The typical board size ranges somewhere between three and seven members, and you should always have a good balance between founders, outside directors, and investors. It doesn’t have to always be equal, but you want to make sure you have a balance around the table and plenty of different points of view.

As a CEO, managing your board and the board meeting tempo is one of your responsibilities. You want your board members to come to the meeting prepared, understand your expectations, and expect consistency from meeting to meeting.

One way you can use your board is to help you manage transitions. This could be transitions of individuals on the leadership team, transitions of the CEO out of the company, or transitions from being a private company to a public company. Using a certain board member’s expertise can be very valuable in these situations.

Having a board that you’re comfortable with and like spending time with gives you a chance to detach from the day-to-day of the business a little bit while you think about the business more broadly. In doing this, you want to create a relationship with each individual board member as well as a cohesion between the board members themselves.

Have a wide lens. It’s very easy to think about your own direct network, people you know or investors that invest in your company, and then go only one degree further. Thinking about recruiting board members in the early stages is powerful.

The board of directors is a formal construct for every company that essentially provides governance for the company. Their duty, in a variety of formal and informal responsibilities, is to ultimately serve the best interest of the company. The CEO should create a transparency with the board that builds the board’s faith in the CEO as the person to run the company.  

You should be as thoughtful about picking your board members as you are about picking your co-founders. You want a set of people with whom you really want to engage and work. Be deliberate about building your board and managing the expectations of the interactions.

Drawing on 30 years of experience as a CEO and member of several boards for both public and private companies, Suren Dutia illustrates how building a good board can help better position your company for future success.