Who is in Your Personal Boardroom?: How to Choose People, Assign Roles and Have Conversations With Purpose

A practical way to build the network you need to succeed

You're only as good as the people you surround yourself with. But when did you last think about who exactly that is, and whether you've got the right people around you? How do you know how to select, from your network, the right combination of people to help your be truly effective as a leader and in your career.

Drawing on their work with executives and on academic research on the networks of high performers, Zella King and Amanda Scott show how to home in on the 6-12 relationships that drive and sustain success.

What you'll find in this book

• Discover the five steps to designing a Personal Boardroom.
• Learn how to choose 6-12 members from across your network.
• Discover the 12 roles you need in your Personal Boardroom, and decide who can play those roles for you.
• Find out how to make your Personal Boardroom stronger.
• Act on practical advice to start conversations with a purpose.
• Enabled by your own Personal Boardroom, use the same framework to provide help to others.

Start choosing people, assigning roles and having purposeful conversations today

Reviews of Who is in your Personal Boardroom?

"In this thoughtful book Zella and Amanda encourage us to think about what they elegantly describe as our 'Personal Boardroom'--our current and potential connections and how they may support us in what we want to achieve. Well worth reading."

Piers Fallowfield-Cooper, Executive Chairman, Greycon Ltd

"Zella King and Amanda Scott have nailed the secret of modern career success: having the right connections and knowing who to ask for help from and how to help others in equal measure. Who is in your Personal Boardroom? should become something of a corporate classic."

Julia Hobsbawm, Honorary Visiting Professor in Networking, Cass Business School, and founder, Editorial Intelligence

"A brilliant, simple and intuitive way to set about personal and career development."

Matt Brittin, Vice President, Northern and Central Europe Operations, Google

A powerful tool to create a culture of give and take, of collaboration, sponsorship, and mutual support, focused not just on individual performance but also on team and organisation success.

Maria O'Donogue, Vice President, Global Learning and Talent Management, The Hertz Corporation

At last, some practical advice on networking We know good networking drives success, but how do we get better at it? Simply trying harder is not the answer. We need a clear goal and a strategy for achieving it. The Personal Boardroom is a simple but powerful framework for doing just that. For anyone looking for a more effective network, this is essential reading

John Wells, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School

Zella King is an Executive Fellow at Henley Business School. She began her career as a consultant (Accenture) and an investment banker (Schroders). She earned her PhD in Occupation Psychology from Birkbeck College, London. Over a 12-year career as an academic her articles on careers and organisational networks have appeared in top management and business journals.

Amanda Scott spent six years as an advertising executive with J. Walter Thompson before becoming an agent for actors and directors. Returning to her roots in psychology and her interest in change, she is now an executive coach based in Ireland.

In 2012 Zella and Amanda started looking for ways to apply research evidence about the networks of high-performers to the real world. Their collaboration led them to the idea of a Personal Boardroom as a way to help people think purposefully about the network they need in order to succeed. The concept has proved to be intuitive, simple to apply, and popular with executives in coaching and classroom settings. This book is the product of that work.