Director Onboarding Series: Mentor/Buddy Programs (Installment 1 of 5)

MFDF has encountered various onboarding practices in discussions with fund directors that are newer or may be less common across fund boards. Consider these ideas as more of a menu than a plan, it is not necessary for a board to employ all of these approaches, but one or more may be combined according to board culture, priority, and need.

As the first installment in MFDF’s Director Onboarding Series, we will focus on mentor/buddy programs. Assigning a buddy or mentor director to incoming board directors is not a terribly new idea and may even approach common practice on fund boards. However, we’ve included it in the series of new ideas for director onboarding because of the variety of ways boards approach pairing directors. A few approaches we have encountered:

• Buddy/mentor is the last new trustee – on some boards the person who most recently joined the board is assigned to mentor the onboarding director. The logic here is often that these relatively new directors have the most recent experience with onboarding themselves and can anticipate questions and what the onboarding director may need to know as they get started.

• Buddy/mentor is a director nearing retirement – inverse from assigning the most recent new director to onboard is assigning a director who may be the next one to roll off the board. In this case, part of the mentoring relationship may include a knowledge transfer from the offboarding director to the onboarding director about some of the board or fund’s history that is relevant context to the board’s current activities. More senior members of the board may also be “culture carriers” on the board and may work with an onboarding director on board culture practices such as when directors typically arrive at meetings, how questions are raised and through what channels, and behavioral norms during the meeting.

• Mentoring pairs are determined by a personality alignment or common background – some Nominating Committees have gone quite thoughtfully about pairing onboarding directors with a board mentor that has something in common with them. This may be a common career or expertise background, or living in proximity to each other. With a common expertise or career background, these mentors may be able to identify places where an incoming director may have gaps to be addressed in onboarding, or common ground either personally or professionally may ease the building of rapport between the pair to enable frank conversations.

Fund management and/or counsel to the independent directors may run sessions introducing new directors to the fund complex, etc. which can be instead of or in addition to any of the approaches we have included in the series. Look for future posts on:

• How board leadership can facilitate onboarding;
• Building a board culture through onboarding;
• Setting new board members up for success, and;
• Creating onboarding education that sticks.