Whether you are an experienced professional, early in your career, or even still in school, you are likely already serving on what I would call a board – or you will be soon. Board service can range from the Honor Court at a school all the way up to the board of directors of a national non-profit or a Fortune 500 company…and everything in between. Youth sports, church groups, local charities, startup companies, family businesses, foundations, hospitals…the list of organizations that have boards and need great board members is rich and long. I tried to count the number of boards on which I’ve served in some capacity beginning in high school and lost track in the 20s.

When I left Microsoft in 2010, one of my goals was to find ways to serve the community differently – what I now call civic engineering. As part of this work, I currently serve on three national non-profit boards, two local non-profit boards, a private company board, and two startup advisory boards. In spite of all of this time spent working on boards and chairing several of them, I still feel like I learn something new about best practices in almost every meeting. So while I’m still no expert, I thought I would share my current state of thinking on how you can make your board service more valuable to the organization and to yourself as a member.

For the rest of this post, head on over to my LinkedIn page.