Assembling your Personal Board of Advisors

Maybe you need someone to view your issue with a perspective that seems to have escaped your view. That is where having a mentor and/or advisor comes really handy. Then again, given the complexity of our work and business environment, most times having one mentor/advisor is not good enough.

Executives and Managers, even CEOs today need an array of mentors, advisors and role models as support and to provide crucial information at decisive moments. Just as corporations configure networks to deal with the variety of problems faced by knowledge workers and also manage opportunities when it shows up; individuals too need to configure their networks based on their needs and the resource commitments involved in building such relationships.

Your personal board of advisors can include a range of individuals from friends, family, role models or simply people who come into your life for a specific purpose.

This article aims at providing you with insight and a practical tool on how to assemble your effective personal board of mentors. It has been developed by MIT Sloan School of Management, the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

To use the tool, you need to do the following exercise:

Imagine that you are the CEO of your own company and like any other company, you also would also need to appoint a Board of Directors to run the show. The next step is to think of the people you can appoint on your ‘Board’ as your trusted personal advisors and mentors who can provide the expertise that you fall short of. Of course, these ‘Directors’ that you may want to appoint must be both available and interested to serve on your Board. Next list names that come to your mind one below the other.

Let’s understand the tool and the various roles within it: