Stop trophy hunting: 6 ways to build your board portfolio

The fastest way to derail a governance career is treating board appointments like stamps in a passport. Three experts share what deliberate portfolio design actually looks like.  

In the scramble for a first board seat, urgency often eclipses judgement. Yet many experienced chairs and search advisers agree – accumulating seats for the sake of status is a dangerous mistake. Moving from a single appointment to a resilient, high-impact portfolio demands design, restraint and an acute understanding of your real bandwidth.

Take your time

“I know from my own experience, when you first start on the board pathway, you’re anxious and you have a few meetings and don’t necessarily get an offer straight away,” says John Mullen AM FAICD, non-executive director chair of Qantas, Brambles and Treasury Wine Estates. 

“It’s human nature – you start to panic a bit and worry, ‘Oh God, maybe I’m not going to get a role’. Sometimes that makes you take something you know isn’t right, and then the right thing comes along not long afterwards and you wish you hadn’t. I advise people to take their time and have a clear idea in their minds of what they want to do.”

“Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey,” says Susan Forrester AM FAICD, an experienced ASX chair who over 16 years has built an impressive board portfolio across a diverse range of companies. “Boards don’t work like executive careers – they take time and there are lots of twists and turns. You have to be patient, know your worth and take pride in it – the right board will recognise it.”

Build, don’t collect

“Be deliberate rather than acquisitive,” says Jason Johnson, CEO of board advisory and executive search firm Johnson Partners. “One of the mistakes aspiring directors make is viewing the objective as accumulating board seats – build a portfolio of relevance, rather than a portfolio of appointments.” 

“The count is the wrong measure,” says Forrester. “What matters is the committee load, and how committed you are to the organisation’s culture. A portfolio of top 50 boards isn’t necessarily the most challenging or interesting one – a mix of different boards keeps you sharp.”

She says early in her career, an older mentor who had been on a lot of boards told her to take a “mind map” approach. “He drew it out for me – he wrote SUE in the middle, and then bubbles coming out from that… listed, private, not-for-profit,” she says. 

“Think about whether you want to work in the tertiary space, maybe serving on a university senate, what about the memberships area? It opened my eyes that a portfolio is much more than a list of jobs. I still have that ragged piece of paper 20 years later and I show it to the women I mentor.”

When he’s assessing directors for appointment, Mullen “never looks at the number of boards they’re on”, he says. “I judge the individual on their performance. You’ve got some directors who are on one board and they’re not very good, and others who are excellent on five boards. When I make a decision, it’s based on merit. Some of the best directors are on a lot of boards and they’re very dedicated. Others are just on one for status and don’t really do anything.” 

Assess your own capacity and interests

Johnson, who has overseen more than 500 director appointments, says his advisory doesn’t “impose an arbitrary maximum of board seats” because that lacks the necessary nuance. 

“One ASX-listed chairmanship may demand more capacity than several smaller NED roles, but equally, a relatively straightforward board can suddenly become extremely demanding because of a CEO transition, cyber incident, regulatory intervention or takeover,” he says. “The critical question is not ‘How many boards can I fit into my diary?’, it’s ‘If two of my organisations experienced serious issues simultaneously, could I properly discharge my responsibilities to both?’ That’s the real capacity test.”

Forrester says, “Just as in executive life, it’s up to each individual – professionals juggle. I’ve had as many as nine boards, but six or seven is my sweet spot.” 

Don’t take an appointment if it’s not something that interests you, says Mullen. “Over the years, I’ve been approached for a couple of bank boards and I think to myself, ‘I don’t get excited by financial derivative strategies, I’m not sure I’d be a very good director as a result’. My career has been in logistics and aviation, so in a role like Qantas, I feel like I’m coming home. Even if it’s an industry you don’t know, as long as you find it interesting and want to learn and enjoy it, that’s really important.”

Consider being an executive director

Mullen explains that in Australia, proxy advisers and some shareholders push back against having a CEO or another senior executive on a board. A position he fundamentally disagrees with. 

“Having serving executives on a board is a dual benefit – it advances their career and brings such a level of real-time knowledge to the board. You can get stale so quick!

“I was with DHL for all those years and within two or three years of leaving there were companies being talked about I’d never heard of and things going on in the industry. The worst thing on a board is to have the captains of industry approach, ‘I remember, young man, in my day’ and all that. It’s completely irrelevant in today’s world. You need younger people who are still actively involved in the day-to-day.”

Keep learning and knowledge sharing

All three directors land on the same rule – there is no graduation day in governance. Every boardroom dynamic, debate and misstep is a lesson in real time. 

“The best directors continue learning about technology, AI, cyber, regulation, risk, changing workforce dynamics and the environment in which their organisations operate,” says Johnson. 

“Hand on heart, at every board meeting I go to, I learn something I can apply in one of the other companies or that helps guide a decision,” says Mullen. “If you have an eager learning mind, there’s always something you can pick up.”

“I learn every single day – from lawyers, consultants, CFOs – how one organisation manages risks can be completely different from another and both have something to teach,” says Forrester. “If you’ve been through a major acquisition or negotiated an exit, you know which questions to ask before anyone else in the room does.”

Don’t present a cookie-cutter CV

As a chair, Forrester looks for directors whose CVs are “short and sweet”, with a complete absence of ego.

“Not gushy, not arrogant,” she says. When I read a CV, I’m asking myself ‘Can I picture this person at the board table?’ and I look for multi-faceted problem solvers.”

Mullen works to bring in diversity beyond just gender and age. “You need people from totally different backgrounds with different values and ways of looking at things,” he says. “On a couple of my boards, I’ve got people who’ve never been a director before and went straight onto an ASX 20 board, and immediately brought different approaches.”

“A good director CV tells you where someone has been; a great one tells you something about the choices they’ve made,” says Johnson. “Intellectual diversity across someone’s portfolio is often highly valuable, but I want to understand the connecting logic.”