What Makes Operators Board-Ready

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Board seats look like the product of a closed network. Robin Washington's path complicates that story.

She is President, Chief Operating & Financial Officer at Salesforce, and she serves on the boards of Alphabet and Honeywell. Her first board seat came before she was a CFO, when an audit chair who had watched her work during a hostile acquisition at PeopleSoft asked her to join him. She has been in boardrooms, as a presenter or a director, for most of her career since.

Her Fortune 500 seat started with a line on paper. When she was CFO at Gilead and felt ready, she wrote "join a Fortune 500 public board" into her annual performance appraisal, then told the board members she had one-on-ones with. The first seat came through a recruiting firm. Mark Benioff, who had spent years trying to hire her, eventually asked her to join his board instead. Salesforce later asked her to step in as President, COO and CFO.

Robin is just as clear about what the job is once you have it. A board has two primary responsibilities, the strategy and hiring and firing the CEO. Everything else is asking questions, giving guidance, and making introductions. Her phrase for it is nose in, head in, but fingers out, and she says it is exactly where strong operators get tripped up.

She also treats every offer as a two-way interview. A friend of hers joined a board whose leaders came under investigation for fraud, and another large board the friend sat on asked her to resign over the reputational risk, though she had done nothing wrong. Before joining Alphabet, Robin had dinner with Sundar Pichai and asked him directly why he wanted her, since she knew nothing about consumer search. He wanted her for health and for a cloud business that was not yet profitable.

Three takeaways from the conversation

Be exceptional at the job they can already see

Robin calls this the one most important thing about being board ready. Your fellow board members and your leadership team notice the work first, so the credential you are already building counts, as long as it is visible beyond your own walls through industry forums, speaking, nonprofit boards and presenting in your own boardroom.

Put the goal on the record

Robin wrote her board ambition into her performance appraisal and then said it to the board members she knew. Her read is that the best way to get on a board is to tell people you are interested in board work, which only works because the day job has already made the case.

You are not an operator in the boardroom

Robin points out that a director's job is strategy and the CEO, and everything else is questions and guidance. She built that altitude by presenting to her own company's board long before she held a seat, and she recommends the same practice, along with a nonprofit board, to anyone aiming for one.

Watch the full conversation

About this guest

Robin Washington is President, Chief Operating & Financial Officer at Salesforce. She serves as a Board Director at Alphabet and Honeywell International, and served as Lead Independent Director of Salesforce from 2022 to 2025. Earlier she was EVP & CFO at Gilead Sciences and CFO at Hyperion Solutions. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Pepperdine, and she is a co-founder of Black Women on Boards.

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