder if maybe it's not really the pinnacle and clearly the examples you gave to me seem much more interesting, much more useful use of time. However, there are people who definitely still want to go the board route. So if we look at two questions related to network, because we know that a way to maybe go through some of the screens faster is with the network. So here's the MBA student. I have a strong network, but I'm not sure it is helping with board seats. What does a targeted board network actually look like in practice and how is it different from simply knowing a lot of senior people, which I do?

Sandy Li:

I love that question as well. It speaks to the fact that you've got to be flexible about how your board opportunities get sourced as well as self sourced. You're absolutely right that there are a lot of executives that are very well qualified, have excellent networks and never end up getting on boards. So how do we attack that and having a targeted strategic, almost a rigorous plan as to how you want to go about your networking is an important piece as well. So if you think about the people, if you are looking ultimately for it to lead you to a referral to a board seat, then I would start with who do you know specifically at the retained search level? And that is where I spent a decade of my career as well, and specifically the firms that probably take the lion's share of board seat recruiting from a retained perspective would be Spencer Stewart, Russell Reynolds, he and Struggles, Korn Ferry, Agon Zender, and they take pretty much the bulk.

So it's sort of do the partners in the industry groups of those firms and do you know the partners in the specific board practice of those firms, right? So if you're thinking about highest bang for your buck, do you already know these people? Do you already have a relationship with these people? If not, can you be one step removed referring into those people? And in some ways, because I remember when I was doing recruiting, not just, oh, I'm ready to get on a board blast in your resume and put me on a board. I get on average about a hundred resumes every day looking for some kind of opportunity, some of them boards, some of them direct roles. You're not going to start that relationship from day one and automatically get put forward. So I think having the right expectation for where that recruiter is coming from and the volume that the recruiter is dealing with for that opportunity.

Then in addition to the recruiting firms looking at the connectors, these are your investment bankers, primarily your bulge bracket, but also your middle market banks. Depending on the type of public company corporate board you're looking for, your lawyers, your accountants, all of those that service these companies, they are also great sources of referrals into the firms that you're interested in. So if you're looking at, Hey, my network is great, my first question would be list out specifically for your industry sector, the recruiters, the top investment bankers, top law firms, consultants, accountants. What does that number, is it 10? Is it 50? Is it a hundred? Is it 200? Is it more? Right? The larger the number, the more potential funnel you have, and then once you even have that funnel, it's the strength and the depth of the breadth of those relationships you have with them because each of those connectors knows hundreds if not thousands of candidates that could be right for the number of clients that they're seeing. And why would they be referring you? What is the benefit that you being on that board or you having that referral going to do for their business?

Anita Brick:

Well, I like that. I think what happens is that sometimes someone will assume that because there's an affinity, could be a school affinity, could be that you worked for the same organization, maybe not at the same time that you have other things that you share in common and making the ask without building the foundation for it makes it extremely transactional and not very effective. I'm going to ask you a question that is on pretty much everyone's mind. How do you engage with someone who might be able to help you get on a board? But this applies to other things too, in a relationship advocate building way rather than transactional. If you start there, it ends there too,

Sandy Li:

Assuming the affinity in the engagement and making the ask. That's such a great piece because so many of my clients I've helped move from the transactional to the transformational relationship building.

Anita Brick:

Tell us your secret.

Sandy Li:

What does that mean? I've given workshops, and I've spoken at conferences specifically on this topic, and part of it is first shifting your mindset. Most of the people with the transactional mindset, they are trying to build a relationship for a purpose that suits them. The whole reason why they are even talking to that person is because they're hoping they're going to get what they want. That's the opposite of building a transformational relationship because when you're on the receiving end of that, whether it's capital raising or getting on a board or being a recruiter or getting any kind of notoriety and profile people who are in that seat of receiving all of those tell me about yourselves. They can smell it a mile away and it's very off-putting.

Anita Brick:

It's

Sandy Li:

Very off-putting. And then also, you are not differentiated from the hundreds of people that they've met before looking for a handout. The piece that makes it transformational is when you completely change that mindset of what you want. And something that has made me successful in my career is going first with what do they need? What's in it for them? How can I marshal all of my resources, all of my expertise? And when you can get something that is customized, so no one else can say it but you comprehensive, so that if it's short, you're not leveraging too much of their attention span to explain how you can help them. And so when you can get the concise, comprehensive and customized, that's a good tester to whether or not you're facilitating building a transformational relationship for them versus a transactional relationship for you. Got

Anita Brick:

It. No, that's great. Not to put you on the spot, but do you have an example that you can share with us?

Sandy Li:

Sure, sure. I'll put myself on the spot and use an example. And this is something that a lot of the podcast listeners can sort of think and take themselves through. Most people have their one minute elevator pitch, and many even struggle just to condense 20, 30 years of experience into less than a minute. So I'll use myself as an example. Let's say I am not necessarily pitching to getting on boards because people can smell that unfilled way. Let's say I'm pitching my normal pitch just in the course of meeting new clients, you don't know where the opportunity is, so you're going to be broader with what that pitch approach is. So I started my career in investment banking with Morgan Stanley in London and in Hong Kong and then in Houston. And after four years in New York placing C level executives in banking, private equity and asset management, I moved to Los Angeles to build our West Coast practice partner with clients like JP Morgan, TPG, and TR Schwab.

Over my career, I've personally coached over 40,000 professionals globally, and I take my unique blend of industry and recruiting expertise to help individuals and organizations achieve targeted professional success. That's under minutes. It's about 43 seconds. But if I think about applying my own quadrant test to it, if I look at the credibility, yes, I'm hitting some of the big brand names, that instantly elevates some elements. Then if you look at the hard skills, the investment banking, the capital markets covering financial institutions, the Hong Kong corporate finance general industrials, the Houston Energy m and a i, and I've heard many people use examples like this. Say I have global diversified experiences, I have worked across financial services, like being able to translate a more vague description into showing them rather than telling them you have that diversity, actually throw in the technical phrases that can help give them that picture in a more tangible sense, right?

So there's that second quadrant. Then if you look at the network, the soft skills, I got recruited into the recruiting side, I'm partnering with clients, I'm placing C level executives, board executives. So you get a sense of, okay, well, what is the network of those soft skills? And then as far as the value proposition, people always want to know what's in it for me. I say that what's uniquely different about my experience is that blend of industry and recruiting expertise. There've been a lot of bankers. There've been a lot of recruiters, not a lot of people do both and then coach 40,000 professionals. I literally say that as my last line, take my unique blend of industry and recruiting expertise to help individuals and organizations achieve targeted professional success. It's concise, it's comprehensive, and no one else can say my exact pitch and it be true, right?

It's comprehensive in the sense of if I only get one minute to say my history, I can kind of get it done in a minute. Most people can kind of bridge this gap. It's that next piece where it's, well, how do I boil it down to one sentence? This is where I find a lot of the clients I work with struggle because they have a particular goal in mind. They don't know how to translate their minute into a sentence to get that across. And then suddenly, how do you make it from transactional to transformational beyond that bigger picture. So I'll give my one-liner for different audiences. So you get a flavor of that concision of branding, right? So I'll take this career cast as an example. If I started with an MBA alumni event audience, I might say a Wharton alum and former Morgan Stanley investment banker, I'm now a recruiter and executive coach who helps Chicago Booth alumni get onto boards.

Now take it to a more broader global financial conference. For example, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker in Hong Kong, London, and Houston. I'm now a recruiter and executive coach focusing on advancing the careers of global finance professionals. Great. You can kind of see how it's pretty much the same message, but I'm swapping out one tangible phrase for another tangible phrase specific to that audience. This is the most common, what do you do? Tell me about yourself, type one liner, but to move it towards the transformational relationship building, maybe you want to be able to express what you have to offer, but in a more conversational setting, when you're not asked, what do you do? So the next common thing would be the update. Like, oh, hey Sandy, how's it going? Or you run into someone in a more social context. Maybe it's a banker, maybe it's a consultant or maybe it's a board professional that you don't want to hit up for a particular goal.

So the professional update to, Hey, how's it going might be, I spent the summer interviewing a hundred LPs about how we can better support emerging managers and the next generation of lp CIOs, a Stanford md, asked me to join the board of his biotech startup, and I'm actually debating whether to take it. I'm apprenticing with a tai chi master and bringing that wisdom into my coaching to help leaders scale with balance and clarity. So like my professional update, they're talking about things that I'm genuinely doing kind of for fun, but it also hints at a professional context that could move something forward into a direction that they're interested in.

Anita Brick:

Got it.

Sandy Li:

But then there's also a personal update. Sometimes people, again, differing degrees of how much they can smell it a mile away, that personal update, they don't want to talk about work at all. So I might have something after years of painful and ineffective surgeries. I'm using AI to create a holistic, personalized health program that's beating all my doctor's recommendations. Again, that hints at a process and even more personalized. And these are the things that draw an emotional context. That's another category where if you really want to move the dial, sometimes you want to get to an audience where you're hitting them where the heart is. So for example, if I'm meeting with a women or a diversity type audience, I might say, well, most of my career I've been the only woman or person of color in the room, but I've also built lasting relationships with Fortune 100 C-suite leaders who look nothing like me. If I've got a more social impact audience,

Anita Brick:

I don't want to cut you off just so that we don't run out of time, but I think you've given us a really good flavor of the diversity of language, and it's only subtly different.

Sandy Li:

Yes, yes. And with that, you are looking at being consistent about communicating your brand in multiple audiences in multiple ways where it's not like you're selling, you're being authentic about sharing just information about how you're spending your time, where your priorities are, what's important to you, and also in many cases, a little piece about your personal history. You start to engage people on a personal level and then they're not seeing you as someone that's selling them or asking for a handout.

Anita Brick:

Agree. And I think the stakes even are really very high when it comes to board seats, both for the person who wants to be on the board, probably even more for the person who could be their supporter, their advocate to be on the board. Anything that has a negative tone, it could take away the opportunity that might've been there.

Sandy Li:

Agreed.

Anita Brick:

And

Sandy Li:

In some ways, especially for very senior and very experienced executives, you may also want to balance some of the big uppe with things that can be more humility based or maybe more elements of vulnerability. An example of that, bank of America executive asked me like, Hey, Sandy, what do you do for fun? And I developed a mindfulness and art therapy technique to help rehabilitate people recovering from homelessness and trauma in la and that became one of my statements. It's like it may not look like it, but have actually survived a lot of trauma as a child and as an adult. And what healed me was a therapy I created to transform my grief into hope, and I'm sharing it with you.

Anita Brick:

Oh my gosh, suddenly no wonder you've spoken at so many places. You are amazing.

Sandy Li:

There are just different examples where if I look at it is my personal brand that I'm a coach, that I'm a banker, then a recruiter? No. In all these different instances, I am someone who has very unique experiences to help a particular audience with something that they need help with, and that's what I hope to translate into a lot of the candidates and clients who are looking to get on boards, is to find that special sauce that takes their 20, 30 years of experience that breaks it down into a concise message, but then something that they can cohesively and comprehensively then communicate across multiple audiences in a way that's vulnerable, that's authentic, and that honestly no one's ever heard before, which is what makes it personal and memorable.

Anita Brick:

Agree. We like to be really practical and actionable. If you can give us three things that someone can begin doing today, even if they only have 15, 20, 30 minutes to start that they can potentially do consistently, what are three things you would advise someone to increase their board readiness?

Sandy Li:

The three things that they need to do as a starting point would be that honest assessment of their positioning, the strategic elements of how they're going to approach their search, whether it's company or network. And then thirdly, identifying what are those one-liners that you want to use across every different kind of audience where it might come up as a, Hey, what have you been up to? But it's communicating that consistent brand. So those are those three things for a foundation, and if you're going to then apply it every single week for the next year, you're thinking about what's my one-liner to a particular connector of influence? Have I been able to communicate that to at least one connector every week? If you can do it every day, perfect. If you can target one week, I can only have time for one, then it would be like, did I give my one liner to that one important person? And then can I maybe spread that out across 50 connectors in the year?

Anita Brick:

That's brilliant. Thank you so much. You are clearly extraordinary. I think that your uniqueness is because of the diversity of your perspective and your experience, but also your heart. Anyway, thank you so much for making time for us, and I hope that we cross paths again and we can have another conversation, maybe even over a cup of coffee.

Sandy Li:

I love it. Anita, it's been an absolute pleasure joining you on Career Cast, and I look forward to the next one.

Anita Brick:

Thank you so much.

Sandy Li:

Take care

Anita Brick:

And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with Career Cast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.