How to prepare for a board role: Three pathways to becoming board ready

Shifting from leadership capability to a governance mindset is often more complex than new directors expect. Three executives share how they built the confidence to contribute effectively at board level.

Board readiness is a journey, grounded in a sustained commitment to learning. It requires a shift in how directors think, prepare and contribute – developed over time through building capability, judgement and the ability to contribute effectively.

Against this backdrop, new directors often face a common challenge: understanding what good governance looks like in practice and translating management experience into meaningful contributions at the board table. For many aspiring and emerging directors, identifying gaps in governance capability is the starting point in becoming board ready.

Jacqueline Ross GAICD, Non-executive Director at Surf Life Saving Services, Elsa Masztak, banking and finance leader, and Kristian Henderson, Operations Manager at Aero Adapt, each approached that challenge from a different starting point.

All three completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Foundations of Directorship™ program at different stages of their careers. What connects their stories is a shared shift in how they think, prepare and contribute at board level.

Jacqueline Ross GAICD: Building confidence to contribute effectively in the boardroom

Ross thought she understood what governance readiness looked like. After more than three decades working in financial services, healthcare and energy, she brought extensive executive experience in leading transformation and delivery, along with exposure to budgets and organisational operations.

But as she moved towards securing her first board role, she recognised that experience was not the same as boardroom readiness.

“I had a level of financial acumen… but really, I guess there was a realisation that my financial knowledge was not where it needed to be, and there was quite a bit of work to be done,” she said.

Rather than waiting for a board role, she focused on closing that gap. “The solution to that – if we call that a challenge or a problem – was that I fully immersed myself in a room and a quiet space to really get across the financial content.”

That investment translated quickly into action. “Just completing the course… gave me the confidence to have a go and to put myself forward for my first board role, which I was able to successfully secure,” she said.

She also saw an immediate impact in her executive role, refining how she framed information and supported board decision-making.

But completing the coursework wasn’t simply a means to an end. “One of the key takeaways for me is that this is the start of the journey. It’s a commitment to continuous learning,” she said.

A key learning was understanding what effective board contribution really looks like. “One thing that I've really realised is that you don't have to be an expert in everything. The most effective boards are ones that are diverse and where everybody brings something different to the table,” she remarked.

“You need to know enough about certain things to be able to ask the right questions, and to know when to drill into information more.”

Her board role with Surf Life Saving Services came about through a combination of preparation and personal connection. After completing formal governance training and becoming a volunteer lifesaver, an opportunity emerged through her local club.

“I had completed the Foundations of Directorship™ course. I completed my bronze medallion, and being a member of the [Surf Life Saving] club, I received the email that they were looking for some non-executive directors, and I just thought that ‘that's it – the ducks have lined up. I must apply’, so I did.”

Her decision to apply was grounded in clear sense of alignment. “I didn't want to join a board for the sake of joining a board,” she said.

“For me, it was very much about finding a board that aligned with my values… I really love what surf lifesaving represents and what it reflects in terms of its sense of community connectedness.”

Elsa Masztak: Learning to think like a director

After 30 years working in banking and finance, Elsa Masztak understood risk, capital and regulation. What she had not worked in directly was governance at the board level.

“The piece that’s been missing for me when I think about boards is governance.”

Many professionals do not recognise this gap at first. Experience in regulated environments can create a sense of familiarity with governance, but board‑level governance requires a different discipline.

“I felt that getting some formal education around governance was really important,” she said.

So she chose to build that foundation before pursuing board roles. “I wanted to make sure that I was ready to do that… particularly because I felt I was lacking confidence inside of the subject of governance” she added.

“I guess I didn’t understand fully how much I didn’t know.”

The biggest difference lay in the level of thoroughness and accountability expected of boards.

“The documentation you need around it, the rigour, the proof in meetings around having adequate governance was the pieces that I didn’t fully appreciate,” she said.

That knowledge ended up shifting how she approached all her work. And while she does not yet sit on a board, she has worked closely with directors, CEOs and CFOs.

“The Foundations of Directorship™ course has really helped me around how I approach boards,” she said. “Understanding the expectations of boards and what they would want to see from a bank or from an advisor has really helped me in terms of how I prepare before I meet with the boards.”

And that kind of preparation goes beyond financial detail to consider what boards are trying to achieve and the risks and opportunities they are weighing up.

“I think when you understand what the risks [are] and what they’re looking for – that helps you prepare,” she explained.

“Doing the course has allowed me to understand the full spectrum of what a board member needs from an advisor or from a bank.”

More importantly, it also reshaped her understanding of responsibility and the difference between management and director level contributions to the organisation.

“I thought I really understood what the responsibility of a board member was… but doing the course really started to shift my mindset in terms of how much more complex and how different it actually is to what I thought,” she said.

Exposure to other sectors also challenged and grew her perspective.

“You can get very ‘blinkered’ in your own career,” she said. “I just felt very enlightened and was realising how sheltered I’d been in the one sector.”

Similar to Ross, that insight reinforced the importance of embracing diversity in the boardroom.

“When you truly embrace diversity of thought, that requires time, and it requires patience,” she said.

“If you’re really going listen to something that’s very diverse, you have to be open to being wrong.”

For Masztak, she realised that readiness was not about a single capability, but about building a strong foundation deliberately.

“I actually think it’s really important to think about the end game,” she said.

“I’ve never wavered around that, but it has meant that I’ve wanted to build it up like a house… to get the foundations really solid.”

Kristian Henderson: Applying governance thinking in a small business

Working as an operations manager in a small business, Kristian Henderson was not necessarily preparing directly for a board seat when he signed up to the Foundations of Directorship™ course. Instead, he was more interested in applying governance thinking in the role he had.

“There was a lot of discussion [in the course] around ensuring workplace frameworks were well established and informing your risk appetite based on how resilient your business truly was,” he said.

In practice, he said this looked like testing and challenging assumptions in the operating model and board briefings to make sure the underlying systems and decisions were sound.

“That was something that I was actually able to … take back into my company and discuss with my senior management, about how we had our staffing framework and how we could make little improvements and little changes to increase our operational resilience,” he said.

He applied this thinking in the business, changing how he approached systems, risk and underlying assumptions. But the shift was more about mindset than formal structures.

“I look at that as applying a directorship style of thinking, but into an operational … style situation, which, as a director, I would expect is how you would like your staff to be thinking within your organisation,” he said.

That mindset now informs his approach to decisions.

“What I've been able to apply in my organisation… is the way of thinking that a board would want someone in a position of fairly significant leadership within the company to be applying,” he said.

“My assessment of risk, compliance strategy, consideration, resilience and financial due diligence has all been informed. Decisions I’ve made from an operational perspective have also been made through the lens of: if I were briefing a board, how would I expect that board to respond?” he said.

For Henderson, governance is not separate from the day-to-day. It is embedded in how decisions are made and tested.

“So, I thought that was quite an opportunistic way to apply the learning… I would hope that in the future, when the roles have flipped and I'm in a directorship style position, I can be considering how I applied those learnings as an operational staff member,” he said.

While each story follows a different path, a common thread runs through them: experience alone wasn’t enough to feel board ready. Each took the time to build a clearer understanding of governance, and continued to learn along the way.

How do you go from competence to confidence in the boardroom? To find out more, visit the Foundations of Directorship™ program.