Getting a board advisory position via Li...

Getting a board advisory position via Li...

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Getting a board advisory position via LinkedIn

"They flew me there in first class and paid me U.S$30,000 for a day. Come to think of it, the flight took longer than the work." My friend was telling me about his latest job as a senior advisor. This was the first time I had seen him in two years.

The last time we met, he was worried about leaving his salaried job because he was done working for other people but had no idea what he would do instead. We parted on that note without resolving it. We reconnected on LinkedIn two years later and he was a different man. A Gulf country was expanding the kind of critical infrastructure he had spent decades running, so they headhunted and hired him.

He is not the only friend I have who found this kind of board advisory roles after they left their formal employment. I have another friend, and he makes me laugh every time we meet because he carries a fanny pack. He has no choice because he carries three phones, one for each company where he sits as a board director.

Last month he was chewing over a fourth seat. "They offered U.S$200,000 he said, "but I think I can push for U.S$300,000 What he does for all four companies is the same, which is opening doors around Asia-Pacific with the network he built over thirty years in security.

I asked the fanny-pack friend why he was even considering a fourth seat when he already owns every unit on the floor his extended family lives on. "Because the alternative is staring at my wife across the breakfast table until one of us cracks," he laughs. What the role also gives him is a reason to put on a nice shirt in the morning and make decisions that are more consequential than where to have lunch. There is something people who retired rarely say out loud, which is that when you step down you also lose part of your identity. I used to call this friend Chief for years because that was his informal title, and after he left his job, I didn't know what to call him, and fumbled the first few times we met.

Both of my friends got their advisory seats because of their wealth of experience, but what's interesting is how they got it.

The fanny-pack friend does it the old-school way. He is out at trade association dinners most nights of the week, and by my reckoning each new advisory seat costs him about a year of networking. He enjoys it so it's not a problem, but most senior people would prefer to spend those precious evenings with their grandchildren.

The first-class flight friend stumbled upon his advisory position online. He started writing diligently on LinkedIn after leaving his job, and within six months companies were calling him instead of him chasing them. "The client is already convinced by the time he asks to speak to me", he admitted. His writing had turned his LinkedIn page into a storefront that prospected for him even while he slept, and readers who shared his articles carried him into rooms he could never have walked into himself.

If you want a shop window like that, here is what I would do.

1. Write posts that get you discovered outside your own circle

You don't have to morph into one of those influencers who post shallow things for the likes. You just have to find a dignified way of being seen by people who are not already in your circle.

For me that means saying things nobody expects. The post that first made me “viral” was my post about how it takes just a $10 Starbucks gift card to keep your best people. At an organisation I know, every employee gets a Starbucks card with one rule attached, which is that they cannot spend it with anyone on their own team.

You are strongly encouraged to have coffee with a skip-level boss or someone from another department. The thinking behind it is, that if you are fed up with his own team, you know someone outside of your reporting line to negotiate for an internal transfer, rather than to look outwards immediately. Readers loved it because it was such a simple answer to a problem companies normally throw money at, and about 800 people reacted to that post, which put it in front of thousands more who had never heard of me.

The other way in is to say the thing everyone has felt but nobody dares to say out loud. I wrote about how the phrase "let's take this offline" was the bane of meetings, and what a senior official would do instead to run meetings efficiently. People who didn't know me shared the article with their friends because everyone has sat through that meeting and there is something cathartic about riding on someone else's post to say so. The post carried me into C.X.O's feeds and out of Singapore altogether, putting me in front of people that I otherwise wouldn't have the chance to meet.

If you are wondering where to find your own version of this, start with the opinions you have always held that nobody around you seems to share. It might be:

· something you find easy that everyone else finds hard,

· a shortcut to a problem your industry has decided is unsolvable,

· a piece of industry gossip that is not classified, but useful to people outside your circle

What you are after is the small jolt a reader gets when a post tells him something he did not know, because that jolt is what makes him share you with people you will never meet, and those readers will carry you into rooms you cannot walk into yourself.

One of those rooms is the one where somebody is deciding who to put on their board.

2. Write posts that make people respect you

When I was offering workshops on how to get a job referral, I published how-to guides, including one for introverts who wanted to network without pretending to be extroverts, and another on activating your LinkedIn network so that friends recommend you for jobs without you ever having to ask. Those guides caught the eye of university career centre advisors, who invited me to run workshops for their students.

They didn't hired me because I said I could teach networking. They hired me because I showed that I could teach networking.

That's what got my first-class ticket friend into the door, that he showed the nominating committee what he's capable of doing for their company via his LinkedIn posts.

3. Use your new connections as warm referrals

Most people treat LinkedIn as a scoreboard and count how much engagement they raked up with a post. But that's just vanity metrics, and it doesn't translate into anything meaningful. What's precious is the new connections that you've made, the people outside of your network who liked and commented on your post, or the ones who added you as a friend after reading it.

So whenever someone new connects with me I write back and ask, "Thanks for reaching out. Since we haven't met before, what caught your eye?" Most are surprised by the question, which tells you how rarely anyone bothers. One of them told me he has young associates who would benefit from the networking skills I spoke of, and invited me to speak to them, and that became an opportunity that I never pitched for.

Most of the time the person who answers is not the one who can hire you, and that is fine. He could be the one who forwards your post to the decision maker and advocates warmly for you. That is how you get the seat without you ever asking for it.

The problem is that you do not have the time

If you are an E.V.P, none of this is a good use of your time. A close friend of mine jokes every time I ask her out for lunch that she charges S$850 an hour in her consulting business, which is her way of reminding me what a senior person's day is worth.

Running this whole LinkedIn thing properly, which means writing the posts, replying to every comment, and messaging each new connection, takes about eight hours a week, and those are the hours you should be spending in front of the contacts your writing brought you.

You will be tempted to hand it to A.I, but think about the last time you read something on LinkedIn that was obviously machine-written. You probably thought slightly less of the person who posted it. Anthropic and OpenAI are still hiring sales executives themselves, which tells you something about the power of the human touch in sales.

So if you want the shop window and you do not have the hours, get a ghostwriter, and screen them properly. Read their own posts and ask whether you find them intellectually interesting, because someone who cannot hold your attention will not hold your buyer's. Then ask whether you respect them enough to let them speak for you, because everything they write goes out in your name and appears in front of people who have known you for thirty years.

If you want an introduction to someone I trust, or the reading pack I put together on writing to be remembered, leave me a message here and I will send it over.

Written verbally on my evening stroll with Typeless, a voice dictation tool.

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