What Drives Your Board Career?

Board careers are rarely shaped by coincidence alone. Over time, experience, opportunity, and ambition interact with personal values, motivation, and a growing sense of responsibility. Yet many decisions about board roles are made under time pressure, external expectations, or perceived prestige rather than through deliberate reflection.

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This article invites you to pause and consider what truly drives your board career. It explores how motivation evolves, how individual contribution creates value in the
boardroom, and why clarity of purpose is essential when choosing which board roles to accept, sustain, or decline. Whether you are preparing for your first board appointment or reassessing an established portfolio, the reflections that follow are intended to support more conscious, responsible, and value-creating board engagement.

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Framing the right questions

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Whether you have not yet taken on your first board position or already serve on one or more boards, you will sooner or later face the same fundamental questions:
• Why do I engage in board work?
• What motivates me at this stage of my career?
• What concrete contribution do I deliver, and where does it create value?
• In which board context is there a clear alignment between me and the organization’s needs?
• What is my next conscious choice or deselection within my board portfolio?

These reflections do not lead to definitive answers. Instead, they create a decision- making foundation that supports a more deliberate navigation of your board career and helps ensure that your engagement remains characterized by responsibility, clarity of fit, and meaningful value creation.

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Why do I engage in board work?

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Motivation is not static. It evolves with experience, life stage, and professional development. For this reason, reflecting on your WHY is just as relevant for the experienced board member as it is for someone preparing to enter the boardroom. Motivation may stem from recognition, influence, financial compensation, or a desire to contribute to the long-term development of organisations. Regardless of its source, board work is fundamentally about responsibility and value creation. As experience grows, so does the expectation that one’s contribution extends beyond title, reputation, and formal attendance.
A lack of reflection on personal motivation increases the risk of accepting board roles that, over time, result in low engagement and limited impact. Awareness of motivation is therefore a prerequisite for both personal integrity and professional effectiveness.

For new board members, motivation is often shaped by curiosity and a strong desire to learn. This can create tension between the impulse to say yes and the need to ensure a genuine and sustainable fit. For experienced board members, the focus typically shifts from whether one can contribute to whether the contribution continues to be meaningful. This shift naturally increases the need for selectivity.

What do I contribute in particular?

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When stepping into a board role, it can be helpful to view yourself as someone who brings a specific and distinct contribution. What is your unique position in the boardroom? What do others value most in working with you? If you are willing, consider asking trusted peers or collaborators how they experience your contribution. What are you most strongly associated with when decisions become complex or time-critical? Which issues are you consistently invited to engage with? For many, this type of reflective feedback is both challenging and highly insightful and often provides greater clarity than self-assessment alone.

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Seeing yourself from the outside

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A central element of this reflective work is the ability to observe yourself from the outside. Not to reduce yourself to a role or function, but to better understand your distinctive contribution. What makes you relevant in a board context? In which situations do your competencies create the greatest value? This reflection may feel different depending on whether you are new to board work or highly experienced, yet the underlying need for clarity remains the same.

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Superpowers, triggers, and values

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An effective way to identify your core values is to begin with what provokes a reaction in you, your triggers. What do you experience as ineffective or poor board leadership? What triggers resistance often points directly to your strongest capabilities, your superpowers. Impatience may signal decisiveness and a results-driven mindset.

Frustration with a lack of dialogue may reflect strong relational and governance capabilities. Resistance to superficial decision-making may indicate analytical depth and strategic rigor. When you understand your triggers, you gain clearer insight into your values. This understanding helps you recognize where your contribution fits naturally and where it does not.

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Choosing well and choosing away

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As your WHY becomes clearer, decision-making becomes more grounded. Not only in relation to what you choose to say yes to, but equally in relation to what you consciously step away from. Often, it is these deselections that most clearly demonstrate awareness, responsibility, and integrity in a board career. When board roles are accepted without reflection, driven by opportunity, expectation, or prestige, board work risks losing both direction and meaning. When choices are anchored in a clear WHY, a board role becomes a conscious commitment and a genuine alignment between the individual and the organisation.

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Closing reflection

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Board work is not about accumulating positions. It is about choosing well. It requires an ongoing alignment between personal motivation, professional contribution, and organisational need. That alignment is dynamic and must be revisited as experience, context, and priorities change. Clarity about your WHY does not only guide what you say yes to. It also strengthens your ability to say no, or to step away, when a role no longer represents a meaningful match.

In many cases, these choices are the clearest expression of integrity, responsibility, and maturity in a board career. The reflections offered here are not intended to produce simple answers. Rather, they aim to support a more deliberate and reflective approach to board work, one in which contribution, accountability, and value creation remain at the centre of every decision.

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_{About the author‍}

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Anne Malberg Horsager is Co-founder and Director of DTU Board Education & Certificates, an executive education programme at the Technical University of Denmark DTU aimed at educating current and future board members and leaders in board work, governance, and strategic leadership. As head of Board Education, Anne Malberg Horsager plays a central role in shaping and leading an educational programme that combines academic theory with practice-based learning. The programme emphasises case-based training, simulation of board meetings, and direct participation in real-life board situations, enabling participants to gain hands on experience rather than purely theoretical knowledge. In addition she has a strong professional background in business development, digitalisation nad leadership practices. She has been actively involved in board work across multiple industries and has experience advising both owners and executive management on strategic sparring and organisational development.}

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