Boost your career with a personal board of directors

We all have moments in our careers where we need to promote ourselves: whether it's an annual review, a step up in our current career pathway, or a new opportunity.

And while you might be advocating for yourself, you don’t have to do it alone. Enter: your personal board of directors. You can think of them as your professional support system — a group of people who know your career aspirations and can offer advice, guidance, and that necessary gut check at pivotal moments.

At our Diversity of Latinidad summit, we invited Salesforce’s Mayte Zavaleta, Director of Product Management, and Alexzandra (Alex) Caldwell-Wenman, Senior Director of Product Management, to discuss how they built their networks of advisors, mentors, and champions that helped them get to where they are today — and how you can, too.

Here are some highlights from the conversation.

Why build a personal board of directors?

For Alex, a professional support system plays an impactful role from the outset of your career.

“It gives you the opportunity to have people to talk to and figure out how you navigate the space as you grow. They help you figure out things like: ‘How do I show up in this space potentially as a woman or as someone who's Hispanic?’ They can be incredibly helpful if they've seen this before.”

For Mayte, it’s essential to have a few people to reach out to for quick questions and gut checks — but also to help pave the way for new opportunities. “There might be folks with a career path that you really admire. Connecting with them and asking them to help you open some doors over time is incredibly valuable.”

Building your personal board of directors

“If you go to conferences or you meet people organically and see a connection, definitely leverage that,” Mayte says. “But also, if you know people through your networks in university or other avenues, don’t be afraid to reach out, introduce yourself, and highlight why you are reaching out and how this could be mutually beneficial.”

In the beginning, finding and connecting with someone can be a numbers game and requires getting out of your comfort zone, Mayte warns.

“I know it can be scary since you're reaching out to someone that you may not know directly, right? But I would put it this way: The more people that you reach out to, the higher your chances of forging a really good connection you can build over the years.”

Navigating professional challenges

Some of the people on Alex’s board are leaders from her prior employers who bring with them an outside perspective. She also enjoys tapping into the perspective of connections who are more senior than her.

“Particularly as I transitioned into people management, having larger and larger teams, it was really great to have people to reach out to and say, ‘Hey, my team has encountered this issue, or this thing has happened. How do you handle it in your organization? Or when you have these kinds of metrics that you're measured against, how do you help your team navigate that circumstance?’”

The importance of authenticity

Both Mayte and Alex stress the importance of centering authenticity in your board of director relationships.

For Mayte, her most productive conversations at Salesforce have also been the most vulnerable, and she appreciates working in a safe environment that encourages genuineness.

“It's little things. [Salesforce] doesn’t do cookie-cutter-type events that are kind of forced on you. You have the latitude to create an environment that reflects how you want to communicate the things that you want to do, even work-related topics.”

Alex shares how she’s found community within the organizational structure at Salesforce. “At my level, we have meetings about once a month where all the directors can get together and just talk through different issues. And it's incredibly helpful to have that sounding board in each other and that chance to be able to talk about different things that we might face. We can have much more open conversations compared to organizations that I've worked at.”

She gravitates toward spaces that invite her to be her authentic self. “I have found Salesforce to be very inviting because they have these different spaces and they are on the whole very welcoming to everybody.”

Keeping relationships going

Having a group of coaches, mentors, and sponsors ready to bat for you is great — but can be even better when you nurture those relationships over the long term. Alex and Mayte weigh in on how:

1. Touch base consistently. “If I've already built a really close relationship with someone and they move to a different department or leave the organization, or maybe I've left an organization, I will make a concerted effort to reach out every six months or so, even just to say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’” says Alex. “Also, within my organization, when there are newer people that I'm getting to know, I will set up one-on-ones with them.”
2. Don’t save your conversations only to ask for favors. “Reaching out to someone just when I need something feels rude,” says Alex. “So I try to make sure that most of my interactions are just normal, checking-in style conversations to build a relationship.”
3. Let people know you’ll be reaching out. “Over the course of time, I'll ask people, ‘Hey, is it okay if I keep reaching out to you even if we aren't working together?’ just to keep that relationship going. And usually, by that point, people are very much inclined to say, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ because it is valuable to both parties,” says Alex.
4. Prepare for the conversation. “Always have an agenda, even if it’s a very established relationship,” says Mayte. “If you’re talking to a sponsor or someone you know has very little time, make sure you have something for them to react to.”
5. Make time for nurturing the most important relationships. Mayte says, “There’s a golden rule: You need to master the art of saying no to make sure you prioritize areas that are going to give you returns on your long-term investment.”

For more insight into how Mayte and Alex built their network of advisors, mentors, and champions — and how you can, too — listen to the full conversation, “Promote Yourself: Level Up Your Career With a Personal Board of Directors,” here.