Understand the role, responsibility, and your readiness.
Executive experience is an important foundation, but it does not automatically prepare you for board service. Directors provide independent oversight and carry fiduciary duties across strategy, financial performance, enterprise risk, compliance, CEO succession, and long-term value.
Board Fundamentals combines governance education with personal readiness planning, so you understand how boards work, how directors are selected, and whether your experience aligns with the demands of public, private, or nonprofit board service.
In this interactive virtual workshop, faculty and corporate director coaches guide you through director responsibilities, committee structures, and the board search process, with small-group breakouts to identify your experience for boards and intention statement.
Board Fundamentals is designed for professionals and executives who are:
How Boards Govern: Learn how directors exercise independent judgment and oversee strategy, financial performance, enterprise risk, compliance, executive leadership, CEO succession, and long-term value.
Board and Committee Structures: Compare public, private, nonprofit, and advisory boards, and understand the responsibilities of audit, compensation, nominating and governance, and other board committees.
Responsibility, Risk, and Protection: Examine the preparation, time commitment, accountability, conflicts of interest, potential liability, indemnification, and directors and officers (D&O) liability insurance associated with board service.
What Boards Look For: Examine the executive experience, functional expertise, leadership qualities, and governance capabilities boards consider when identifying candidates.
How Directors Are Selected: Gain insight into skills matrices, board succession planning, nominating and governance committees, search firms, referrals, due diligence, interviews, and the confidential nature of the process.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have:
What I see in Board Fundamentals participants is clarity, often for the first time. Women arrive with ambition and leave with a plan. As a director coach, being part of that shift is deeply rewarding. The curriculum gives them the foundation; the coaching gives them the confidence to act on it.
Maureen Tarantello
SVP Executive Coaching, Challenger, Gray & Christmas
Board Fundamentals was designed for women planning for their first board seat. Every session is built around the real questions about board service: where to start, how to position yourself, and what boards actually look for. The roadmap is concrete, and the community you build here stays with you.
Pegi Matsuda, MA, CFRE
Onboard – Business & Community Consulting, Nonprofit Board Director
