What to Look for In Potential Board Members with Jocelyn Mangan

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. And I'm here today with my friend Jocelyn Mangan. Jocelyn is Founder and CEO of Him For Her and illumyn, which are partner companies of Bolster in the board space. Jocelyn, it's great to see you.

Jocelyn Mangan: It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So I like doing these interviews periodically to ask people, what are your top interview questions when you're interviewing an executive? But with you, I want to do this a little bit different and talk about interviewing candidates to join your board. Which for most CEOs they don't do every day, right? Maybe they've never hired an independent director in their life, or they've hired one or two, as opposed to executives where they have hired many of them. So beyond knowing sort of the persona you're looking for and asking those questions about their functional skills or their resume, what should a CEO be looking for when she is interviewing candidates to join her board?

Jocelyn Mangan: Yeah, it's a really good question. And we've talked to so many people who've been on both sides of this, the candidates who are interviewing and the people, like you said, who might be doing this for the first time. And I think the headline is, it's different from interviewing executives. And I think because of what you're looking for, the words and the stories that we've come up with, the phrase I would use is informed curiosity is something you're looking for. And not just blind curiosity and not just informed, but really the combination. And what I mean by that is if you're hiring a board member, ultimately you are looking for someone whose advice you can't get enough of. But in an interview process, I think what you're looking for is someone who knows enough about maybe the industry. Sometimes you won't know a lot about the company, because it might be a small private company. There's not a lot out there to learn. But if they've shown up for the interview, the hope is that they are curious. They might be curious about things like how you position yourself against competition. So in some ways, as the person interviewing the board member, you're looking to the candidate to see how informed and curious they might be, and what types of questions they ask. Almost as if, are those the types of questions you'd want to have in the boardroom itself?

Matt Blumberg: Right, yeah. I mean, that's important. It certainly shows that they've done their homework, and that they care enough about the business, and how they can add value, to ask smart questions. So I like that. Do you have another one?

Jocelyn Mangan: I do. So the other two are a little bit related, but I think you also want to see that they are curious about the time that's going to be required. And you, as the person interviewing, might want to have a sense of what you would like to have in terms of the time spent, because that's going to vary depending on the stage of your company. If you're an early stage founder or CEO, you might actually want a biweekly monthly call with this independent board member. If you're a larger late stage company, maybe it truly is once a quarter or monthly full board calls. But I think having someone who can, usually, that can spend the time that you're expecting. So kind of getting that conversation going through the interview process is one. I think the other is looking to see how this person resonates with the culture of the company and the culture of the board, which can be maybe distinct cultures. But, one, you want to know what... If you don't have a set board culture yet, because you're early in your board formation, you likely want to have some ideas about what you want it to be. And will this person contribute to that? Will they add to that culture? Will they be not necessarily a cultural fit per se, but a cultural addition to the culture you're trying to build? And then similarly with the company itself.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. The question of whether the board has the same culture as the company, or a related, maybe overlapping but slightly different culture, is an interesting one. And maybe I'll have you back on the podcast another time to dig into it.

Jocelyn Mangan: Yeah. We could probably do a whole conversation on that one.

Matt Blumberg: Because that's a good, long conversation.

Jocelyn Mangan: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: All right, Jocelyn, thank you so much for your wisdom today on interviewing candidates for board seats.

Jocelyn Mangan: Thank you for having me.