Leading from the Chair: Insights from One of the Smallest Clubs in Business

Whether you're seeking to join your first board, to secure your next board, or to move from a seat at the table to the head of the table, you'll find unique insights from the leaders who joined us on the Heidrick & Struggles’ new Leading from the Chair video series.

This series was the creative idea of Bonnie Gwin, Vice Chairman and Co-Managing Partner of the Global CEO and Board Practice, to get more women into Chair positions. Bonnie and her team assembled an impressive cast of prominent directors, including:

• Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO of Ariel Investments and Chair of Starbucks, who describes how to be an excellent director.
• Marge Magner, former Chair of Tegna and former Lead Director of Accenture, who explains why more women on boards help companies perform better.
• Pat Russo, Chair of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and former Chair of Lucent, who details best practices of effective board Chairs.
• Baroness Shriti Vadera, Chair of Prudential plc, who embraces her responsibility to champion aspiring women leaders.

Female Chairs like these four women are, I think, powerful agents of change who are critical to advancing women in business. Pitifully few female Chairs exist currently—just 40 in the 1,000 largest U.S.-based companies ranked by revenues. In Europe, there are only 12 women Chairs in the FTSE 100. Moreover, the power of female board Chairs has hardly been examined... until Heidrick & Struggles decided to tackle this critical challenge.

Challenging the status quo has long been at the core of the Heidrick & Struggles culture. In 2018, it was the first major executive search firm to pledge that at least half the board candidates it presents to clients annually will be diverse. Last year, the firm dramatically beat that target: 72% of its candidates were diverse.

My SellersEaston Co-CEO, Nina Easton, and I share that same passion to move women to the head of the boardroom table. As Bonnie Gwin says in this video that kicks off the Leading from the Chair series, more women Chairs will lead to more diverse boards and more opportunities for women to advance into C-suites globally.

We at SellersEaston Media are proud to help Heidrick get this message out by moderating and producing this video series. Over the next eight consecutive weeks, you'll hear practical advice and valuable insights from Bonnie Gwin and female Chairs who have been there, done that, and want to share what they've learned with you. Enjoy!

?